If These Walls Could Talk: Exploring Carceral Community Building Through Prison Writings

“If These Walls Could Talk: Exploring Carceral Community Building through Prison Writings” argues that men incarcerated at the Wisconsin State Prison explored and dissected understandings of their personal identities as Americans and “criminals”, the realities of their confinement, and the function of the prison in American society through a prison publication called The Candle, which was in print from 1936 to 1946. Through this paper, they effectively established the prison not only as a place of confinement, but as a site of organization, collaboration, and insight. By centering the narratives and ideas put forth by surviving prison publications, this paper excavates histories of penal development, prisoner activism, and carceral ideology. This work builds upon the larger project of illuminating America’s carceral development physically and ideologically, to center the prison as a central site of inquiry. When examined through the eyes and minds of those held within them, prisons can be understood as more than cages and institutions of state punishment. Rather, I argue that prisons were viewed as spaces inherently shaped by those held there, their actions, and their ideas. In the case of the Wisconsin State Prison in the 1930s and 40s, the incarcerated population operated within processes of disenfranchisement, discipline, and surveillance to join nationwide conversations about penal practices and publicly negotiate the “prisoner’s” place in America- both inside and outside the walls of a prison. This work shows how The Candle operated as a tool of political engagement and individual reckoning for men incarcerated at the WSP and a medium through which the intricacies of life in the “walled-off” could be explored.