Abstract

Agency in prison writing is often theorized as resistance to the material conditions of incarceration and the ideological forces of the State. Situating agency in the larger history of mass incarceration (1970 – 2010) and in the memoirs of those who lived through it, however, shifts the focus from the prison writer as subject resisting an oppressive system and toward the prison writer as rhetor navigating the changing discourses and material conditions of mass incarceration in registers of agency that include resistance, self-determination, and recovery.