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Incarceration's Witnesses: American Prison Writing | HamiltonX on edX | Course About Video

505 views · Published 22 December 2014 · 1:52 · Indexed 14 November 2026

Channel: edX · 2014 · Education

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Incarceration's Witnesses: American Prison Writing

After a brief history of the U.S. prison system and a survey of U.S. prisoner writing from 1904 to 1970, we will explore—through prisoner witness—the issues raised by the unprecedented rise of the nation’s mass-incarceration regime since the early 1970s, and the central place that prisoner witness can take in understanding this system and its future. 

About this Course
The U.S. incarcerates a larger number and percentage of its own citizens than any nation on earth: larger than China, Russia, Cuba, or Iran. American ex-offenders are arrested again at a rate of 67% within three years, and 75% within five years of release. This course looks inside U.S. prisons, through the history of literary witness born by incarcerated people over the past 100 years. This history, valuable in its own right, will help us to understand the mass-scale prison’s rise, its day-to-day practices, and why it fails so badly at the task of rehabilitation. Through prison witness, we may hope to begin to understand what is needed to make the U.S. prison a more socially constructive institution. Among other texts, we will read and discuss Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America, The (online) American Prison Writing Archive, and come to a sense of the moral weight that prison witness must carry in any truly democratic debate on the criminal justice system.

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