By Jay Parini

My father was a Baptist minister, and on Sunday afternoons he would conduct services at the local prison in Scranton, Pa. It was a miniature version of the Big House: a county jail, decades old, with rusty bars and a gritty linoleum floor. Since I played the piano, my father took me along to accompany "the boys," as he called them, although many were past the usual age of retirement. It always puzzled my father that the convicts asked for the same hymn over and over: No. 69. Three times every Sunday, I would play the tuneless hymn, four flats and all, trying hard to keep a straight face. I knew what my father didn't: that 69 referred to a forbidden sexual position.

We often lingered afterward, drinking coffee and talking to the prisoners, most of whom seemed thoroughly befuddled by their experience. The young ones—there were always a few in their late teens—hardly understood what had befallen them.

There was an old guy who led the singing. He had a shaved head and bulging muscles, and my father and I knew him only as Gilbert or "Mr. G." I asked him how he wound up in the clink, and he said, "Either I robbed somebody or he robbed me. It wasn't too clear. In any case, here I am and will be for the foreseeable future."

That was in the early 60s. Since then, our prison population in the United States has grown steadily, reaching numbers that beggar belief. In a nutshell: We put more people in prison (by percentage of population) than any other country in the world. The statistics are appalling, and this all costs the American taxpayer more than $50-billion a year. And what do we get for our money?

I don't for a moment believe our system is working to anyone's advantage. We've become a punitive society, obsessed with getting "tough on crime."

But how do people behind bars themselves see what is happening? There is a long tradition of prison memoirs, of course. Some are works of literature with deep philosophical meaning: The best example might be Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers From Prison (1953), written in the 1940s between the theologian's arrest and execution by the Gestapo. Among other classic works in the genre is Alexander Berkman's Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912), with its fierce ideological bent. Berkman sketches vividly the organized violence of prison life, with its sadistic guards and predatory inmates. Also unforgettable is the antifascist poet and novelist Ignazio Silone's Memoir From a Swiss Prison (composed in 1942), which puts before readers a sensitive man with a fierce political and moral conscience who uses his time in jail to sort out his political and philosophical ideas. In a different vein, one can hardly forget Soul on Ice (1968), by Eldridge Cleaver—a volume of fiery essays written during Cleaver's nine years in Folsom prison, during which time he began to face the painful realities of racial politics in America. I read that book in college, and have never gotten over its blistery prose, the sense of a man coming painfully to terms with himself and his society.

Even the most mundane of books written from prison provide an eye into the world behind bars, where violence takes countless forms, including rape. One sees that violence in Victor F. Nelson's Prison Days and Nights (1933), which fills in the gruesome details of life in a closed society where human beings are degraded, dehumanized, reduced to numbers, and where distorted relations between guards and inmates seem part and parcel of prison life.

Many of these books—especially those by inmates in large prisons—contain a great deal of anger and resentment, more than my father and I found in the Lackawanna County Prison. Perhaps size breeds anonymity, which in the context of incarceration produces violence in its many forms, physical and psychological.

One of the best recent books on life inside American prisons is Ted Conover's brilliant Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (Random House, 2000)—an account of the author's year as a prison guard. "When grown men are infantilized, most don't take it too nicely," Conover mused. Prisons are designed to infantilize their inhabitants, destroying any vestige of adult humanity. They are overly crowded—that goes without saying. But they suffer mostly from the widespread attitude in American society that anyone convicted of a crime is somehow "other," beyond redemption, worth snuffing out like a cigarette in the ashtray of prison life.

This fall a fierce and compelling book about that life arrives: Mother California: A Story of Redemption Behind Bars (Atlas), by Kenneth E. Hartman. As a teenager, Hartman beat a man to death in a Los Angeles park. He had been raised to kill: The account of his impoverished and violent youth is harrowing to read. He got life without parole and has lived for three decades in a variety of California prisons. He tells his readers exactly what life is like in a maximum-security prison. Given his propensity for violence, he often winds up in The Hole of solitary confinement.

