Between 1970 and 1999, America’s prison population grew from 300,000 to 2.2 million.Today, only Cuba and Rwanda lock up more people per capita. Much has been written by historians and sociologists, but VCU Professor Dave Coogan wanted to tell a different story.
"The story of mass incarceration has rarely been told from the perspective of the writers who were there and witnessed it first-hand."
The first chapter of his new book was written by Malcolm X.
"Malcolm X was imprisoned in the 40’s and 50’s, before the era of mass incarceration began, but his autobiography was published in 1965, at the cusp of the beginning of mass incarceration," Coogan explains. "He articulated what it felt like to be uneducated and left out of society from the pre-civil rights era onward. That book remains a powerful testament and one of the first to catalyze a generation of writers to resist."
A whole group of prisoners would flip the script – arguing the American system of justice was rigged against people of color.
"People were not being tried by a jury of their peers. Black people were being charged for a crime that was arguably traced back to police brutality by a jury of white people, and we knew they were being targeted by the federal government through the Co-Intel program —the same ones who wiretapped Dr. King and Malcolm X," Coogan says.
The 80’s and 90’s saw a new population of prisoners –- many locked up for long periods of time for selling, buying or using drugs.
"They were basically doing twice as long prison terms for drug offenses, mental health issues or poverty or a lack of healthcare for their drug addiction."
And Coogan says there was an economic component to this picture.
"A lot of the jobs in American went overseas, a lot of the manufacturing jobs. The economy just changed, and you ask yourself, ‘Well what does America make now?’"
As one of the prisoners featured in the book – Mumia Abu Jamal -- noted, America was using its prisons as a form of economic development .
"Prisons create jobs, and prisons then need to be filled with bodies who are going to work jobs at far below regular minimum wage," Coogan continues. "You know in Virginia, for example, I once heard a presentation from former VDOC Director Harold Clark. He said the Department of Corrections is the sixth largest landowner in the Commonwealth. There are farms, vendors making furniture."
The Cambridge Companion to American Prison Writing also looks at why inmates were driven to tell their stories. Seth Michelson, a professor at Washington and Lee, got to know one of them – an Apache/Chicago poet from New Mexico.
Jimmy Santiago grew up in a poor, abusive household before his father left and his mother was murdered. When his grandparents could no longer care for him, Michelson says, he lived on the streets. He was ten and could not read or write, but while serving a prison sentence of five years for drugs, Baca learned and was driven to create amazing poetry.
"Susan Sontag became a great champion of work while he was still incarcerated, and he has his first book of poetry accepted while he was still in prison," Michelson says.
Like many other prisoners, Michelson said, Baca needed to share his feelings with words.
"On a personal level it helps them to subsist. It’s a way of enduring and resisting intimidation and opprression and violence, because it allows you to envision alternatives to that. It’s a way of trying to resist the landscape of violence that one encounters in prison."
Baca has written at least 34 books and two screenplays while winning a number of national and international awards.
Michelson will join Dave Coogan at the Richmond Public Library on Franklin Street from 5:30 to 7:30 tomorrow (December 3) to launch the book and explore the subject of writers behind bars. Coogan hopes his latest book will serve as a catalyst for change in this country’s criminal justice system.
