Breaking out: in fiction and nonfiction, new books are ending the silence on life in prison, as well as societal policies and personal behaviors that put people there.

After being released from prison in 1936, Chester Himes tried to publish a manuscript based on his personal experience there. Publishers rejected the material, which dealt with then forbidden topics such as corrupt guards, racism, casual violence and sex and love between men. This was decades before Nathan McCall's Makes Me Wanna Holler (Random House, 1994) told of his prison experience and the love and lust between some men; before asha bandele wrote her lyrical novel The Prisoner's Wife (Scribner, 1999) about love and personal growth between her and a man who was incarcerated when she met and married him.

Today, with more than two million people behind bars and blacks imprisoned at an alarming rate, prison and its lifestyle can no longer be taboo. Prison shows up on television, in rap music and in art. So naturally, we also have a steady stream of fiction and nonfiction books being published, where prison and incarceration are the main subject or an important element.

These publications include rifles as varied as: Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories Press, 2003), Angela Y. Davis's pondering and her call for "new terrains of justice"; Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett by Jennifer Gonnerman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004), a journalist's look at one woman's challenge of re-entering the free world and the effect of incarceration on her children (a National Book Award nominee in 2004); A Breed Apart (Atria Books, 2004) is Victor Woods's account of the crimes that landed him in prison and the journey to turn his life around after release; and Upstate by Kalisha Buckhanon, a novel published in January 2005 (see "And Now What?" THE WRITING LIFE, page 68), a story told through letters between two lovers, one of whom is incarcerated.

"There's no question there are more books being produced that explore these issues" says Marc Mauer, who has authored nonfiction books on prison-related issues for some 25 years.

Policy of Mass Incarceration

"There's a growing recognition that incarceration has wide-ranging impacts on society, that it significantly affects family and community structures, resource allocation and certainly the life prospects of many in the African American community in particular" says Mauer, assistant director of the nonprofit Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C.

As a New York criminal defense attorney, John V. Elmore was tired of seeing young black people go to prison, often because of mistakes made when they did not understand their legal rights. Elmore has written Fighting for Your Life: The African-American Criminal Justice Survival Guide (Amber Books, 2004), which covers such topics as choosing an attorney and dealing with police misconduct. Elmore hopes mentoring programs, schools and community organizations will use the book to teach people, especially youth, to protect themselves from "the U.S. policy, of mass incarceration." [Log on to www.bibookreview.com for introduction by Tony Rose, president of Amber Books.]

When bandele, poet and journalist, wrote The Prisoner's Wife, it was partially because she did not see a literary mirror anywhere that reflected herself.

"I couldn't ignore this huge area of my life that defined my life, as well as the lives of the other two to three million who got up at two or three in the morning and took bus rides to give a gift or a hug,' says bandele.

Although her later novel Daughter (Scribner, 2003) is more about the perils of silence, the prison issue weaves in and out of the story. Her goal in her writing, says bandele, is to not departmentalize life into the good and the ugly, but to show all of life and its complexities--"what it means to be human."

The Innocents

After Jaki McCalvin's husband was incarcerated, she wrote What Happens When Brothers Go to Prison and Leave Sisters Alone (Sister Publishing Co., 2004), inspired, she says, by "the children that I saw waiting in the cold at midnight in the winter boarding buses that would take them to visit fathers in prison.

"My main market is the forgotten victims, the wives and children left behind to fill the void that the incarceration of these men creates," she says.

What happens to the families of prisoners is the focus of Doing Time on the Outside: Incarceration and Family Life in Urban America (University of Michigan Press, 2004), a more scholarly look at families in Washington, D.C., whose economic and social lives have been shaped by incarceration. The author Donald Braman gives personal stories of families and communities that are losing people to prisons, often for drug-related crimes.

The number of books being published about incarceration, or that include prison in their plots, will most likely rise if the United States continues its practice of super-incarceration. Now that DNA tests are proving that some people in prison are innocent, we may see more books like Exit to Freedom. Written by Calvin C. Johnson Jr. with Greg Hampikian (The University of Georgia Press, 2003), it is the story of Johnson's 16-year imprisonment for rape and related crimes and his eventual triumph, when DNA proved he was not the rapist.

Chester Himes had to wait until 1952 to get a watered-down version of his prison tome published as a novel called Cast the First Stone (Coward-McCann, 1952). It would be 40 years later, in 1998, before W.W. Norton's Old School Books would publish Himes's original manuscript--with its corrupt guards and homosexuality. It was published as Yesterday Will Make You Cry the final title the author had given the work.

Patrice Gaines is a former reporter for The Washington Post and author of Laughing in the Dark: From Colored Girl to Woman of Color: A Journey From Prison to Power (Anchor Books, November 1995).