| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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In this context, it is perhaps worth noting that my corpus includes one famous and heavily fictionalized autobiography, namely Robert E. Burns’ I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! This narrative is a classical prison autobiography and reads like a sensationalist novel. In contrast to Lejeune (1994), who argues that we can differentiate between novels and autobiographies on the basis of the so-called pacte autobiographique, this study assumes that an absolute separation between novels and autobiographies is impossible. The prison experience in autobiographies is always reinvented and fictionalized. Also, the fact that the magazine Time points out that Burns “admitted he had never been chained or whipped in Georgia” (qtd. in Campbell 17) even though he claims this in his narrative, justifies the treating of Burns’ text as a novel rather than an autobiography.
This book also focuses on prison films because today, most individuals gain their knowledge of prisons from films or television shows about them. The criminologists Wilson and O’Sullivan point out that they
At the beginning of the research for this book, I viewed about one hundred prison films at the British Film Institute in London.5 The choice of movies focused on was then primarily based on their wider availability. Also, the films I discuss cover different decades ranging from the 1930s up until the 1990s.
Moreover, the desire to get a comprehensive picture of British and American prison institutions motivated the selection of narratives for my corpus. Hence, this book looks at narratives that represent British debtors’ prisons, penal colonies, convict prisons, and borstals but also at novels and films that narrate American reform schools as well as state and federal penitentiaries.