“Only softback books are allowed inside.” That’s what the email from the prison liaison said. I stared at the stack of hardback picture books I’d gathered as samples for a class on writing for kids I ...

The earliest-known prison memoir penned by an African American was published by Random House on Jan. 26, over 150 years after it was originally written. “The Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict,” ...

When a revolutionary mob stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, the famous Paris prison held only seven inmates. The eighth, the Marquis de Sade, had already been transferred to another jail. But the ...

There's something almost paradoxical about the idea that some of the world's greatest literary works were born not in quiet libraries or cozy study rooms, but inside prison cells. Locked away, ...

Prison literature has a long and rich history, stretching back to Jack London, Nelson Algren and Malcolm X. The genre includes powerful work from prisoners incarcerated on death row, which is often ...

RIO DE JANEIRO — When 33-year-old Brazilian woman Emily de Souza heard about a program allowing her to shave off four days from her prison sentence by reading a book, she seized the opportunity to ...

PEN America details the types of book bans prisoners face, the arbitrariness with which they are implemented, and the lack of transparency and oversight that leads to bans on titles from Nobel Prize ...

Kimani Wanjiru discusses prison literature in East Africa: “Maina wa Kinyatti perhaps has the highest number of books that vividly describe his harrowing experience. He has a collection of poems A ...

ISTANBUL — As surely as dissidents have been locked up throughout Turkey’s turbulent modern history, their words — poems, memoirs, fiction and even screenplays — have managed to break out. The country ...