14 The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been effectively repealed by the criminalization of the poor, especially people of color, through the so-called war on drugs, racial profiling, unleashed police, and felony disenfranchisement. Grotesque experiments in dehumanization are being conducted in the form of "supermax" prisons. This has been culture war with a vengeance--and with a very effective strategy.
9. Make no mistake about it. The prison-industrial complex is a major component of a strategy in the culture wars. While disintegrating Black and Latin communities, it attracts the white working class with a carrot--prison-related jobs--and a stick--fear of people of color, imaged as a criminal underclass. This strategy developed from the tactical use of the prison as an overt weapon against the urban rebellions and social movements of the 1960s. But during that period, the imprisonment of activists and rebels helped turn the prison into a cultural matrix that generated political leadership and an explosion of prison literature. Unlike earlier periods when reformers and even revolutionaries viewed prisoners mainly as victims to be rescued by progressive social movements, parts of the movement viewed prisoners as a potential revolutionary vanguard. The Black Panther Party, for example, deeply influenced by Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X--who had shown how prison could be transformed into school--saw what they called the lumpenproletariat as the truly revolutionary class, and their leaders included ex-convicts such as Eldridge Cleaver, as well as George Jackson, the main spokesman of the movement inside the prison. Meanwhile, many convicts and ex-convicts were becoming radicalized, as exemplified by authors as disparate as Etheridge Knight, Iceberg Slim, Piri Thomas, Jack Abbott, and Donald Goines.
10. By the late 1970s, prison literature was becoming a powerful force in the culture wars. Then came the repression that was to build during the 1980s and 1990s. Educational opportunities, including creative writing courses, in prison were defunded. Congress eliminated Pell Grants for prisoners. By 1984, every literary journal devoted to publishing poetry and stories by prisoners was wiped out. "Son of Sam" laws made it illegal for convcts to collect money from their writings.15 And while prison literature was being outlawed by the state, it was being delegitimized by fashionable critical theories that, like New Criticism, revered coterie literature brimming with complexity, indeterminacy, and ambiguity, while disdaining socially purposeful works accessible to a mass audience.
11. Today, amid the growing consciousness of the magnitude and effects of the prison-industrial complex, the literature of the American prison--past and present--is being rediscovered. The American Studies Association has made a major effort to spotlight the prison-industrial complex as a fundamental institution of American society, leading to the development of a variety of exciting new courses centering on the American prison. The 2000 MLA convention itself suggests that something similar could be emerging in literary studies. Besides this panel, there is the Black American Literature and Culture Division session on "Criminality and Incarceration." As I argued there, just as we now assume that one cannot intelligently teach nineteenth-century American literature without recognizing slavery as context, one cannot responsibly teach contemporary American literature without recognizing the American prison system as context. For we are beginning to become aware that, in the words of Ho Chi Minh eighty years ago, one of the great "atrocities" of the "predatory capitalists" is substituting prisons for schools.
H. Bruce Franklin, Rutgers University, Newark
