Former prison librarian Avi Steinberg describes why teaching creative writing in prison is so important:
Many people who came to my classes were eager to improve their skills at writing letters. Prison is a lot like the 19th century. Letter writing continues to thrive there. There is a particular urgency to writing in prison—a letter is the difference between having a relationship with a person on the outside or not. Writing is the relationship. Like those old Victorian letters, the prose itself is heated by this dynamic.
There are so many ways in which creative writing is suppressed in prison.
So much of writing in prison is associated with sheer malice and with legal warfare (inmates and staff members are constantly writing grievances and incident reports). There is little free speech in prison and no private property. Your cell can be searched at any time and your writings can be confiscated. Anything you say can and will be used against you—that’s the literary culture of the place.
And suppression could come in other, less obvious forms. Many inmates had gone through addiction recovery programs that incorporate writing assignments into their regimens. Perhaps this kind of writing serves its therapeutic purpose but, from a literary perspective, it’s stifling. It trains people to tailor their stories to the tastes of recovery-think, and to strangle these stories with the homogeneous language of the program. After I saw the 10th consecutive essay that described how someone had “hit rock bottom” I realized that I would have to figure out how to get my students to write in their own voices.
The Dish 