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Drawn from the American Prison Writing Archive, a pivotal anthology of essays by incarcerated writers about the prison’s role in perpetuating harm
Prison is neither the beginning of the inquiry nor the end. Thus, writers from across carceral institutions in the US unfold the multiple and intersecting ways that violence shapes and informs their lives, prior to, during, and after incarceration. They illuminate violence as a contextual phenomena shaped by historical trauma, cycles of deprivation, and systemic inequities. Harm and Punishment reveals the interconnectedness of personal and structural violence, tracing the way violence often emerges within the fabric of communities profoundly shaped by poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia.
The stories, testimonies, and reflections collected here serve as bridges toward a new imagination. They expose the limitations of punishment and move us closer to a vision of collective care and mutual responsibility. In bearing witness to the experiences of incarcerated writers, readers become part of a profound shared endeavor to dismantle the barriers of misunderstanding and fear, opening pathways to action and change.
"Harm and Punishment tells a large and layered set of stories about trauma, resistance, repair, and hope. The brilliant historian Elizabeth Hinton and her coeditor Elsa Julien Lora have curated a set of voices from the front lines of the struggle against the carceral state. They remind us that the struggle is about hard truth-telling as much as it is about legislation, protest, and court cases. Eloquent and impactful." —Barbara Ransby, author of Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century
“There is no closer, no more brilliant, poignant, nor profound perspective on the cruelty and costs of our nation’s prison system than that offered by those who live with it day in and day out. Harm and Punishment is a must-read for anyone who hopes to eradicate this brutal apparatus and truly to achieve a more just future for all.” —Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
“Reading Harm and Punishment is a process of profound witness and transformation. This collection pulls us into the depths of the torturous institution of the prison, exposing its rotten roots firsthand. It also calls us to boldly imagine and act—following the lead of those courageously imagining and taking action behind prison walls. Harm and Punishment is both intensely personal and radically universal; these essays pulse with the insistence that all of us listen, recognize, acknowledge, take accountability, and work collectively to dismantle the carceral system and build toward a more just world.” —Maya Schenwar, coauthor of Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms
"Arundhati Roy reminds us that there’s no such thing as the voiceless, only ‘the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.’ Harm and Punishment brings to light important voices of the ‘preferably unheard’ and is a hard—and necessary—book. It invites us to witness violence, not as spectacle or titillation. It demands that we receive the words as an offering, an opening bid to understand shared responsibility for the violence we make." —Naomi Murakawa, author of The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America
“This haunting collection of writing by incarcerated people offers powerful testimony about the consequences of our national rush to cage more and more human beings. Read this book, and you'll never think about the problem of violence the same way.” —Brian Jones, author of Black History Is for Everyone
“Prisons thrive on invisibility and silence, and there's good reason for this: They must obscure the harms they inflict daily, and they must shield the public from knowing what ultimately they don't want to know about the violence of prisons and the prison-world they uphold. More than anything, they must drown out the voices of those on the other side of the walls, who have everything to tell us. Those who know the system best know how best to fight it: These are their voices." —Geo Maher, abolition school coordinator and author of A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete
Elizabeth Hinton is professor of history, African American studies, and law at Yale University and Yale Law School. Her research focuses on the persistence of poverty, racial inequality, and urban violence in the twentieth-century United States. Hinton is the author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America and America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s. Her articles and op-eds can be found in the pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Boston Review, The Nation, Science, Nature, Time, and elsewhere.
Elsa Julien Lora is a writer, scholar, and collage artist whose work focuses on the history of American prisons and the texture and intimacy of family life. Her writing has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Aperture, and Public Books. She holds a JD from Yale Law School and is completing a PhD in African and African American Studies and History at Harvard University.
Introduction
The coeditors offer framing remarks designed to orient the reader to the essays to come and help guide their interpretation.
Note to Readers
This essay, penned by the incarcerated journalist Ghostwrite Mike, introduces readers to the stakes of the volume and why the perspectives it contains matter
Part 1: Blighted Soil
The essays in this section ask us to trace violence to the pyramid’s foundation: the intimate spaces of childhood and the environments that cultivate harm.
Part 2: Razor Wires and Iron Bars
The essays in this section affirm prisons as spaces that cultivate, sustain, and perpetuate harm by design. Violence functions as an organizing principle of daily life, institutionalized both through passive neglect, psychological coercion, and flagrant brutality.
Part 3: Dancing in the Penitentiary
The essays in this section illuminate the resilience that persists against the prison’s spectacular violence and abuse. That people who live in prisons find ways to cope and experience moments of joy does not negate the brutality of the institution. Instead, it highlights the strength of those who endure it.
Part 4: Punishing the Symptom
The essays in this section reject the premise that punishment is a solution, challenging us to envision responses to violence that center healing, justice, and repair.