October 25, 2024: Prison Stories: The Inside Literary Prize

[On October 27^th, 1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population in federal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in American history. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that has only gotten infinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’ll AmericanStudy prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to a weekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

Three quotes that together help sum up why one of our newest literary prizes is also one of the most important ever.

1)      “Freedom begins with a book”: That’s Reginald Dwayne Betts, Founder and CEO of the awesome Freedom Reads project, one of the Prize’s principal collaborating organizations. It goes without saying that books are far from the only form of freedom or rights that incarcerated individuals and communities should possess, and I know Betts and the project would of course agree. But I hope it also goes without saying for readers of this blog that I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the impact and influence of books and all that they offer; and if that’s true for all of us (as I believe it is), it is infinitely more true still for folks for whom books can represent a bridge to the world that might otherwise not be present in any form. Getting books in the hands of incarcerated folks is a vital enterprise, and then listening to, respecting, and fully recognizing their reading of and response to those books—as this new prize, judged entirely by incarcerated people, does—is a wonderful next step.

2)      “This literary prize that honors how engaging with great books can both build community and facilitate a deeper understanding of our shared human experience”: That’s Lori Feathers, co-owner of the very cool Interabang Books in Dallas and one of the principal voices behind the prize’s initial creation. It’s a bit of a paradox but also undeniably the case that two of the most crucial ways we can support incarcerated people are both to help strengthen their inside communities and to help connect them to all of our outside communities. Neither of those is easy to accomplish, and doing both at the same time seems particularly challenging—but I agree with Feathers that this prize and its processes very much do both, creating impressive communal ties between incarcerated people and yet fully connecting them to our society as a whole at the same time.

3)      “To the people inside, please know when I say ‘we’ and when I refer to ‘my people,’ I mean you too”: That’s Professor Imani Perry, the phenomenal author and scholar whose excellent book South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation (2022) was the winner of the inaugural 2024 Inside Literary Prize. (It’s also, to my shame, the only one of the four National Book Award-nominated finalists I’ve read, but I hope to seek the others out soon!) Perry’s book is more than deserving of this prize on its own terms, but I think that quote really sums up both the prize’s importance and why she was a perfect first choice for what will hopefully become an annual addition to our literary landscape—and an inspiring addition to our justice system.

Reading list post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Prison stories or histories (or contemporary contexts) you’d highlight?