Katy Ryan
I envision this class as a philosophical, political, and literary exploration of the U.S. prison system, primarily through twentieth-century American literary texts. The class emerges from some dismal facts and some hopeful developments. First, the dismal facts: the United States imprisons more of its population than any other country in the world, with over two million people living behind bars; more black American men are locked up today than are in college; women are the largest growing population in prison; supermaximums, created in the 1980s, deny inmates all human contact; and four million U.S. citizens are disenfranchised because of felony convictions. But there are hopeful signs, including a strong movement against mandatory minimum sentences, participated in by federal judges; ongoing state moratoria on the death penalty; and the implementation of alternative sentencing programs based on restorative models of justice. Our state of incarceration has resulted in the emergence of a new body of American literature. Bell Chevigny writes in her introduction to a recent PEN anthology, “The writing coming out of U.S. prisons has never been as strong, rich, diverse, and provocative as in the final quarter of the twentieth century.”
In Part One, we will look at the history of prisons–when and where and why they emerged and how they have transformed. We will discuss economic considerations, both in terms of the for-profit prison industry and in terms of the corporate use of inmates’ labor. We will also address one of the most costly, in every way, prison practices: capital punishment. To conclude this section, we will read two memoirs that address, among other things, the persistence of racism in our legal system. Part Two will constitute the bulk of our reading, which comes from imaginative literature—novels, short stories, plays, and poems. In Part Three, we will look briefly at recent developments in the struggle to reform or abolish prisons. The literature of imprisonment is an enormous field, and some areas of study will necessarily be neglected. You are, of course, welcome to pursue these areas in your own research.
In addition to the observations you bring to the table each week, we will consider both literary and social questions: What might be the parameters for the genre, “prison literature”? How does it compare to other generic literary classifications? What might the field of literature contribute to discussions about public policy? To what extent does Foucault’s analysis of modern systems of surveillance apply to prisons in the United States? What impact should international standards of justice, like those articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions, have on the administration of American prisons, domestically and abroad? What should be the role of victims and victims’ families in the criminal justice system? To what extent do literary texts expose or perpetuate the lie that we must sympathize either with prisoners or with victims of crime, not with both, a divide that undermines our reason and our ability to make the changes necessary to reduce violent crime and reverse the devastation of mass imprisonment.
In November, we will have two guest speakers–Delbert Tibbs, a poet who was sentenced to die in Florida and exonerated after three years on death row, and my father, Bill Ryan, who helped to organize the moratorium on executions in Illinois and continues to advocate on behalf of men and women in prison.
A Practical Policy 