Critical Survey

The aims of this special issue on ‘Reading and Writing in Prison’ are twofold: to insist on the cultural significance of paying serious critical attention to the genre of prison writing beyond canonical authors (such as Oscar Wilde) and to showcase reading and writing in prison as a space for radical pedagogy and social transformation – potential transformation not only for those ‘inside’ but also those going into prisons as facilitators, be they creative practitioners, academics, or university students.

Taking stock of ten years of a service learning project that brings together small groups of college students and prisoners in jailhouse classrooms to discuss literary representations of crime and punishment, this essay finds in project participants' reading journals some remarkable trends. Complex dynamics of authenticity and authority emerge in the groups' weekly meetings, as participants negotiate their own and their groups' identities and commitments with respect to each other and to the literary texts, in the absence of professors, corrections officers, or other guardians of discipline. These dynamics are investigated in light of participants' discussions of a range of works, before looking in greater detail at responses to Sherman Alexie's 1996 novel Indian Killer, which are found to complicate stable notions of pedagogical authority and the object(s) of literary study.

The essay addresses the right to education for inmates and the disappearance of postsecondary education from US prisons; prison-university educational partnerships; and the potential of online programmes toward realization of education rights for US prisoners. As practical address to these issues, the article discusses an English department initiative to provide a partnership with prisons. As a creative example of how to reach all prison populations, this essay illustrates an online writing internship between undergraduate writing majors with primarily maximum-security inmates at the Penitentiary of New Mexico. By using online technology common on university campuses in the United States and elsewhere, the project has created a prison-university bridge and educational service that can be replicated and scaled upward. Such digital work spurs new social activism within university communities.

Through community-based literacy work, writing teachers can encourage the development of prison narratives that counter social and media-driven stereotypes of prisoner identity. Such work thus situates writing workshops and other literacy-inspired programming for women as part of the emergent US prison abolition movement. This is a complicated equation to work through, however, given the sometimes competing sponsors of such literacy work and its reception within and beyond institutional contexts. This essay suggests that a nuanced reading of prison literacy programmes and their sponsors is necessary for contemporary educators interested in contributing to both educational prison programmes and the abolition movement. In order to explore such challenges and to illustrate individual and public tactics for emergent social justice, this essay offers sample texts and commentaries from the SpeakOut! women's writing workshop in the western US as a starting point for a larger consideration of the complexities that literacy educators confront when designing and facilitating such programmes.

The purpose of this article is to describe the meaning of incarceration for African American women as depicted in the narratives of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated African American women. This article uses black feminist thought as the primary theoretical framework to provide the relevant context for understanding the race, sexual, and gender oppressions that contribute to African American women's experiences with imprisonment. I argue that black women's prison narratives offer a unique insight into interlocking patterns of oppression that contribute to their incarceration, and how discrimination based on race, gender, and sexuality extends into prison.

This article considers the theoretical and practice-based evidence for the therapeutic effects of the shared reading of literature (poetry, fiction, plays, short stories) in prison communities. Taking as its starting point recent research and practice relating to the successful intervention ('Get into Reading') pioneered by UK charity The Reader Organisation, the article situates the components of this model in the context of established theories of reader response, as well as new research on reading and the brain. Yet its focus is always shared reading in practice and, through specific examples and testimony from prisoners and those who read with them (including health professionals), the article demonstrates the vital relation of this intervention to current recommendations in respect of the mental health needs of prisoners. It also offers a possible model for future interdisciplinary research in this field.

Prison(er) Auto/biography, 'True Crime', and Teaching, Learning, and Research in Criminology

The Noir américain: In which He Howls at the Moon & Digs Bill Evans Matthew Arnold in New York Harriet and the Crow by TONY ROBERTS

Biro Preventive Maintenance by MICHAEL BARTHOLOMEW-BIGGS

Scrying Stone by Steven O’Brien (London: Greenwich Exchange, 2010), 68pp, ISBN 978-1-906075-56-9, £7.99 (p/b).

The Flaming by Mamie Pomeroy (London: Greenwich Exchange, 2010), 72pp, ISBN 978-1-906075-43-9, £7.99 (p/b).

A Change of Season by Michael Cullup (London: Greenwich Exchange, 2010), 68pp, ISBN 978-1-906075-38-5, £9. 99 (p/b).

Notes on contributors