The Prison and the American Imagination - by Caleb Smith (an interview)

[BridgeTheGap]

Ten Questions for Caleb Smith on
The Prison and the American Imagination
(Yale University Press, 2009)

What inspired you to write The Prison and the American Imagination? What sparked your interest?

I’ve always been intrigued by questions of discipline, solitude, and self-consciousness. American literature provides the richest language I know about for thinking through those questions. The prison provides a concrete historical context. In our age of convict warehousing and scandalous war prisons, it can be hard to remember this, but from a certain point of view, the prison system began as an experiment in how convicts could be rehabilitated and redeemed by a disciplinary institution.

The reformers who built the model institutions of the early nineteenth century called them penitentiaries, to compel penitence. They drew from Christian traditions—Quaker tenets of nonviolence, Catholic and Calvinist varieties of asceticism and moral rigor—and they often represented the cell as a place of spiritual rebirth. As a precondition for that resurrection, they led convicts through mortifying processes including “civil death,” a loss of legal personhood with origins in European monasticism. The Philadelphia reformer Benjamin Rush quoted scripture in describing the rehabilitated convict as a man who “was lost and is found—was dead and is alive.” My book is animated by my fascination with this resurrection plot and all of its contradictions.

Of course there are also personal kinds of inspiration. When I started writing it, in graduate school at Duke, I was living in a house full of amazing people, including one who is now a public defender and another who is writing about interrogation and confession in modern Ireland. It was just after September 11, 2001, and there was a feeling of political intensity. We were all very aware of living in history, in a world of conflict and real power. We talked all the time about crime and punishment. My book was inspired in many ways by those conversations.

What’s the most important take-home message for readers?

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/rdbook/1929/prison_as_resurrection/

[Downtown Hound]

1. Seems like an interesting book

If I get the chance, I will check it out.