Prisons have always been a fertile environment for writers, writers, and even artists, and over time, writers and writers have been imprisoned for various reasons, and they have been creating their masterpieces from inside prisons, as if the imagination expands with the narrow walls of cells.

Anti-racist human rights activist Malcolm X recounted his memories in prison and his words inspired a large audience, and American writer Jack London said that his experience of spending a month in the Erie County Jail in New York in 1894 inspired many of his writings.

London wrote his novel "Star Rover" about a university professor serving a life sentence in an American prison, while prison officials try to break his morale through a torture device called "the jacket", as he tries to withstand by entering a spiritual state in which he walks among the stars and experiences past life .

Black prison literature

Amid the protests sweeping American cities against police violence, in order to demand justice and equality, prison literature reveals the never-ending tragedy of blacks caused by racism and poor law enforcement.

In a report published by the American "theatlantic" magazine, writer Christine Guillaume shed light on a number of books and biographies in which black writers and activists talked about the tragic conditions of detention they lived in prisons, and during which they demanded a fairer system and more humane treatment.

The author says that many of the books - such as the books of the African-American activist who fled to Cuba, Asata Ulujbala Shakur, and the Communist activist and academic Angela Yvonne Davis - provide a summary of harsh experiences in prisons, and raise questions about justice, the concept of public security and police behavior, and whether they should exist Prisons in the first place.

But this type of literature is not new, as the author says. In the 19th century, Austin Reed wrote the book "The Life and Adventures of a Tortured Prisoner", the first known biography written by an African American prisoner, when he was arrested on charges of theft at the age of ten in the oldest juvenile prison in New York City.

This story is not much different from what was suffered by Reginald Dwayne Bates, who was tried as an adult at the age of 16 for stealing a car, and he listed the details of his imprisonment in his memoirs in 2009, the year in which he won the Beatrice Hawley Prize for Poetry, and after his release he published a collection of poems. In a book released in 2019.

Bates assured to The Atlantic that his love for literature arose while he was suffering from inhuman detention conditions in his solitary confinement.

According to the author, the prison experience was a pivot for many black writers whose ideas and theories about the struggle for justice crystallized during detention, and one of the most famous examples in history is Martin Luther King Jr.'s message in 1963 during the so-called "civil rights movement", where he specified in his letter Which he called "Letter from Birmingham Jail," his philosophy of peaceful protest to dismantle the system of racist laws.

A recent example is a book published in 2017, published by former prisoner Susan Burton, founder of the "New Way to Return to Life" project, entitled "I Become Mrs. Burton," which sheds light on what women are suffering in prison, and through it, she called for fairer and more humane laws.

What prison robs him

Caleb Smith, professor of English and American studies at Yale University, says that the book "The Life and Adventures of a Tortured Prisoner", which Austin Reed finished writing about 5 years before Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, reveals a painful reality in prisons and conditions that are totally different from slavery. , A comparison that became popular later.

The book is a reminder of the cruelty of imprisonment and its impingement of human dignity, despite all the laws and legislations that aim to improve conditions of detention throughout history.

From prisoner to poet

And in his book, A Matter of Freedom, Reginald Dauin Bates says, “On the occasion of my birthday, I was in a solitary cell that I only leave to shower every 3 days, or to have fun twice a week… Two days after my birthday, I was at the door shouting for a book, Then someone threw under my cell door a book: The Black Poets, by American poet and author Dudley Randall .. The poets recount their stories in Randall's book under dark shades. They tell stories that I have not read in school books.

Letter from Birmingham Jail

In his famous letter "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King Jr. describes the tragic conditions of black people in American prisons, saying, "I doubt you would praise the police force if you saw their dogs sticking their teeth into unarmed, peaceful negroes."

He continues, "I doubt that you would thank the police so quickly if you saw their crude and inhuman treatment of negroes here in the city prison, if you saw them pushing and cursing old Negro women and young Negro girls, if you saw them slapping and kicking old people and young boys from Negroes, if you saw what they did on two occasions, it is They refused to give us food because we wanted to sing together. "

Luther King wrote in the letter the famous sentence attributed to him, saying, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

Voting in prison

Megan Massey was excited to have the right to vote in the 2016 presidential election, but when she went to jail in Los Angeles County for starting a fire, some of her fellow prisoners told her that she had lost the right to vote.

This turned out to be wrong, and with the help of Susan Burton and a group of volunteers, she managed to cast her vote by mail.