Schorb 2014

Schorb, Reading Prisoners

Interested in how literate practices show up in relation to prisons, e.g. gallows and confession literature, prison libraries, prisoner education and transformation. Library histories have claimed that education has always been entangled with prisons from their earliest days but this is not true.

Wines and Dwight – 225-232 – reporting on secular instruction, literacy instruction, and rise of libraries in prisons (qtd in Schorb 131)

See 132 – this idea that print was a problematic space for inmates, that they were systematically denied access to it as an outside thing – this is changing with reforms mentioned by Wines and Dwight, contra to what Schorb is saying

Contested nature of education in early American prison reform movements, antebellum

on gallows literature, see Daniel E. Williams, Daniel A. Cohen, Karen Halttunen, Sharon Harris, Jeannine DeLombard (10)