The American Prison Writing Archive is “the largest collection to date of non-fiction writing by currently incarcerated Americans writing about their experience inside…

…[The] goal [of the archive] is to replace speculation on and misrepresentation of prisons and imprisoned people with first-person witness by those on the receiving end of American criminal justice. No single essay can tell us all that we need to know. But a mass-scale, national archive of writing by incarcerated people can begin to strip away widely circulated myths and replace them with some sense of the true human costs of the current legal order. By soliciting, preserving, digitizing and disseminating the work of imprisoned people, we hope to ground national debate on mass incarceration in the lived experience of those who know jails and prisons best.”