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Professor Elizabeth Hinton Co-Edits Anthology of Essays by Incarcerated Writers

A close-up of bars on a prison cell

As dialogue surrounding the American penitentiary system and criminal justice evolves, scholarship on the topic has expanded to include voices which had been historically disregarded. 

“Harm and Punishment: Incarcerated Writers on Violence and the U.S. Prison,” edited by Professor Elizabeth Hinton and Elsa Julien Lora ’23 offers 50 essays written by incarcerated individuals on topics surrounding violence, imprisonment, and trauma.

The book seeks to answer a question posed by George Jackson, an incarcerated person who penned “A Letter from Soledad Prison” in 1970: “What work do prisons actually do?” Edited by Hinton and Lora, two scholars on racial injustice and incarceration, the book takes a critical stance towards carceral institutions through reflections on historical and personal trauma, and links between personal and structural inequities. 

"Harm and Punishment" co-edited by Elizabeth Hinton and Elsa Julien Lora ’23

The book’s essays were chosen from hundreds in the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA) at Johns Hopkins University. APWA is the largest collection of first-person writings by imprisoned people in the U.S., collected to represent “the multifaceted and intersectional experience of incarceration […] revealed by those living it, as they choose to represent it and to be represented,” according to APWA’s mission statement. 

Hinton and Lora compiled these essays to highlight the “addiction to violence” in American society and to “organically blend personal observations and stories with a deep understanding of the broad, systemic nature of violence,” as they explained on the “Speaking Out of Place” podcast. “Violence precipitates violence […] the essays themselves spoke even more to that,” Hinton explained. “Violence is the organizing principle of the prison.” 

Elsa Julien Lora ’23 is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Lora holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was a student in the Challenging Mass Incarceration Clinic, and a B.A. from Wesleyan University. 

Elizabeth Hinton is the Class of 1954 Professor of History and Black Studies in the Department of History and the Department of African American Studies at Yale and a professor of law at the Law School. Her research focuses on the persistence of poverty, racial inequality, and urban violence in 20th-century United States. 

Hinton’s first book, “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America” (Harvard University Press), examined the implementation of federal law enforcement programs beginning in the mid-1960s that transformed domestic social policies, expanded policing in low-income communities, and facilitated the dramatic expansion of the U.S. prison system. Her second book, “America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s” (Liveright), won a Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. “America on Fire” provided a new framework for understanding the problem of police abuse and the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color in post-civil rights America. “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime” and “America on Fire” were both named New York Times Notable books.