This page is referenced by:

• 1 2019-07-24T10:46:43+00:00 Clandestine Literary Acts 1 Schorb Page 4 plain 2019-07-24T10:46:43+00:00  Maroney's text further documents the prisons’ networks of clandestine literacy acts by explaining how illicit reading material made its way inside the state penitentiary. He describes how newspapers were smuggled in by convict clerks and even swiped from the hats of unobservant keepers (10). Historically, prisoners have resisted communications restrictions through numerous gestures: banging on water pipes, tapping alphabetical codes on cell walls, developing elaborate hand signals, passing each other notes (called “kites”) out windows and cell bars, or down ventilation pipes via string. In Newgate, Maroney and his fellow inmates subvert one of the core tenets of prison reform—controlling inmates’ relationship to the outside word—consuming a steady trove of smuggled newspapers, which enabled them access to the latest news of the world. With access to press coverage of the latest scandals and controversies, inmates could even be kept informed as to how the penitentiary itself was being discussed and debated in news of the day.
  Maroney’s elevation of one specific text, Inside Out, helpfully complicates the distinction between hidden and public literacy. Maroney describes at length how inmates smuggled in and shared a copy of Inside Out, an early prison exposé published in 1823 by a former prisoner in Newgate, William Coffey. Maroney confirms the presence of the prohibited book behind Newgate’s walls: “one Coffey, a man of talents. . . , published a book which he entitled, State Prison Turned Inside Out, which was read in my room.”2 But Maroney equally emphasizes the smuggled text’s wider impact: he credits the book for closing Newgate prison and for changing the trajectory of his life: “This book was, I am told, a principal cause of that prison being broken up. . . This book, many of my readers will recollect, after a considerable opposition of some days, was allowed to be read in the House of Assembly, after which about 100 convicts, of whom I was one, were transported to Auburn, and the rest to the new prison at Sing Sing, in the Spring of 1825” (10). Even his sentences emphasize the book’s agency through repetition: (“This book,” . . . “This book,” . . . “This book,”. . . ). Not only did Coffey’s Inside Out lead to the demise of Newgate prison, according to Maroney, it catalyzed Maroney’s own transfer to Auburn, and hence (by the logic of the conversion narrative), made possible his religious conversion and personal reformation, inspiring his own decision to pen and publish his own narrative. In Reading Prisoners, I name this a “congregate literacy effect,” a play on the congregate model of prison discipline, to describe a process in which one inmate catalyzes another inmate’s literacy acts. Depositing his narrative for copyright and publication, Maroney asserted the place of prisoners’ voices in public debates about prison discipline and management, likely hoping that own account might impact other’s lives as did Coffey’s narrative. Might his pamphlet get smuggled into another prison and topple its bricks, inspiring other inmates in return?
  Newspaper accounts substantiate some of Maroney’s anecdote about Coffey’s text, with multiple sources reporting that in March 1824, a tense debate broke out in the New York legislature when an assemblyman sought read Coffey’s testimony during hearings on potential mismanagement in the prison. But, according to the 1824 newspaper accounts, other legislators cut his attempt short, observing that a former convict’s words had no bearing, and that a former prisoner’s civil rights did not extend to offering testimony before a state legislature.3 Maroney’s Narrative deserves credited for bringing this lost episode back to public memory, insisting (correctly) that debates over Coffey’s Inside Out made it to the floor of the New York legislature.  But no sources support his claim that Coffey’s text was the prime catalyst for closing Newgate. Skeptics might therefore dismiss Maroney’s account of Coffey’s influence as fictive, but this downplays the selective nature of the newspapers themselves as conveyers of unbiased history. (For example, the New-York American recapped the Coffey debate with the opening assessment, “Very little business of public importance was transacted in the Assembly to-day.”) Maroney asserts that Inside-Out had impactful influence on the trajectory of his life, a claim that no newspaper account can meaningfully disprove. Rather than read the anecdote as fictive, we might instead see it as radical practice: by asserting the power of Inside Out to abolish Newgate prison, Maroney is deploying what José Muñoz and others describe as the process of utopian imagining, a practice deployed by minority communities to anticipate liberatory futures that are not yet here, not yet possible.4