| Summary: | Based in a digital archive of first-person witness by people currently incarcerated in the United States (U.S.), this paper discusses witness texts that document and grieve the experience of alienation of self-identity, fight that alienation, and that together map both the degradation of human dignity at the center of current U.S. penality and how it can be resisted in restoring sociality with other incarcerated people. Writing from inside often represents a moment not only of resistance to the prison regime, but of reconstruction of the self that is the premise for all further resistance. After placing prison witness today against the background of such witness from an earlier penal era, the paper looks at patterns across the essays currently posted in the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA). The paper suggests that the very availability of the APWA could re-ground future U.S. prison scholarship.
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