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Committee within PEN’s American Center has defended the rights of writers in other countries who have been jailed for their beliefs. But concern for saints of free expression abroad did not translate into concern for ordinary domestic sinners. In fact, this committee’s chair in the late sixties, historian Tom Fleming, had taken a dim view of convicts (his father was a New Jersey sheriff and prison warden). But one day, he appeared on a talk show with an impressive ex-prisoner — a Fortune Society spokesman — who remarked that some of the best people he knew were behind bars. “I never forgot it,” Fleming said.
    As PEN president in 1971, Fleming encouraged colleague Lucy Kavaler to investigate freedom to write in U.S. prisons. Her report spurred Fleming into intensive lobbying with corrections officials, resulting in reduced censorship, improved access to typewriters, courses, and better prison libraries. Then the revelations of Attica made a prison writing program. (PWP) seem a moral imperative to some PEN members. Convinced that writing is inherently rehabilitative, they persuaded other writers to read, teach, and mentor behind bars and publishers to send materials. “To be able to say what you mean, to put in words what you perceive as truth, to impose form on the formless — this is a way to reconstruct a life, to restore one’s sense of meaning, of responsibility to oneself and to others,” PWP chair Kathrin Perutz wrote. “But the others — at least some others — must be listening.”
    And so in 1973 PEN launched its first annual literary competition for prisoners in federal institutions and extended it to state prisoners in 1974, soon engaging some fifteen hundred prisoners annually. Winning works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction (drama was added later) were read at annual celebrations, and Fortune News (the Fortune Society’s paper for prisoners) and other journals published them. The contest reinforced the seventies’ prison renaissance nationwide. As college programs grew behind the walls, so did creative writing workshops, some funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Journals devoted to inmate writing — with names like “Joint 3 ’ Conference and Sentences — sprang up overnight. Some academics embraced this literature of the American dispossessed as part of their project of challenging, or enlarging, the canon. The bibliography of H. Bruce Franklin’s 1989 edition of Prison Literature in America: The Victim As Criminal and Artist lists 320 books by prisoners published from 1971 through 1981. Then everything changed.
    The year 1981 saw the publication of In the Belly of the Beast, a volume of Jack Henry Abbott’s prison letters to Norman Mailer, describing the rage he cultivated through his lifelong institutionaliza-tion. Readers were more excited by the writing than mindful of its warning; the book went through five printings and Abbott was released with fanfare. David Rothenberg recently described Abbott on his second day at liberty, sweating through an appearance on Good Morning, America, in which Mailer answered Abbott’s questions for him. Rothenberg invited Abbott to drop by the Fortune Society for help with the deinstitutionalization process. Abbott was not interested. Within a month, he had killed a man in a fight. The romance between writers and convicts had run its course, and prisoners went out of fashion in the eighties.
    Support for prison writing plummeted as well. Under Reagan, the NEA severely cut financial aid to fledgling magazines, and by 1984, every journal devoted to prison writing had gone under. Prison newspapers, a vital branch of this literature, began to lose support in this era. Now, with the notable exceptions of the distinguished Angolite in Louisiana and Prison Legal Notes in Washington State, most have been suppressed.
    The PWP persisted, though many members, always volunteers, fell