![Sample our Law journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5942/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Law.jpg"})
Abstract
Rachel Kushner’s 2018 novel The Mars Room examines the nature and causes of mass incarceration in the United States. The novel follows American prison literature conventions in showing what prisons conceal, and departs from them by not having its characters undergo personal transformations or speak for broader communities. Most distinctively it employs several narrative voices, which facilitates a multidimensional analysis of mass incarceration, and by distancing the reader from the engaging main character, helps Kushner deliver a structural critique. Beyond immediate factors like harsher sentencing laws and plea bargaining lie poverty and abuse that track mostly lower-class people into prison. The violence Kushner depicts saturating American society suggests the difficulty of ending mass incarceration.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Todd Clear and Natasha Frost, The Punishment Imperative (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 17.
2 Ibid., 56.
3 Cheryl Webster and Anthony Doob, “Penal Optimism: Understanding American Mass Imprisonment from a Canadian Perspective,” in American Exceptionalism in Crime and Punishment, ed. Kevin Reitz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 122.
4 John Pfaff, Locked In (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 1.
5 Zoie Matthew, “LA Author Rachel Kushner Takes on California’s “So-Called ‘Justice’ System” in Her New Book,” Los Angeles Magazine, May 2, 2018. https://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/rachel-kushner; Melanie Kembrey, “Interview: Rachel Kushner on The Mars Room and the US prison system,” Sydney Morning Herald, March 29, 2019. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/interview-rachel-kushner-on-the-mars-room-and-the-us-prison-system-20190325-h1craj.html.
6 Jon Wiener, “What Does It Take To Write a Novel About Prison?,” Nation, May 23, 2018. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/what-does-it-take-to-write-a-novel-about-prison/.
7 Dana Goodyear, “Life Sentences,” New Yorker, 94, no. 11 (2018): 22–8.
8 Bell Gale Chevigny, ed., Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1999); H. Bruce Franklin, ed., Prison Writing in 20th Century America (New York: Penguin Books, 1998); Wally Lamb, Couldn’t Keep It to Myself (New York: Regan Books, 2003).
9 Simon Rolston, “Shame and the Ex-Convict: The New Jim Crow, African American Literature, and Edward P. Jones’s ‘Old Boys, Old Girls,’” Canadian Review of American Studies, 48, no. 1 (2018): 96.
10 Michael Israel, “Jack Henry Abbott, American Prison Writing, and the Experience of Punishment,” Criminal Justice and Behavior, 10, no. 4 (1983): 446.
11 D. Quentin Miller, “Introduction,” in Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States, ed. D. Quentin Miller (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 2.
12 “Prison, Writing, and Questions of Genre: A Conversation with Dr. Shareah Taleghani,” MENA Prison Forum (April 29, 2021), https://menaprisonforum.org/outreach_detail/82/; H. Bruce Franklin, Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 234; D. Quentin Miller, “Introduction,” in Prose and Cons, 3.
13 Called the Unabomber, Kaczynski committed sixteen bombings from 1978 to 1995 that killed three people and injured twenty-three.
14 D. Quentin Miller, “‘On the Outside Looking In’: White Readers of Nonwhite Prison Narratives,” in Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States, ed. D. Quentin Miller (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 16.
15 Tiffany Ana Lopez, “Critical Witnessing in Latina/o and African American Prison Narratives” in Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States, ed. D. Quentin Miller (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 64.
16 Judith Scheffler, “Imprisoned Mothers and Sisters: Dealing with Loss through Writing and Solidarity,” in Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States, ed. D. Quentin Miller (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 118.
17 Steven Lab, Marian Williams, Jefferson Holcomb, Melissa Burek, William King, and Michael Buerger, Criminal Justice: The Essentials (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 17.
18 Pfaff, Locked In, 13.
19 Deborah Treisman, “Rachel Kushner on Prison Life, From the Inside and Outside,” New Yorker, February 5, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/fiction-this-week-rachel-kushner-2018-02-12.
20 Ibid.
21 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 9; Caleb Smith, The Prison and the American Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 9–11.
22 Simon Rolston, “Conversion and the Story of the American Prison,” Critical Survey, 23, no. 3 (2011): 106.
23 Doran Larson, “Toward a Prison Poetics,” College Literature, 37, no. 3 (2010): 144.
24 H. Bruce Franklin, “The Inside Stories of the Global American Prison,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 50, no. 3 (2008): 235.
25 Larson, “Toward a Prison Poetics,” 145.
26 Franklin, “The Inside Stories of the Global American Prison,” 241.
27 Matthew, “LA Author Rachel Kushner Takes on California’s ‘So-Called ‘Justice’ System’ in Her New Book”; Wiener, “What Does It Take to Write a Novel about Prison?”
28 Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room (New York: Scribner, 2018), 4.
29 Ibid., 265.
30 Caleb Smith and Rachel Kushner, “Discipline and Abolish,” Yale Review, 109, no. 2 (2021): 89; Michel Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” in Archives of Infamy, ed. Nancy Luxon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 67–84.
