Prison writing

Eurozine review 1/2020

 

Standing up to the new machos

Index on Censorship 4/2019

Silly or sinister: the new Swedish Kulturpolitik

Ord & Bild 5/2019

Prison isn’t working

Samtiden 4/2019

Prison writing

Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 120 (2019)

Protest songs and the music of the deaf

Syn og Segn 4/2019

Searching for superheroes

Dialogi 10/2019

Violence

The political debate on lawful conditions for prisoners often overlooks that incarceration is itself ‘a form of violence’, write Catarina Frois and Alfonso Bento in their article on the Portuguese system. While the reintegration of offenders persists as an abstract ideal, in practice ‘inmates are simultaneously agents and targets of violence, both before and during imprisonment’. Only by taking this ‘continuum’ into account can inmates’ ‘strategies for adapting, resisting or conforming’ to incarceration be interpreted.

Identity

Doran Larson explores the American Prison Writing Archive, the largest open source digital repository of writing by prisoners about their experiences. Larson calls it the ‘documentation of the dissolution of identity’. As witnesses to how ‘humanity can fade into mere memory’, the writers ‘struggle with their own unmaking’. ‘Witnesses who document the absorption of the self – effected, feared or merely lamented – into the prison environment peek back from inside the lip of the abyss; those who write from atop that lip throw ropes to pull the others out.’

Also: Zakaria Rhani reconstructs the corporeal and spiritual ‘metamorphosis’ of a former inmate of Tazmamart, the notorious Moroccan prison built to hold soldiers accused of participating in the coup against Hassan II in 1972. And Julienne Weegels explores the role of ‘re-education’ in the Nicaraguan prison system, observing how prison theatre acts as a parallel to the everyday violence of life inside.
More articles from Revista Crítica in Eurozine; Revista Crítica’s website

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