Abstract
When Chris Eskridge contacted me with an offer to edit a special issue of this journal, my initial thought, was, “No.” After 6 years of editing Criminology & Public Policy, I did not feel an urge to edit a journal again. But the idea stayed with me. I had been thinking for a while that two things were missing in the national conversation about mass incarceration: (1) candid recognition of the way our perceptions of violence handcuff our ability to engage meaningful reform, and (2) the perspective of people who have been subjected to the steamroller of the American justice system. I offered to put together a journal of essays on violence written by people who had been or were currently incarcerated.
I developed a Call for Papers (CFP) that asked for essays that explored personal experiences with violence, before, during, or after incarceration.
The usual way to publicize a future “special issue” is to distribute a CFP to the memberships of the relevant academic and professional associations. But when the special issue is devoted to essays written by people who have been or are currently incarcerated, there is no “relevant” membership list. How does one widely disseminate a “call for papers” to people who are or have been in prison?
I turned immediately to two sources.
The first was the Convict Criminology Division of the American Society of Criminology. This group, more than 100 strong, includes a large number of academic criminologists who have previously been incarcerated. We sent the CFP to their members and received a few submissions, published in this volume.
The second source was the large number of prison-based college programs operating in various locations around the country. We wrote to the parent organization, The Alliance for Higher Education in Prison, about our solicitation, and they distributed it widely. Several of the publications in this volume came from that source.
Word of the project soon got around to Charlie Sullivan, who is the founding director of CURE (Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Errants). He offered to contact his mailing list of over 10,000 people currently in prison. His note to his mailing list emphasized that essays could deal with violence at the hands of prison authorities. By far, this solicitation resulted in the greatest number of submissions. Dozens of essays were submitted in response to the CURE solicitation. Many are included in this volume.
A few months into this work, I realized I needed help. I asked two colleagues if they would like to join me in the work. Sarah Lageson, a professor at Rutgers University, and Jennifer Yang, a PhD student at John Jay. Both agreed to join the work, and they have been full partners since then.
Along the way we have learned a few things about incarceration in the United States. We have selected for publication here only some of the essays describing violence perpetrated by the corrections and justice system. Yet we received so many of them. The incredulous shock the editors experienced upon reading some of these stories can only be only matched by the repulsive feeling that they evoke. There is no way to check the factual accuracy of these essays, of course. But the sheer number of them is kind of a testimony to their underlying truthfulness. We take them on face value. But even if some of the descriptions are exaggerated; even if we acknowledge that there can often be two sides to many of the incidents reported to us, there is no denying the prison is a place infused with an underlying quality of violence.
This message came home to us in various ways. The fact that at least half the essays were submitted in handwritten form testifies to the lack of access to technology afflicting most people in prison. We also had difficulties communicating with our authors. Letters came back as “undeliverable” for reasons that were not clear. One letter came back to me undelivered because the return address had only my last name, not my full name. Apparently, that prison’s policy requires my full name on the outside of the envelope. Delivery was initially refused for one of our authors, because the letter contained a “permission to publish” document that prison authorities decided was a “contract” in violation of prison regulations. One of the letters goes to a prison whose address is “No More Victims Road.” The essays we were reading described repeated experiences of insult, disregard, and harm; the system cooperated by showing us a bit of the same thing.
Yet our primary interest in building this issue is to enable people who have been sent to prison explore the role–the experience–of violence in their lives: before, during and after their incarceration. We have organized the issue into 4 sections. The opening section includes essays that tell of violence leading up to incarceration, including stories of redemption. The essays in Section 2 describe experiences of violence during and after incarceration. So many of the essays we received explored the politics of incarceration and violence, and Section 3 is devoted to this theme. When most people think of violence in prison, they think of conflicts between people who are incarcerated–this theme is the subject matter of Section 4, which also has essays about violence at the hands of prison authorities.
One last note: We have done very little editing of any of these essays. The special issue is partly about “voice,” and we want as much as we can to provide a venue for that voice to be heard. In reading the essays, you will sometimes encounter raw language with faulty grammar and harsh tone. You will also read sensitivity and perspective. We have left what we received largely untouched, and we have selected essays that reflect what the many submissions had to say. We hope you will appreciate reading them.
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(We have not provided contact information for the authors. Any readers who want to contact an author should write to Todd Clear to obtain contact information: