America Is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s
America Is the Prison: Arts and Politics in Prison in the 1970s
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Abstract
In the 1970s, while politicians and activists outside prisons debated the proper response to crime, incarcerated people helped shape those debates though a broad range of remarkable political and literary writings. This book explores the forces that sparked a dramatic “prison art renaissance,” shedding light on how incarcerated people produced powerful works of writing, performance, and visual art. These included everything from George Jackson's revolutionary Soledad Brother to Miguel Pinero's acclaimed off-Broadway play and Hollywood film Short Eyes. An extraordinary range of prison programs—fine arts, theater, secondary education, and prisoner-run programs—allowed the voices of prisoners to influence the Black Arts Movement, the Nuyorican writers, “New Journalism,” and political theater, among the most important aesthetic contributions of the decade. By the 1980s and 1990s, prisoners' educational and artistic programs were scaled back or eliminated as the “war on crime” escalated. By then these prisoners' words had crossed over the wall, helping many Americans to rethink the meaning of the walls themselves and, ultimately, the meaning of the society that produced them.
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Front Matter
- Introduction
- One We Shall Have Order: The Cultural Politics of Law and Order
- Two The Age of Jackson: George Jackson and the Radical Critique of Incarceration
- Three What Works? Reform and Repression in Prison Programs
- Four We Took the Weight Incarcerated Writers and Artists in the Black Arts Movement
- Five Cell Block Theater Entertainment, Liberation, and the Politics of Prison Theater
- six Radical Chic Jack Henry Abbott and the Decline of Prison Programming
- Conclusion
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End Matter
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