Introduction to ‘Dispatches from the Inside’

“I don’t think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did,” Malcolm X wrote in The Autobiography of Malcolm X. “In fact, prison enabled me to study far more intensively than I would have if my life had gone differently and I attended some college.”

Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

While I would not wish my experience with prison or the streets on anyone, I am thankful for the education I received in juvenile jail, group homes, prison, and the streets. My experience engaging with deeply-rooted racists, adroit dope boys, cunning street hustlers, and the arrogance of white power endows some of us who have been on the inside with an ability to read what others cannot (or will not).

I have been shaped by all of the former. Many traumas come with incarceration. Witnessing murders, stabbings, beatings, and having to participate in race fights makes me angry and hyperaware, especially around men. Only a few people have seen the effects of my incarceration. The anger that results from my being captured validates my theory that America hates me. No human being should have to maneuver through spaces with an understanding that, at any time, one could be killed or seriously hurt. But this anger gives urgency to my educational pursuits and opens my ambition to explore the places that made me. My life and my life's purpose cannot be separated from the people living and dying in the hidden corners of America.

One of the most important things we can do is listen to prison intellectuals. In this new section of SOULS, we extend Manning Marable's notion of “Dispatches from the Ebony Tower to highlight “corrective,” “descriptive,” and “prescriptive” Black study by writers and thinkers who are currently or formerly imprisoned. If the Black intellectual tradition is descriptive, then the voices of the elders sitting under the tree across from my grandmomma's house—including Mr. Vincent Bolden, my prison teacher, mentor, and friend at Mississippi State Prison at Parchman—need to be heard

The voices of my uncles and homies who taught me how to hustle, and protected me from grown men who would attempt to take advantage of me on the streets, speak through me and need to be heard. Some of this love may have been unhealthy but my loved-ones expressed love as they understood it. Whether right or wrong, the streets, prison, and every encounter in my neighborhood are responsible for my intellectual pursuits. These teachers are just as important as my mentors inside of the Ebony Tower. Their voices are why I am here. Their voices bring us crucial perspectives within, subsumed by, and looking outward—rather than peering under a microscope or through what Zora Neal Hurston called a “spyglass… . Prison intellectuals have lived in and experienced places that trained intellectual study, giving them a different vista from which to examine and critique white supremacy. Self-reformed narratives are inspiring, and in many cases, cause fear in the mind of the white supremacist. Prison intellectuals have spent time in prisons, and some have spent time on the streets as criminals and addicts. Insights gained from experiences within interlocking systems of white supremacy pose a formidable threat to white supremacy and the ideals that shape the prison industrial complex. Black prison intellectuals are some of the most inspiring people in the world.

Malcolm X often drew upon his experiences from the streets of Roxbury, Massachusetts and Harlem—his alternative educational spaces before formally earning what he called his ‘master's degree’ during six years of incarceration at the Massachusetts State Prison. Malcolm's auto-didacticism transformed him into one of America's most brilliant revolutionary intellectuals. He said: “Many who today hear me somewhere in person, or on television, or those who read something I've said, will think I went to school far beyond the eighth grade. This impression is due entirely to my prison studies. Malcolm X follows a strong thread of confined Black intellectuals who exposed and examined America's criminality and hypocrisy from within their confinement.

In 1797, Abraham Johnstone, a former slave who eventually earned his freedom, was sentenced to death after being accused and convicted—without evidence—of murdering his friend and forced laborer, Thomas Reid. Johnstone maintained his innocence, and explained why and how Blackness is criminalized, using his own imprisonment as an example. During his incarceration, and before his death sentence on July 8, 1797, Johnstone penned several letters not only proclaiming his innocence but brilliantly critiquing America. Johnstone's writings were later combined into a pamphlet, “Address, Dying Confession and Letter to His Wife.

What initially stands out in The Address of Abraham Johnstone is that Johnstone does not come across as a man begging for his freedom. Instead, Johnstone asks the powers-that-be to be upright citizens—challenging them to acknowledge that his conviction of murder is a result of his skin color as opposed to solid evidence. He goes on to give a brief history of the transatlantic slave trade before calling out the hypocrisy of the colonies seeking independence from the British: “even the patriotic who stood forth the champions of liberty…those who undauntedly stood forth day by day the advocates of liberty, at night would be cruel, rigid, and inexorable tyrants.” Johnstone calls for the liberation of all Black people and warns Black people to be aware of the hypocrisy of whiteness. “Another circumstance that renders my fate [peculiarly] unhappy at this crisis, is that it happens at a time when every effort is us[ed] for a total emancipation of all our brethren in slavery within this state.

Nearly one century after Johnstone was framed, convicted, and hanged– Celia, an enslaved teenager, faced the state of Missouri after she admitted to killing her enslaver, Robert Newsom. Newson raped Celia—who was fourteen-years-old at the time, on the day he “purchased” the girl Celia was a political prisoner.

During Celia's brief life—before being executed by the state at nineteen—the abolition of slavery became a serious conversation among politicians. While there is not much known about her imprisonment, she was born sometime around 1835 and gave birth to a stillborn child during her incarceration. At the time, Members of Congress argued over Celia’s case—a few recognizing her humanity and right to defend herself from inhumane treatment, along with other forced laborers. Today, an examination of America written by Celia would have been invaluable to scholars. Her voice could have offered unique examinations of sexual politics and the economics of slavery in the United States. Times change, but racist and sexist patterns persist. Today many political officials acknowledge the disproportionate abuse of profiling, arrests, and mass incarceration of Black and other people of color during the so-called War on Drugs. During which young boys and girls were labeled “super predators” and sentenced to excessive prison sentences for petty drug charges.

