The American Prison Writing Archive contains materials created and submitted by prisoners and prison staff. Materials are then transcribed (and users of the site can volunteer to subscribe them) to create a searchable database of submissions. Materials can be sorted by author, state, or name of prison, and appear to skew heavily toward submissions by people who are incarcerated.
The archive aims to
replace speculation on and misrepresentation of prisons, imprisoned people, and prison workers with first-person witness by those who live and work on the receiving end of American criminal justice. No single essay can tell us all that we need to know. But a mass-scale, national archive of writing by incarcerated people and prison staff can begin to strip away widely circulated myths and replace them with some sense of the true human costs of the current legal order. By soliciting, preserving, digitizing and disseminating the work of prison workers and imprisoned people, we hope to ground national debate on mass incarceration in the lived experience of those who know jails and prisons best.
The archive can be accessed at http://apw.dhinitiative.org/.
Dr. Jeanie Austin 