***A great deal of literary works has come out of prisons. This is one of the most extraordinary achievements of American culture this century.***

ONE of the strangest and most revealing indicators of the progress of literary works in the 20th century is the amopnt — and tremendous impact — of fiction. poetry, autobiographical and political writing produced in prisons.

Spanning the novels of Russia's Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Kenya's Ngugi wa Thiong'o, the poetry of Nigeria's Wole Soyinka and Pakistan's Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and the life stories of everyone from Nelson Mandela to Adolf Hitler, the writing going on in prison cells has influenced almost every aspect of this century.

; If that principle is true for the world as a whole, it holds particular importance in the United States, where Protestant reformers helped to develop the modern penitentiary in the 18th century — and which is home to more than one million prisoners today.

To give this dismal reality its proper due. professor H Bruce Franklin of New Jersey's Rutgers University has edited one of the year's most fascinating books — a deceptively straightforward anthol ogy called Prison Writing in 20th-Century America.

Offering a stunning breath of literature from Jack London's memoirs to Mumia Abu-Jamal's essays, the book more than bears out Franklin's own argument in the introduction: "One of the most extraordinary achievements of twentieth-century American culture is the literature that has come out of the nation's prisons."

There are. of course, some excellent, and exceedingly grim, reasons behind this achievement. One — as Franklin diyly notes — is that the United States imprisons so many people for so wide a range of crimes.

From 1992 to 1993, he says, the United States imprisoned 519,people for every 100,000 citizens — well above the South African ratio of 368 detainees per 100,000 citizens, and tremendously ahead of any European state. African Americans fare worst, with nearly one out of every 25 black men behind bars.

The writers presented in the anthology attest to how little needs to be done to end up producing literature from behind bars.

The first piece in the anthology is a narrative from a freed' slave who describes how one former plantation decided to declare that all black men of that area were criminals — so that, once again, they could provide free labour to

their former masters as prisoners.

Nor is that example of the link between slavery and imprisonment the only sign of how easy it is to fall foul of the law. Jack London, one of the most noted US authors at the turn of the century, describes how he was picked up for vagrancy after he had Just arrived in Niagara Falls. "John Law was up and out after the early worm," he narrates. "1 was a worm."

Agnes Smedley, an early womens rights activist, was detained in New York City’s worst jail simply for distributing pamphlets about birth control — then a federal crime. In one of the collection's more amusing moments, she complains to a fellow inmate about how scrubbing prison walls is dirty work — only to be met with the reply. "Not half so dirty as cleaning up the man-made laws in this country."

Other noted writers passed through prison on almost equally specious charges. Nelson Algren. once dubbed "the poet of the jail and the whore

house . wound up writing the tragic short story El Presidente de Mejico after being detained for allegedly stealing his typewriter.

Robert Lowell, a poet convicted of evading the draft, recalls telling a famous gangster who was curious why he was detained, Oh, I'm in for refusing to kill."

One of the wonderful things about this single-minded, often claustrophobic, collection is that it shows both the remarkable evolution of the US prison into its modern-day chamber of horrors. and the resistance — and even community spirit — of the inmates who must contend with it.

smedley. for example, depicts a world in which extremely strong women from all walks of life band together to face the squalid conditions and brutal guards which threaten them all. Malcolm X — who has credited prison as being the place he embraced Islam and began to educate himself — proudly describes his nightly attempts

to transcribe the entire dictionary by hand, steadily building up his vocabulary while defying strictures on going to sleep.

Perhaps the most moving conception of survival in prison as a form of resistance is by George Jackson, the Soledad inmate whose murder in prison in 1971 was one of the flashpoints of the decade's political divisions. Modern prisons produce only two types of people, Jackson argues: revolutionaries and inmates with crushed spirits. The broken men are so damaged that they will never again be suitable members of any sort of social unit," he writes.

"Everything that was still good when they entered the joint, anything Inside of them that may have escaped the ruinous effects of black colonial exis fence, anything that may have been redeemable when they first entered the joint — is gone when they leave... They'll never count me among the broken men. but I can t say that I am normal either."

Franklin does an insightful job at showing how such writing has influenced various kinds of literature and political thought. Most of the underpinnings of black leftist philosophies, from Malcolm X to Assata Shakur (also known as Joanne Chesimard) to noted death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal

today, emanates from prison cells.

Similarly, a surprising amount of the writing in many typical genres owes a debt to prison writing. The anthology shows how Iceberg Slim's bleak ghetto narratives. Chester Himes's ironic mysteries. Robert Lowell s chilly poetry and Malcolm X’s pro-empowerment rhetoric all spring from the same source: their effort to avoid the ways in which prison life can crush the individual spirit.

Even lesser-known writers prove the same lesson, as Carolyn Baxter does when she muses, in a lengthy poem about her detention: "I smell lemon powder, thinking of my name. Trying to remember femininity."

Prison Writing in 20th-Century America is not an easy book to read, and certainly not one which can be read in one or two sittings: the mood is almost unremittingly bleak, leaving the reader to feel somewhat penned in. as well.

At its best, however, it shows how those behind bars struggle against not just imprisonment but the human condition itself — at a time when the bars are encircling more people, and becoming one of the defining features of US society.

— IPS