Doing Time Read Online Free

of prisoners and to find community-based alternatives to incarceration.
    â€¢   The disparity between the high sentences for crack cocaine (used mostly by people of color) and the relatively low for powder cocaine (used mostly by white people) is being eliminated.
    â€¢   Re-entry has become in the last several years the most challenging issue in criminal justice policy as the public realizes that almost all people return from prison to the community and need help in preparing to reintegrate successfully.
    â€¢   In 1998, a group called Critical Resistance launched the first major coalition-building conferences for prison activists concerned about checking what they called the Prison Industrial Complex and strengthening communities at risk; coalition building has since become the norm.
    â€¢   Formerly incarcerated men and women are increasingly designing and staffing programs for people returning from prison. (See the afterword, especially the first two sections.)
    Most important, public awareness has grown, and many citizens work with local organizations. Michele Alexander’s powerful metaphor—mass incarceration is the new Jim Crow—may startle readers out of their indifference and fire the conscience of the country to engage in a refreshed human rights movement. Such struggles are never simply for the persons deprived of their rights, but rather for all of us. We are all diminished by an unjust society. We are all implicated in this monstrous carceral society whose tentacles reach everywhere. For the good of us all, we must try to understand it and change our approach to crime and criminals.
    With prison and prisoners an increasingly large, though still ignored, aspect of society, this collection of prison writings is more relevant than ever. Teachers seeking ways to integrate prison issues into American studies find it invaluable. Many are again prizing prison writing as an essential expression of our nation’s underclass and, with its own complex traditions, an important field of American literature.
    Prisoners know that they dwell “behind the mirror’s face” (in Paul St. John’s telling phrase; see “Reading and Writing”), that prison reflects the state of society. This book aspires to dissolve the mercury and leave us face to face with our brothers and sisters. Our future is one. The evidence that this book offers of the complex humanity of people in prison and their very real aptitude for growth has a surprising part to play in our construction of the future.

    Writing is my way of sledge-hammering these walls.
    â€”Alejo Dao’ud Rodriguez, Sing Sing Correctional Facility, Ossining, New York
    My life was one of perpetual conflict. I held an apocalyptic view. I have spent most of my existence on this earth inside one prison or another, so my mindset toward the world was one of complete antipathy and alienation … I was reluctant to submit my story to the PEN contest I at no point thought I had a chance of winning. When I won the award, it gave me an overwhelming sense of acceptance. I now felt that I had something to offer humanity.
    â€” Anthony Ross, Death Row, San Quentin Prison, California
    Public reception of prison writing over the past twenty-five years parallels the plunging and rearing trajectory of attitudes toward prisoners we have seen: enthusiasm and broad-based support in the seventies, doubt growing in the eighties, cynicism dominating the nineties, and beginning to give way at century’s end* To some degree PEN’s engagement has followed these vicissitudes, but with an important distinction: Every year PEN has provided an outlet for these forgotten voices.
    PEN’s involvement in this unique creative movement began in a curious way. Born in 1921, PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, Editors, and Novelists) is dedicated to consolidating world peace through a global association of writers. Since 1960 a Freedom-to-Write