Inside Witness

Written accounts during or after the prison experience remain the largest genre of carceral creativity, ranging from the famous Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison in Pavia, Italy in the year 524 and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," written in 1963, to the infamous Hitler's Mein Kampf, which he began writing in Landsberg Prison in Bavaria in 1924.

In addition to many published accounts, is a vast trove of letters, poems, and other records, including audio and visual recordings, of the prison experience written by people in prisons around the world. Several efforts have been undertaken to compile archives of these testimonials, which provide a profound treasure of primary source material. Here we offer links to such archives currently known to us, with brief descriptions quoted from each site. In addition, references to known books based on materials from each archive are also provided.


American Prison Writing Archive
https://prisonwitness.org/

"The mission of the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA) is to replace misrepresentation of prisons and imprisoned people with first-person witness by those living in legalized confinement."

Larson, D. (2024). Inside knowledge: Incarcerated people on the failures of the American prison. New York University Press.

Hinton, E., & Lora, E. J. (Eds.). (2026). Harm and punishment. Haymarket Press.


Prisons Museum
https://prisons.museum/en

"What started as a search for missing colleagues after ISIS was defeated turned into a systematic effort to document all of its prisons in Syria and Iraq using the latest 3D technology with the goal of publication for accountability.

The first version of the virtual museum, the ISIS Prisons Museum, enriched with testimonies and documents, went online in the fall of 2024, soon followed by the Syria Prisons Museum in the summer of 2025. The projects are actively working with victims’ initiatives and legal bodies in support of truth and justice."


Prison Letters Archive of Birgitta Wolf
https://skbl.se/en/article/BirgittaWolf (the archive source is being located)

"Her archive contains tens of thousands of letters from convicts and she quickly became known as “the angel of the convicts”. In order to give them a public voice she collected manuscripts, poems, and sayings which she published as a book in 1963 entitled Die Vierte Kaste. In 1968 she also published a book in Swedish, called Det stulna livet: brev från fångar."

Wolf, B. (Ed.). (1968). Aussagen: Briefe von Strafgefangenen, mit einer Orientierung von Birgitta Wolf. Langewiesche-Brandt.

Wolf, B. (Ed.). (1972). Anklage erhoben (Charges filed): Gedichte und Grafiken von Strafgefangenen. Burckhardthaus-Verlag.


Münster Archive of Prison Writing
https://www.gefangenenliteratur.de/

Collected by Helmut H. Koch at the University of Münster

"We define 'prisoner literature' as texts written by prisoners while incarcerated or composed in retrospect based on their prison experiences. This is distinct from literature in which prison appears as a motif but is described merely from the outside. It is advisable to adopt a broad definition of prisoner literature (or "literature of marginalized groups") so that important forms of writing are not overlooked due to traditional categorizations."

Colvin, S. (2017). Unerhört? Prisoner narratives as unlistened-to stories (and some reflections on the picaresque). The Modern Language Review, 112(2), 440–458. https://doi.org/https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5699/modelangrevi.112.2.0440

Colvin, S. (2022). Shadowland: The story of Germany told by its prisoners. Reaktion Books.