Joy James, Ebenezer Fitch Professor of Humanities, surmised that prison intellectuals are public intellectuals who, like his or her visible counterparts, reflect upon social meaning, discord, development, ethics, and justice Prisons have generated important knowledge while also operating as spaces for political education and grassroots mobilization—transforming the lives of imprisoned intellectuals and others. During his bid at Soledad Prison, George Jackson—the prison activist and member of the Black Panther Party (BPP), held political education classes with his fellow inmates. Malcolm X’s prison studies had a direct influence on the creation of the Black Panther Party. In the subsequent year following Malcolm’s 1965 murder; Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the BPP, pored over books inspired by Malcolm X’s political ideas, leading to the creation of the BPP in 1966 Today, both are widely regarded as required reading to understand the contexts of the prison industrial complex More recently, Demetrice Buckley, for example, currently serving twenty years for a second-degree murder conviction inside Michigan Department of Corrections, has turned a prison sentence into purpose. Buckley, in his sixteenth year behind bars, has found purpose as a scribe, examining poverty, and injustices within the prison system.

The intellectualism of prison intellectuals is not unlike what we can find in universities, the Black church, and political movements—although the language, style, and the forms of rigor might differ. The issues plaguing the elders sitting under the tree across from my grandmomma's housetree—addicts, drug dealers, gang bangers, and sex workers—all who have likely received, or will receive, a prison sentence, cannot be fully understood without more voices of people living inside prisons and jails providing their contexts and analyses. These men and women’s lives, like Malcolm and Newton, have been shaped by America’s treatment of Black life, making Black life—all Black life— an act of political resistance.

……

‘Dispatches from the Inside’ will bring these insights and experiences to SOULS. We invite you to engage. If you are currently or formerly incarcerated, send your pitch or completed work to Souls— on our submissions page.

Darryl Robertson '27 (Columbia GS) is a Harlem-based writer, former Justice in Education (J.I.E.) Scholar, and freelance research assistant for the New York Times and contributing writer for MS NOW. Find his writing here: https://linktr.ee/darrylrobertson

More on Prison Intellectuals & Writing from Inside

Addendum to “Introduction to Dispatches from the Inside” — Editorial Staff

Classic & Foundational (U.S.)

Malcolm X, with Alex Haley. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965).

Eldridge Cleaver. Soul on Ice (1968).

Etheridge Knight. Poems from Prison (1968).

George L. Jackson. Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970); Blood in My Eye (1972).

Angela Y. Davis, ed.. If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (1971); Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974).

Martin Luther King Jr.. “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963). in Why We Can’t Wait (1964).

Contemporary (U.S.)

Assata Shakur. Assata: An Autobiography (1987).

Mumia Abu-Jamal. Live from Death Row (1995); We Want Freedom (2004).

Jarvis Jay Masters. Finding Freedom (1997); That Bird Has My Wings (2009).

Wilbert Rideau. In the Place of Justice (2010).

Safiya Bukhari. The War Before (2010).

Reginald Dwayne Betts. A Question of Freedom (2009); Felon: Poems (2019).

Shaka Senghor. Writing My Wrongs (2016).

Susan Burton, with Cari Lynn. Becoming Ms. Burton (2017).

Albert Woodfox, with Leslie George. Solitary (2019).

Recent (2024–2026)

Reginald Dwayne Betts. Doggerel: Poems (W.W. Norton, 2025).

Christopher Blackwell, with Jamie Beth Cohen. Ending Isolation: The Case Against Solitary Confinement (2025).

John J. Lennon. The Tragedy of True Crime: Four Guilty Men and the Stories That Define Us (Celadon Books, 2025).

Global & International

Antonio Gramsci. Prison Notebooks (written 1929–35; English selections 1971). the foundational modern prison-intellectual text.

Jawaharlal Nehru. Glimpses of World History (1934); The Discovery of India (1946).

Ho Chi Minh. Prison Diary (Nhật ký trong tù) (written 1942–43).

Dennis Brutus. Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison (1968).

Wole Soyinka. The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972).

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (1981); Wrestling with the Devil (2018).

Nelson Mandela. Long Walk to Freedom (1994); Conversations with Myself (2010).

Latino & Native (U.S.)

Piri Thomas. Down These Mean Streets (1967).

Miguel Piñero. Short Eyes (1974).

Jimmy Santiago Baca. Immigrants in Our Own Land (1979); A Place to Stand (2001).

Leonard Peltier. Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance (1999).

Anthologies & Collections

Joy James, ed.. Imprisoned Intellectuals (2003); The New Abolitionists (2005).

Caleb Smith, ed.. The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison (PEN America / Haymarket, 2022).

Film, Audio & Exhibitions

Freedom Archives. George Jackson — 16mm work print, 1971–72; interviews with George Jackson, Georgia Jackson (George and Jonathan Jackson’s mother), and Angela Davis, filmed in the Marin County Courthouse Jail before her acquittal.

George Jackson on Fascism — short audio (Freedom Archives).

Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration — curated by Nicole Fleetwood; installation images, New York Public Library.

Where to Read Incarcerated Writing Now

Inquest

The Marshall Project

Prism

Empowerment Avenue

Prison Journalism Project