Photo credit: Texas Observer
Damascus James started exchanging letters with people in Texas prisons several years ago. This project evolved into Texas Letters, a collection of letters written by people living in solitary confinement.
The project’s second volume is out now. James will discuss the project in a conversation about mass incarceration in an event at Brazo’s Bookstore on Sunday, May 19, at 6.30 p.m.
The Guardian reports that incarcerated people are barred from reading a collection of letters and 10,000 other texts.
Mr James said he started writing to and visiting people in solitary confinement and on death row throughout the Texas prison system during the COVID-19 pandemic. The incarcerated people, too, would respond every month with letters that pulsated with pain, describing the torture they endured, often with no end in sight.
The correspondence inspired James to put together Texas Letters, an ongoing anthology by nearly 50 writers who have spent more than 550 combined years in Texas solitary confinement. In it, they describe their loss of humanity, sanity, and family connections.
They say they have experienced copious violence, including assault and sexual abuse, at the hands of prison staff. A writer said a woman in a nearby cell had died after being beaten by a guard.
Many describe poor mental and physical health that often leads to a desire to self-harm. Rates of suicide in Texas solitary confinement are disproportionally high.
A letter writer, Lupe writes:
“It is hard to accept being locked in a 9×5 cage, for 24 hours a day, for years on end, with at most one hour a day out of your cell to shower or to recreate alone in a slightly larger cage. For the last few years, the one hour a day out-of-cell time was cut down to one hour a week on a good week.”
Texas Letters has been published since 2021. The job is done with the hope that the collective work shows that people in prisons are not pure monsters deserving of the most inhumane punishment but rather imperfect beings who are far more than a prison sentence.
Their words are powerful and deserve to find a comprehensive, wandering readership, including in prisons, where the anthology would benefit the incarcerated by showing them they are not entirely alone in their enforced aloneness.
The writers’ anticipation of receiving a copy was high. For some, it was their proudest accomplishment. Unfortunately, the anthology now lands on a long list of banished titles throughout the statewide system. Other banned titles include The Color Purple and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave, in addition to New York Times bestsellers and books by Nobel Peace Prize nominees, civil rights leaders, and even the Bard himself.
