Fitting Sentences: Identity in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Prison Narratives

Robin Chamberlain is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

In Fitting Sentences, Haslam explores the subjectivities formed by the
experience of being incarcerated. What makes Haslam’s study distinct
from other histories of the prison is twofold: first, he makes his book
a history of prisoners, rather than of prisons, and second, he includes
slave narratives alongside prison narratives.

The texts Haslam analyses are writings by prisoners from 19th- and
20th-century North America, South Africa, and Europe, all written either
while the author was incarcerated or shortly after his or her release.
These texts are by Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Jacobs, Oscar Wilde,
Martin Luther King Jr., Constance Lytton, and Breyton Breytenbach.
Haslam focuses on how these authors’ experiences of imprisonment
shaped their identities, often in ways contrary to the intentions of
their captors. The identities created in prisoners’ texts, Haslam
argues, problematized the concept of the enlightened individual, a
concept tied to the structure of the prison. In short, Fitting Sentences
explores the many points of disjunction between carceral theory and
actual experiences of incarceration.

Haslam rejects organizing his book chronologically, as he is interested
in exploring the transhistorical similarities between prison narratives.
To that end, he organizes the book thematically. His first section
explores how discipline and punishment affect the broader society and
its institutions. The second section juxtaposes letters from prison by
Wilde and King, and the third deals with texts by authors who are
members of privileged classes.

Like any book about prisons and punishment, it is written in the shadow
of Michel Foucault’s seminal work Discipline and Punish. In his
introduction, Haslam discusses both Discipline and Punish and the
critical debates surrounding it. While he accepts many of Foucault’s
arguments, he does critique Foucault for two omissions in his study of
the prison: the role of slavery in its formation, and the experiences of
female prisoners. In Fitting Sentences, Haslam responds to this omission
by including narratives by both slaves and women.