By chance, Hartman makes contact with a woman in a law office—and their phone calls lead to marriage and a child. His story here is hardly unique, but he tells it well, and one begins to root for him from the start. He is clearly a highly intelligent man, one who took a life but who has also been brutalized by society and then by prison. This memoir tells the story of his self-discovery. Against the odds, he becomes a writer.

An author named David Scott Milton inspires Hartman to write, and the result describes his journey toward redemption: It began with a 12-step program, moved through the creative-writing classes, through marriage and fatherhood, to his determination to work for the benefit of other prisoners. "All these years of working to overcome my own limitations, struggling to transcend the constraints of my reality, had borne fruit, literally. From the loud and aggressive man I created, a force that parted the waters of crowded humanity around me with menace and fear, has emerged a still loud and only slightly less aggressive man—but one reaching through barriers to seek connection."

In a way, Hartman's book fits neatly into the genre. These books are about self-realization as well as self-justification. They describe a similar pattern: getting into trouble, confronting the claustrophobic and unforgiving world of prison, dealing with growing despair until something or somebody offers a crack in the wall, a little bit of daylight shining through. After a great deal of soul-searching, the writer/prisoner reaches a fresh sense of selfhood, coming to terms with the original sin, forgiving himself or herself. In the very best of these memoirs—especially with a prisoner of conscience or one unjustly jailed—there is often a redeeming social vision at work. The genre bleeds into that of spiritual autobiography, and the resulting work can rise into the realm of literature.

Hartman is no Berkman or Silone. Nor will he be mistaken for Cleaver. But he is a sincere and thoughtful man who looks at his life directly and comes to terms with who he is and what he did. To a degree, he refashions himself, which is part of what prison memoirs are about.

Two other recent books, both from Yale University Press, take on the iconography and social history of the Big House in American life. Together, they help us understand why prison memoirs hold such an enduring appeal for readers. They turn the mirror on us.

In The Prison and the American Imagination, Caleb Smith, an assistant professor of English at Yale, examines the subject textually, referring to political, legal, and literary works by writers like Emerson and Whitman, Melville and Dickinson. Whitman, for instance, in "The Singer in the Prison," showed an obsessive, even morbid, fascination with prisons, "O sight of pity, shame, and dole!" In a similar vein, Melville saw, in "In the Prison Pen," prisons as a place where "vacant hands/Bring on the idiot-pain." Smith quotes Emerson's memorable line from his journal of July 4, 1835: "I study the art of solitude."

In Smith's haunting and incisive work—he writes beautifully—he wonders how a nation that has been obsessed by the idea of freedom from its outset could have become so identified with incarceration, a trend that culminates in horror: "In the age of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and a sprawling domestic prison-industrial complex, the American prison looms vast and awful on the social horizon, an international scandal and a humanitarian disaster."

He also tracks our national compulsion to isolate criminals, discussing the history of reform. The system arose in its present form in the early 19th century, as an antidote to public torture; there was, indeed, a strong belief in Christian reformation at its heart. That it should end up with solitary confinement becoming the ultimate nightmare for many prisoners is tragic.

One tires of theorists referring endlessly to Foucault's seminal Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (first published in French in 1975). Smith keeps a healthy distance, respectful but willing to push in his own directions. Foucault noted that prisons replicate the social order, "with a little more emphasis." More usefully for his purposes, Smith looks to Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who observed: "Absolute solitude, the violent turning inward on the self, whose whole being consists in the mastery of material and in the monotonous rhythm of work, is the specter which outlines the existence of man in the modern world." And so Smith comes back to major American texts, like Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener," where the scrivener himself is lodged in a famous American prison.

