American Prison Writing Archive
The APWA is the largest and first fully searchable digital archive of non-fiction essays by imprisoned people writing about their experience inside U.S. prisons and jails today. The APWA currently hosts about 4000 essays from forty-seven states, four hundred prison facilities, and 1000+ authors. The archive now has submissions from 1800 authors with 6,268 essays in our physical holdings.
Through a grant from the Mellon Foundation Presidential Initiatives, we migrated the archive from its origin at Hamilton College to Johns Hopkins, where we have expanded our reach, impact, and ability to grow the archive, and continue to ensure incarcerated authors can document life inside and benefit materially from their writings. The Archive now has a staff of 8, supports 7 APWA fellows (formerly incarcerated authors), many student interns, and several advisors inside prison. We have helped forge a network of other prison archives through holding an Archives of Prison Witness convening in October 2024, bringing together over 100 people who lead organizations, archives, and community groups related to prison public memory projects to create a network and set of principles for ethical work with carceral archives. In addition to housing a public, searchable digital archive of over 4000 writings, the Archive has a forthcoming guest edited volume with Haymarket Press, featuring 49 incarcerated authors, Harm and Punishment, and has collaborated to bring APWA essays to a public audience through a commissioned original work and musical performance, “Songs from Inside”, with In the Stacks and the Peabody Institute. The Writing on the Wall (TWOTW), an artwork installation featuring writings from prisons around the world, was on display at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, DC. during February and March 2025. A partnership between Incarceration Nations Network (INN) and the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA), this special edition of TWOTW installation sought to bring together visions from incarcerated authors around political life, democracy, disenfranchisement, and justice featuring a curated selection of writings from the APWA. Writings about the APWA can be found in Inquest, “A Platform for Prison Witness” , JHU Magazine, “Writing Within Prison Walls” (2024) , Baltimore Magazine, “The American Prison Writing Archive Moves to Baltimore” (January 2024), New York Times, “For the American Prison Writing Archive, a ‘Shadow Canon’ Sheds Light” (Arts Section feature article), among others.
OTHER INITIATIVES
Portals Policing Project
With support from the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, we used a new technology and civic infrastructure, Portals, to initiate conversations about policing and incarceration in communities felled by police violence – communities like Freddie Gray’s, Michael Brown’s, and Eric Garner’s. By creating a “wormhole” through space, a bridge to places unseen and
unheard, and, crucially, by making access to these wormholes easy and free, Portals transforms the capacity of disparate people and communities to define their narratives, enhance political activism, create connected political spaces, and expand the possibility of studying politics in beneficially recursive ways. The Portals Policing Project amassed over 850 conversations across 14 neighborhoods in six cities – the most extensive collection of first-hand accounts of policing to date.
The State from Below
In 2015, Americans learned that public authorities in Ferguson, Missouri had imposed a “predatory system of government” on poor black citizens. Ferguson residents were targeted, arrested, and summonsed on civil-ordinance violations, assessed prohibitive fines and fees, and subjected to jail if they failed to pay. The extensiveness of the repression, harassment, and pilfering of the citizenry looked eerily
similar to the practices of failed states and authoritarian regimes and yet, Americans struggled with how to understand what looked like vastly different governing arrangements in a single republic. Is there a distinct type of governance being practiced in communities within our democracy?
What are those shiny gold shipping containers? This article in the Atlantic’s CityLab gives the gist of the Portals project. This one describes the project after we previewed findings at Notre Dame’s Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy .
Working papers and articles related to the project:
- Withdrawing or Drawing In? Political Discourse in Policed Communities. with Gwen Prowse and Spencer Piston, Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics.
- The State from Below: Distorted Responsiveness in Policed Communities. with Gwen Prowse and Tracey Meares, Urban Affairs Review
- Too Much Knowledge, Too Little Power: An Assessment of Political Knowledge in Highly Policed Communities. with Spencer Piston and Gwen Prowse, Journal of Politics.