The prison has become a central institution of American society; more than two million people are currently held in federal prisons, state prisons, juvenile correctional facilities, local jails, military prisons, and detention facilities at home and in US territories abroad. In fact, US incarceration rates are the highest worldwide. Whereas in the 19th century the American prison was often considered a ‘modern’ institution of reform (replacing corporal punishment) which was visited and inspected by European visitors such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles Dickens, it has become the object of grave humanitarian concerns in the 20th and 21st centuries. Terms such as “carceral state” and “prison industrial complex” (referring to profit-oriented multinational corporations in the prison sector) figure prominently in recent critical interventions. We will briefly review the history of the US prison system in the first part of the seminar.
For those on the outside, the prison population is often rendered invisible and voiceless. And yet, from its beginnings, American literary and cultural production abounds with experiences of captivity, bondage, and imprisonment. H. Bruce Franklin, for instance, has remarked on the African American literary tradition as being rooted in the experience of imprisonment and slavery, and obviously race and racialization continue to be crucial aspects in view of a prison population that is largely non-white. Of course, other markers of difference such as gender, class, religion, and sexual orientation also have to be taken into account. In response to the dramatic increase in imprisonment rates over the last decades, prison abolitionism has formed and become a major social and political movement to protest mass incarceration as the “New Jim Crow” (Michelle Alexander, Angela Davis). In the second part of this seminar we will focus on prison writing in various forms (including texts, films, and television series) and on the theoretical approaches that have emerged in the field of critical prison studies to adequately address the nexus of violence, (state) power, and punishment.
Required reading includes texts by Michel Foucault, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Leonard Peltier, Hisaye Yamamoto as well as Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?(2003), Stewart O’Nan, The Good Wife (2005), and Piper Kerman, Orange is the New Black (2015). The shorter texts will be made available on the canvas-platform.