Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing - Softcover

Bell Gale Chevigny is professor emeritus of literature at Purchase College, SUNY, and a Soros Senior Justice Fellow. She has written for The Nation, DoubleTake, and other journals. Her books include The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life and Writings and Chloe and Olivia, a novel. She lives in Manhattan.

Sister Helen Prejean is a prison minister and the author of the New York Times bestseller Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United State. and lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.

This anthology of material by winners of PEN Americas annual prison writing contests provides a polyphonic chorus of rejoinder to our policies of maximum incarceration. The collections prose is honed and direct, with many contributors striking a hypnotic balance between the urgency inherent in writing as survival and the punishingly absurd nature of their circumstances: though their literary imaginations range widely, bodily, theyre going no place. Most at issue is the individual readers openness toward otherwise shunned figures. Several pieces are from longtime death-row inmates, presenting lucid, provocative narratives that dont excuse their youthful brutality. A thick sheaf of entries represent the hapless POWs of the Drug War (often disadvantaged women), serving long sentences for semantic and violence-free crimes. The distribution of fiction, poetry, and essays into 11 topical sections (e.g. Players, Games) allows a textured diversity of excellent pieces, such as Paul Mulryans scorching account of the 11-day Lucasville, Ohio, riot; Jimmy Santiago Bacas poetic reach toward lost family; Dax Xenoss O. Henry-winning fiction, Death of a Duke; and Robert Moriartys droll, harrowing memoir, Pilots in the War on Drugs. Introductory essays by Dead Man Walking author Sister Helen Prejean and SUNY Purchase professor emeritus Chevigny provide a moral chassis; the latters piece charts the prison writing movement as a response to the fluctuations of penal theory between reform and retribution, offering a chilling vision of our current maximum-time, hard-labor model as a machine of social control, devouring ever more persons of color and of the underclass even as the crime rate declines. Essential reading for those concerned by this imbalanceand it should be more than essential for lawmakers and citizens who support the hard bargain of liberty for order without considering the darkness created. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.