In The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison, Stephen D. Cox—a professor of literature at the University of California at San Diego—surveys the Big Houses themselves, discovering fault lines between the myths and realities behind the bars. According to Cox, the legendary aspect of life at large and infamous prisons like Leavenworth and Sing Sing have generated countless novels, television programs, and films—I'm myself a fan of Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), Jailhouse Rock (1957), and The Shawshank Redemption (1994). Reflecting the times in which they appeared, those classic films center on the rebellious male ego, which refuses confinement in various ways. There is a Dionysian energy in the stories in which the hero finds some way out of confinement (escaping without or within). He is a "can-do" American, and in some way I think that is part of the fascination of not just films but also prison memoirs. We want to see the author transcend confinement.

As Cox and Smith show, prisons permeate the iconography of popular culture. Indeed, the prison becomes an ideal metaphor for society as a whole. No wonder writers (Dickens perhaps chief among them) have found the social maze of prisons useful as settings. The journey out may be violent or antic; it may require a mystical turn, a dark night of the soul, or some other discipline of the spirit. Freedom is always the goal—but the notion itself can remain elusive, taking many forms.

As Cox notes, huge prisons came into use in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the population of inmates began to grow—from 30,000 in 1880 (the first year when reliable statistics were available) to four times that number in 1930, when the warden of Sing Sing reflected that there were more people in prison than in the U.S. Army.

At that time, a third of the inmates were housed in large prisons, where, as might be expected, problems running them multiplied as they grew even larger. Cox goes into the details in a riveting chapter called "You Built It, Now Try to Run It." In blunt terms: You put thousands upon thousands of angry, psychologically scarred men into an enclosed space, and you confront horrendous security problems. Smuggling alcohol and drugs. Bribing guards. Taking them hostage. And on.

In an excruciating chapter called "The Art of Humiliation," Cox describes the culture of discipline and punishment: men systematically shorn of their identity, subjected to strip searches, put into uniforms that add to their anonymity. Sexual depravation plays a role in the degradation. Here, popular culture has caught up to reality. "For current popular culture, a defining feature of prison is homosexuality, and especially homosexual violence. In films of the past three decades, rape is a standard part of virtually any prison setting," Cox writes.

One of the questions is why the Big House has become, as he puts it bluntly, "the enemy of heterosexual desire." That prisons are full of horny young men goes without saying, and that adds to levels of distress that result in widespread sexual violence and homosexual rape. "Few institutions evoke sexual fetishes and preoccupations, or surround themselves with sexual mystery and allure. The Big House did, and does," Cox writes. I suppose that is so, in part, because one can only imagine the intense pressures of frustration, where the usual avenues of sexual release are denied. Prisons embody the repression of desire—but they compound the problems exponentially, and therefore they become symbols of eros in a state of dangerous suspension. Like our fascination with the reverse side of freedom—containment—the repression of sexuality becomes an attraction.

For all its interest, however, there is something vaguely dissatisfying about The Big House. It explores the dynamics and imagery of penal institutions. It registers the problems of running such institutions, and gives thumbnail sketches of legendary reformers and reform practices. It nods in the direction of various books and films about prison life, often with considerable acuity.

Yet I wish that Cox had pushed a little further, asking (even answering) the larger questions in more-direct ways: Did we and do we need such large prisons? Have we benefited, as a society, from them? If not, why do we allow them to persist? What does the incarceration of men (mostly black and Hispanic) in such huge quantities say about the way democratic values are employed in America? Cox could use another chapter here, one that draws conclusions and makes suggestions. I myself would have liked a little bit of the anger that we see in prison memoirs.

It seems cruel and unusual punishment to condemn a teenager to life in prison without the possibility of parole. That would never happen in, for example, Britain—or many other civilized countries. Rehabilitation is possible, and, as Hartman's memoir makes clear, hope seems essential for those on the inside as well as those outside the prison walls. But as the books under review make clear: We have filled our prisons with the mentally ill, the homeless, the drug-addicted, with cruelly victimized young men who never had a chance. "I have chosen to make a life out of what I brought on myself," Hartman tells us, near the end of his book. It made me think long and hard about the kind of nation we have become.

Jay Parini is a novelist, poet, and professor of English at Middlebury College. His latest book is Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America (Doubleday, 2008).