I am not referring to incarceration in the United States, but rather, imprisonment in other countries in the past, some of them fairly repressive countries.
Why were some political dissidents or other historical authors (think Hitler writing Mein Kampf in prison, etc.) allowed to keep their written manuscripts when they emerged, or even allowed a pen and paper to write at all? Why didn’t the guards confiscate their writings when they were released - “Sorry, can’t take that with you?” Wouldn’t it have been obvious to the authorities that the dissident or prisoner might be writing things unflattering about the government that might have a big impact once published?
Prison wards got cut a share?
In Hitler’s particular case, his prison conditions were intentionally made lenient by authorities who agreed with his political ideas. He was given a comfortable cell, allowed to have furniture and various luxuries (including writing material), and allowed to receive outside people visit him in his cell. (He had over thirty guests at his birthday party.) Hitler stayed in prison long enough to write his book and establish his “street cred” and then the rest of his sentence was commuted (he only served nine months of his five year sentence).
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It also needn’t necessarily just be bribes. If some imprisoned dissident has sympathizers in the country at large, they’ve probably got them in the prison too. The prison administration itself usually pretty on board with the the ruling regime, but being a rank-and-file guard hasn’t been a particularly desirable job historically.
Because you can lock criminals in a cell, but you’re not allowed to steal from them. Prison guards have to obey the law, too.
If a prisoner is writing, he is staying out of trouble. I know if I was a guard, I would much rather see a prisoner writing than see one starting fights or figuring out how to smuggle things inside.
Some prisoners writing was (is) done in secret. IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands wrote poems, articles and an autobiography while in the H Block.
They were later smuggled out.
Did they really deny Sands the right to write poems? I find that hard to believe.
He was free to compose poems but not to write them down or distribute them. he was, after all, a terrorist.
Could he have inflicted anything worse with his writing than John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress?
This.
How oddly non-specific.
Yes, while he is *in *prison, but once he is about to be released, why wouldn’t prison authorities say, “Hand over those several hundred pages of book-in-progress; we’re not letting you take that with you?”
Again, this thread isn’t about American prisons, but about those in other countries that might be a lot less fair or just.
“You go back in time and see Hitler quietly writing Mein Kampf in his cell instead of raising trouble out in genpop. You…”
Chernyshevsky wrote his novel What is to be Done? while imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. The manuscript was smuggled out of the prison and in a stunning act of bureaucratic incompetence by the tsarist censors it was legally published, despite being an obvious anti-government pro-revolutionary tract. (Not that I’m defending the censors, of course. Just from their point of view it was a huge mistake to allow this book to be published). It isn’t much of a novel but it was wildly popular and hugely influential among the radical crowd.
Russia has a long history of imprisoning its intellectuals if they express thoughts considered dangerous to the state. In many cases the authorities confiscated manuscripts produced by prisoners but people will always find ways around these regulations. Evgenia Ginzburg, who was imprisoned in the Soviet Union for ten years, says that in one prison she was entitled to receive blank notebooks but had to turn them in to the prison censor at the end of the month. She would write poems, memorize them, erase the poems as best she could and then cover the paper with meaningless mathematical equations before handing in the notebooks.
“…let Mein Kampf be released and keep Hitler in prison.”
Apparently Albert Speer was not allowed to write memoirs while serving a 20 year sentence for war crimes. He managed to smuggle 2,000 pages out and after being released, published two books.
Similarly, there’s the Marquis de Sade, who wrote 120 Days of Sodom in secret on pieces of paper that were smuggled to him and which he hid behind a loose brick in his cell wall. He didn’t have a chance to retrieve it when he was moved out of the Bastille, and it remained hidden until it was found long after de Sade’s death (who thought it had been destroyed on Bastille Day.)
A question is, why WOULD they do so? The prison authorities are not the people who censor publications. It simply isn’t their job to decide what material should or should not be published.