Prison autobiographical narratives: Making sense of personal and social (racial) transformation

Abstract

This article investigates autobiographical public narratives of people who are, and were, incarcerated during different regimes of injustices in the United States—from the civil rights era to the current era of mass incarceration. People make sense of their experiences with race and racism through time, from a present standpoint of incarceration or freedom, in retrospect via proximate and distant memories of injustices, and toward a vision of the future. I juxtapose mainstream autobiographies from Malcolm X to Shaka Senghor with public blog posts from individuals incarcerated who provide autobiographical accounts to the world. I find that generations of incarcerated people who came of age during the height of the War on Drugs of the 1980s and 1990s project a narrative of a neoliberal subject who has a more individualistic and de-racialized idea of transforming their moral self and community. This contradicts with the way they portray prison as being a conduit for creating communities of racial solidarity and racial consciousness. Highly influenced and inspired by other narratives of radical prisoners of conscience of the 1960s and 1970s who were prone to view their liberation, and of the Black community, through vanquishing White supremacy, the new generation speaks to the color-blind narratives that pervade mainstream society and possible in narrative interventions correctional program.