Session 2: Prisoner Narratives and Prison Novels
Chair: David Schalkwyk

Rebecca Bordt - A Sociological Analysis of Prison Narratives Written by U.S. Prisoners
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, DePauw University, Greencastle, IN 46135, USA

Incarcerated people’s experiences in the United States have long been documented in books written by inmates, interviews with scholars, publications of prison activists, anthologies of convict essays and poetry and prison magazines/newspapers. Yet, their work as a whole has not been the subject of sociological analyses of prison life and prison effectiveness. This gap in the scholarly literature is troubling given the emphasis on criminal justice evaluation research in academic circles, the explosion of prisons in every corner of the country over the past 20 years, and the overwhelming public support for locking up criminal offenders. This paper presents some initial findings from a sociological analysis of published books about prison life written by prisoners in the United States. Using a cousin of content analysis, I analyze the universe of book-length manuscripts written by “common” prisoners about U.S. prisons published from 1964 to 2002 (n=57). Here, I describe this genre of writing by answering the following questions: How have prison narratives in the U.S. changed over time? Have there been changes in form, substance and number? What explains these changes? What is the relationship between shifts in prison narratives and larger society? What can we learn about ourselves (and our criminal justice policies) from the words of the incarcerated?

Andrew Sobanet - Penology and Fiction: The Prison Novel as Interdisciplinary Sub-Genre
Assistant Professor, Georgetown University, Washington, USA

My paper examines the prison novel as a literary sub-genre that constitutes an intersection of penology (a branch of sociology that focuses on carceral conditions and power structures) and fiction. A form of documentary and testimonial literature, the prison novel has heretofore received scant critical attention as a unique literary modality. It is a particularly fruitful sub-genre for interdisciplinary study due to its artful negotiation of the boundary between fiction and non-fiction.

Using François Bon's Prison as a case study, my paper will show that the prison-writer not only acts as a novelist, but also as a sociologist attempting to document conditions and relations in the carceral universe. My study focuses specifically on how François Bon uses recycled text in Prison (1997), a first-person novel based on the author's experience directing a writing workshop at a youth detention center near Bordeaux in the mid-1990s. While Prison is a work of fiction, Bon includes the inmates' own grammatically incorrect ramblings - spelling mistakes included - in his text as part of an effort to document 'reality,' blur generic boundaries, and create tension between the real and the fictional. This study of Bon's work will serve as a springboard for a delineation of the narrative mechanics, thematics, and ideological impulses of the prison novel as a sub-genre.

This paper is based on close textual analysis of Bon's finished product, on information provided to me by the author in interviews, and on comparisons between the novel and the author's unpublished notes and source material.

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Danine Farquharson - Irish Ironies: The Prison Writings of John Mitchel, Brendan Behan, and Gerry Adams
Department of English, St. Jerome's University, Waterloo, ON, Canada

Writing from and about prison is vital to the history of Irish literature. Speeches from the dock, letters to editors, memoirs, political tracts, and fiction (short stories, novels, plays) about incarceration populate Irish writing from as early as the seventeenth century and continue to this day. My paper will focus on three examples of prison writing from three Irish writers who were all imprisoned for activity "treasonous" to the British crown. Highlighting each work's use of irony as both tone and literary device, I will address the intended audience for the writings and how that may or may not have shaped the textual forms.

After the failed 1848 uprising, John Mitchel (1815-1875) wrote his Jail Journal largely while on board British prison ships en route to Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), via Bermuda and South Africa. Considered one of the central texts of Irish nationalism, Mitchel's document is self aware of the situational and literary irony in writing about freedom and for freedom while incarcerated. Brendan Behan (1923-1964) was arrested in Liverpool in 1939 for an Irish Republican Army bombing attempt - he was fifteen years old and sent to a Borstal institution in Suffolk for three years. Nearly twenty years after his release Behan wrote Borstal Boy, a fictionalized autobiography that initiated Behan into the literary world. Borstal Boy is an ironic bildungsroman and an ironic pastoral. The crowning irony is that the work is also testament to Behan's increasing tolerance of the British. Gerry Adams (1948 -), now President of Sinn Féin, was imprisoned on the Maidstone prison ship and in Long Kesh during the 1970s for his involvement in political resistance and in the provisional IRA. His short stories, later published as Cage Eleven: Writings from Prison, were originally smuggled out of Long Kesh and published under the pen name "Brownie" in Belfast's Republican News. Often lighthearted and brilliantly funny, the stories are also thinly disguised testimony of real life prisoners (such as hunger-striker Bobby Sands) and their steadfast adherence to each other and the republican cause. Here, the irony is political: time in prisons such as Long Kesh served to incubate and solidify the exact republican ideals for which the men were imprisoned.