When I read anything I’m always hoping the writer will take me into realms of experience I wouldn’t otherwise have, experiences that push the edges of human life and our ways of doing things, put me up against myself and make me ask: What would I do in this situation, who would I become? Adventure stories are like that. Prison writings are like that. “Come with me,” these convict writers say, “I’ll take you into my world. Hang on. It’s quite a ride.”
Quite a ride indeed. I am not unacquainted with prison life. I’ve visited prisoners for fourteen years, accompanied four men to execution, know a lot about death row, wrote a book, Dead Man Walking. But I know I’m an outsider. I’ve never heard the clang of bars behind me as I said good-bye to freedom. Never had all the eyes in the room turn to me, “fresh meat,” coming in. At the end of each visit I get to walk out. And every time I find myself taking deep gulps of freedom.
Here are fifty-one writers who take us into a world we hope we never do more than visit. A world where you never touch a doorknob, where you have no control over your environment. A world without privacy, a world of frequent strip-searches, a world where the “shakedown crew” swoops down upon you and throws all your stuff out of your “box” into a heap, laughing, pointing at your photos, walking across your baby’s smile. A world where many of the people have serious personality disorders, and you can’t get away from them. A razor-wired world where you never sit under a tree because the yard is stripped bare for securiry reasons, where security governs everything.
We incarcerate a whole lot of people in this country: 1.8 million, more than any other country in the world. We are building a small country of these throwaway people. How can you expect literature from the refuse pile of humanity? Who would look for eloquence from convicts? Or insight or depth of thought or honesty or the intimacy of self-revelation? Watch for the self-serving subtext. When your heart is moved, can you trust it? When you feel for the writers of these words, are you being had? Cynicism about convicts is in our bones.
Test this doubt by sampling these pages. The words in them have made their way into our hands against great odds. Several of these writers have done long stretches of time in the hole for their writing. Why, at such cost, do they write? Read their reasons in the back of this book. To bear witness, to stay sane, to keep their heart pumping, to not be eaten up by rage or despair, to figure out how they got there, or to discover what truly matters — these are just some of them.
And then they hone their craft — if they’re lucky, in workshops, more often in the horrific din of the cellblock — learning to get past the words other people say to that voice of their own they almost doubt they have. Somehow they hear of the PEN prison writing contest, hear that at the very least someone will read what they wrote and write back. They decide to take a chance.
I think this book is a significant piece of literature. What do you think? The writers are locked away from you, but you’ve already opened a door to their world. Step inside. You’ll never be the same.
Sister Helen Prejean
March 1999