Doran Larson – författare

A powerful critique of mass incarceration by the people who have experienced itInside Knowledge is the first book to examine the American prison system through the eyes of those who are trapped within it. Drawing from the writings collected in the American Prison Writing Archive, Doran Larson deftly illustrates how mass incarceration does less to contain any harm perpetrated by convicted people than to spread and perpetuate harm among their families and communities.Inside Knowledge makes a powerful argument that America's prisons not only degrade and debilitate their wards but also defeat the prison's cardinal missions of rehabilitation, containment, deterrence, and even meaningful retribution. If prisons are places where convicted people are sent to learn a lesson, then imprisoned people are the ones who know just what American prisons actually teach. At once profound and devastating, Inside Knowledge is an invaluable resource for those interested in addressing mass incarceration in America.

2025 CHOICE Outstanding Academic TitleA powerful critique of mass incarceration by the people who have experienced itInside Knowledge is the first book to examine the American prison system through the eyes of those who are trapped within it. Drawing from the writings collected in the American Prison Writing Archive, Doran Larson deftly illustrates how mass incarceration does less to contain any harm perpetrated by convicted people than to spread and perpetuate harm among their families and communities.Inside Knowledge makes a powerful argument that America's prisons not only degrade and debilitate their wards but also defeat the prison's cardinal missions of rehabilitation, containment, deterrence, and even meaningful retribution. If prisons are places where convicted people are sent to learn a lesson, then imprisoned people are the ones who know just what American prisons actually teach. At once profound and devastating, Inside Knowledge is an invaluable resource for those interested in addressing mass incarceration in America.

Joseph Stoyanovich writes children’s books. From the adventures of Baxter Bear and Wally Warthog, he fashions clever morality tales with happy endings that delight his audience, but fill their creator with dismay. For Joseph Stoyanovich is a troubled man whose emptiness is hidden behind a number of elaborate facades.   Among his friends, he is the worldly, wise, and weary cynic; yet to the family of his half brother, Will, he is the indulgent, mild-mannered uncle. Burdened with secret guilt over the death, many years earlier, of a younger brother, and over the marital breakup of his political-activist parents, Joseph lives his life most acutely in the margins, specifically those of his own children’s books—into which he scribbles obscenities in a bizarre ritualistic purging.   Then he meets Felice Kraipolous, a tough little 13-year-old who carries her own troubled secrets, and whom he longs to help; through her, Joseph sees a chance for his own redemption. And yet, at the same time, Joseph’s ambiguous feelings toward this contemporary Lolita threaten his carefully constructed life and career.

Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration works from the premise that if the law establishes and maintains both its practical and symbolic authority on the basis of its monopoly on legally sanctioned violence and the suffering threatened and delivered by such violence, then we cannot know the full human cost or concrete moral status of any legal state without human witness to the depth and manner of suffering meted out by such violence. The prison writer stands in the position to offer such witness. The prison writer knows the law’s violence in the flesh. For every other writer, reflection upon the degree and manner of suffering meted out under legal sanction—that is, reflection upon the full human cost of the contemporary legal order—is necessarily speculative. In close readings of first-person witness from prisons in the U.S., Ireland, and Africa, Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration discovers literary tropes that chart at once local, national, and transnational conditions of carceral experience—the extant conditions of legalized suffering. In exhibiting the labor required to move from institutionalized abjection to the minimum requirements of rights-bearing personhood, this witness offers the sole credible vision of the possibility of a post carceral understanding of freedom.