ABSTRACT
In 1978, H. Bruce Franklin published his enormously important and influential book, Prison Literature in America. It aimed to give African-American literature and the literature of those defined by the state as criminals the centrality of place in the literary canon that they occupy in an American history Franklin saw as running roughly from the convict colony to the plantation and on to the penitentiary. His subject, as he put it, was not “the novels of Spiro Agnew and E. Howard Hunt, or the memoirs of Richard Nixon, men whose crimes are obviously more significant than their art, but the art produced out of the suffering inflicted by such men, their social class, and the political economy they defend.” 1 When ten years later, Franklin introduced an expanded edition of the book, he had more reason than ever to argue for the definitive role of prisons in American life and culture. The number of imprisoned had doubled, the rate of incarceration for Black people was more than “seven times the rate for whites,” and women were becoming the fastest-growing population of prisoners. The establishment of what later came to be called the prison industrial complex had produced, as Franklin put it, “an epoch when the shadows of the prison overspread more and more of everyday life.” 2
