Justice Notes: Origins of A Memoir
A White-Collar Journal forum for criminal justice, lived experience, and the personal search for redemption
PRISONERS LAMENT (Original Memoir-hybrid form)
As I’ve been going through the original outlines and notes for the hybrid manuscript that eventually became A Prison of My Own, I came across this explanation of what I was trying to accomplish.
At the time, I wasn’t simply struggling with what to write. I was struggling with how to write it. Prison seemed to occupy a different dimension, and I wasn’t convinced that a conventional narrative could capture it.
This is what I wrote:
My goal is to illuminate the dimension where an inmate’s experience resides. It’s somewhere between a dream and real life, a kind of twilight zone per Rod Serling’s 1950’s series. But that isn’t it either. It’s not fantasy. If it’s fantasy, the reader can’t experience it.
A traditional, long-form narrative can’t capture it, and the code in poetry is recognized almost exclusively by its author. So I chose a kind of stream of conscious, imagistic, lyrical prose, or some such variation. I’m not sure what you call it. Others will decide if it’s effective.
Maybe the prison experience is just ineffable. Nothing I’ve read captures it.
Reading this now, I’m struck by how deliberate the choice of form was. I wasn’t experimenting for the sake of experimentation. I was trying to solve a problem.
How do you describe incarceration to someone who hasn’t experienced it?
The routines and indignities can be described. So can the guards, the inmates, the bunk, the chow hall, the commissary, the endless hours and the count. But those are the architecture of prison. They aren’t necessarily the experience of it.
What I was trying to capture was something more elusive: the altered sense of time, the dislocation, the separation from the life you once inhabited, the strange community that becomes your entire world, and the realization that the world outside continues perfectly well without you.
I believed conventional narrative imposed too much order on an experience that didn’t feel orderly. So I wrote in fragments—stream of consciousness, images, lyrical passages, journal entries, profiles, poems. I didn’t know what to call it. I called it a hybrid manuscript.
Something unexpected has happened as I’ve returned to these early pieces for Origins of a Memoir. Many of the pieces I’ve been publishing on Substack come directly from, or grew out of, those fragments. And they seem to work particularly well here as individual pieces.
Perhaps the form wasn’t the problem. Perhaps I was asking it to do something it couldn’t do—to sustain an entire memoir. What couldn’t carry a book can capture a moment, an inmate, an image, or a particular experience of incarceration.
Maybe I wasn’t entirely wrong about the problem.
I’m still not sure prison can be fully explained to someone who hasn’t experienced it. Maybe, as I wrote all those years ago, some part of it is simply ineffable.
Justice Notes is an ongoing series examining incarceration, rehabilitation, storytelling, institutional power, and the lives that exist behind prison walls.
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