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.

With thanks for assistance in compiling sources to Mr. Dehler Ingham, honors student at Hamilton College, Clinton, New York.


CANADA


Journal of Prisoners on Prisons
https://uottawa.scholarsportal.info/ottawa/index.php/jpp/issue/archive

"Since 1988, the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (JPP) has been a prisoner written, academically oriented and peer reviewed, non-profit journal, based on the tradition of the penal press. It brings the knowledge produced by prison writers together with academic arguments to enlighten public discourse about the current state of carceral institutions. This is particularly important because with few exceptions, definitions of deviance and constructions of those participating in these defined acts are incompletely created by social scientists, media representatives, politicians and those in the legal community. These analyses most often promote self-serving interests, omit the voices of those most affected, and facilitate repressive and reactionary penal policies and practices. As a result, the JPP attempts to acknowledge the accounts, experiences, and criticisms of the criminalized by providing an educational forum that allows women and men to participate in the development of research that concerns them directly. In an age where `criminalization, imprisonment, and other forms of carceral control` have become lucrative and exploitable, the JPP exists as an important alternate source of information that competes with popularly held stereotypes and misconceptions about those who are currently, or those who have in the past, faced the deprivation of liberty."


GERMANY


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.


MENA: MIDDLE EAST/NORTH AFRICA


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."


UNITED STATES


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.


Arts Capacity
https://artscapacity.org/program-impact/

"Arts Capacity’s interactive concert programs are designed to support incarcerated individuals by fostering pro-social behavior, enhancing emotional intelligence, and strengthening family connections. As of fall 2024, Arts Capacity has presented twenty-three interactive concerts across five correctional facilities with varying security levels in Kansas, Georgia, South Carolina, and Arizona. We are collecting data and sharing our data-driven insights in an effort to extend the positive impact of this programming to more facilities nationwide. We gather detailed data through surveys, and the feedback helps us refine our programs, ensuring they contribute positively to each facility’s environment. The following data points are from responses to surveys filled out anonymously by incarcerated individuals." Arts Capacity has over ten years of data on the experience of musical performance in prisons awaiting digitization.


Florence Project, Detained Collection
https://detained.digitalscholarship.library.arizona.edu/items/browse

"The Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal service organization providing free legal and social services to adults and unaccompanied children in immigration custody in Arizona. Although the government assists indigent criminal defendants and civil litigants through public defenders and legal aid attorneys, it does not provide attorneys for people in immigration removal proceedings. As a result, an estimated 86 percent of the detained people go unrepresented due to poverty. The Florence Project strives to address this inequity both locally and nationally through direct service, partnerships with the community, and advocacy and outreach efforts."


Minutes Before Six
https://minutesbeforesix.com/

"Our Mission: to give a voice to those silenced through incarceration. To achieve this, we facilitate a publicly-accessible, online platform that displays the contributions of many talented incarcerated individuals. We provide them with the opportunity to creatively express themselves and allow them the chance to feel connected to the free world by knowing their works are shared with the public. By carrying out our work, our organization offers prisoners a way to maintain a relationship with the outside world; an important lifeline many do not otherwise have available to them. Equally, our vision is to afford prisoners a productive outlet by contributing to the literary and arts communities, while also educating our readership about prisoner experiences navigating the criminal justice system, via our website."


North American Slave Narratives
https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/texts.html/Documenting-the-American-South-North-American-Slave-Narratives

"'North American Slave Narratives' collects books and articles that document the individual and collective story of Black people struggling for freedom and human rights in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. This collection includes all the existing autobiographical narratives of self-emancipated and formerly enslaved people published as broadsides, pamphlets, or books in English up to 1920. Also included are many of the biographies of self-emancipated and formerly enslaved people and some significant fictionalized first-person accounts of enslavement published in English before 1920."


Prisoner Express
https://prisonerexpress.org/

"Prisoner Express is a program of the Durland Alternatives Library."


Prison Writers
https://prisonwriters.com/

"What happens in prison usually stays in prison. Prison Writers is changing that. Since 2015, we have published more than 800 firsthand stories that give the public an unfiltered view of life inside, while giving incarcerated writers purpose, accountability, and a real voice."


Real Cost of Prisons
https://www.realcostofprisons.org/

"The Real Cost of Prisons Project brings together justice activists, artists, researchers and women and men directly experiencing the impact of mass criminalization who are working to end the carceral state. The Real Cost of Prisons Project is a national organization, begun in 2000. The RCPP created workshops, a website visited by 1,500 people a day and which includes extensive sections of writing and comix by prisoners."


Slave Narratives at the Library of Congress
https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/about-this-collection/

"Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration, later renamed Work Projects Administration (WPA). At the conclusion of the Slave Narrative project, a set of edited transcripts was assembled and microfilmed in 1941 as the seventeen-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves. In 2000-2001, with major support from the Citigroup Foundation, the Library digitized the narratives from the microfilm edition and scanned from the originals 500 photographs, including more than 200 that had never been microfilmed or made publicly available. This online collection is a joint presentation of the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs divisions of the Library of Congress."

Litwack, L. F. (1979). Been in the storm so long: The aftermath of slavery. Vintage Books.


Solitary Watch
https://solitarywatch.org/

"Solitary Watch is a national nonprofit newsroom whose mission is to uncover the truth about solitary confinement and other harsh prison conditions in the United States by producing high-quality investigative journalism, accurate information and analysis, and authentic storytelling from both sides of prison walls. By amplifying the voices and experiences of those most directly affected, we generate public awareness, shift narratives, promote accountability, and spur policy change on an underreported humanitarian crisis."