31 Rolston, “Conversion and the Story of the American Prison,” 104–6.
32 Larson, “Toward a Prison Poetics,” 147–8.
33 H. Bruce Franklin, “The Literature of the American Prison,” Massachusetts Review, 18, no. 1 (1977): 51–2.
34 H. Bruce Franklin, Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist, 248–9.
35 Eric Schlosser, “The Prison Industrial Complex,” Atlantic, 282, no. 6 (1998): 51–77.
36 H. Bruce Franklin, Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist, 103, 249.
37 Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room, 18.
38 Pfaff, Locked In, 137.
39 Kushner, The Mars Room, 60–1.
40 Pfaff, Locked In, 129, 137.
41 Ibid., 138.
42 Kushner, The Mars Room, 59.
43 Robert Carp, Ronald Stidham, Kenneth Manning, and Lisa Holmes, Judicial Process in America (Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press, 2017), 221–2.
44 Missouri v. Frye, 566 U.S. 134, 144 (2012).
45 Kushner, The Mars Room, 65.
46 Bordenkircher v. Hayes, 434 U.S. 357 (1978); William Stuntz, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 257–9; Pfaff, Locked In, 131–2; Emily Bazelon, Charged (New York: Random House, 2019), 137–8.
47 Stuntz, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, 258.
48 Carol Steiker, “Criminal Procedure,” in The Oxford Handbook of the U.S. Constitution, ed. Mark Tushnet, Mark Graber, and Sanford Levinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 660.
49 Howard Abadinsky, Law, Courts, and Justice in America (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2021), 234.
50 The Supreme Court upheld three-strikes laws in Ewing v. California, 538 U.S. 11 (2003).
51 Cara Drinan, “The Future of Juvenile Life-Without-Parole Sentences,” in The Eighth Amendment and Its Future in a New Age of Punishment, ed. Michael Ryan and William Berry (Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 2020), 254–5. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned LWOP sentences for many who committed homicide as juveniles in Miller v. Alabama, 567 U.S. 460 (2012).
52 The median age of arrest is 24 in the U.S.; John Fuller, Introduction to Criminology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 174.
53 Pfaff, Locked In, 191.
54 Evelyn Patterson, “The Dose-Response of Time Served in Prison on Mortality: New York State, 1989-2003,” American Journal of Public Health (March 2013). https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2012.301148.
55 Amanda Bailey and Joseph Hayes, “California Counts: Who’s in Prison? The Changing Demographics of Incarceration,” Public Policy Institute of California, 8, no. 1 (2006): 3; Vera Institute of Justice, “Incarceration Trends in California,” December 2019. https://www.vera.org/downloads/pdfdownloads/state-incarceration-trends-california.pdf.
56 Ruth Gilmore, Golden Gulag (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 88.
57 Kushner, The Mars Room, 279.
58 Brown v. Plata, 563 U.S. 493, 505 (2011).
59 Ibid., 501.
60 Kushner, The Mars Room, 32.
61 Ibid., 32.
62 Ibid., 73.
63 Judith Scheffler, “Imprisoned Mothers and Sisters: Dealing with Loss through Writing and Solidarity,” 114.
64 Kushner, The Mars Room, 82.
65 Ibid., 74.
66 John Fuller, Introduction to Criminal Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 334.
67 Kushner, The Mars Room, 162.
68 Ibid., 158. At Stanville even those in solitary confinement (“administrative segregation”) have a cellmate due to overcrowding.
69 Ibid., 162.
70 Ibid., 290.
71 Ibid., 91.
72 Ibid., 217.
73 Ibid., 184.
74 Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 128–80.
75 Pfaff, Locked In, 88–9.
76 Kushner, The Mars Room, 281.
77 Ibid., 50.
78 Ibid., 32.
79 Ibid., 94.
80 Bailey and Hayes, “California Counts: Who’s in Prison? The Changing Demographics of Incarceration,” 4.
81 Kushner, The Mars Room, 220.
82 Ibid., 157.
83 Ibid., 25.
84 Ibid., 81.
85 Ibid., 83.
86 Ibid., 171.
87 Ibid., 171.
88 Ibid., 33.
89 Ibid., 39.
90 Ibid., 45.
91 Ibid., 34.
92 To write this chapter Kushner reviewed intake forms from the Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles; Smith and Kushner, “Discipline and Abolish,” 94.
93 Kushner, The Mars Room, 89.
94 Ibid., 47.
95 Ibid., 264.
96 Ibid., 313.
97 Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020).
98 Kushner, The Mars Room, 28.
99 Ibid., 26.
100 Ibid., 319.
101 Ibid., 178.
102 Ibid., 83.
103 Judith Scheffler, “Imprisoned Mothers and Sisters: Dealing with Loss through Writing and Solidarity,” 112.
104 Kushner, The Mars Room, 24.
105 Ibid., 238.
106 Ibid., 287.
107 Ibid., 116. The California Youth Authority handled juvenile offenders. Litigation about violence and abuse at its facilities led to a 2002 consent decree that put it under court supervision until 2016.
108 Ibid., 116. 40% of children in juvenile detention get incarcerated again by age 25; Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue (New York: Penguin Books, 2021), 269.
109 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: New Press, 2020), 15.
110 Pfaff, Locked In, 187. Drug offenses account for 20% of those incarcerated; Prison Policy Initiative, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2023,” March 14, 2023, www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2023.html.
111 Weiner, “What Does It Take to Write a Novel About Prison?” Foreman gives a lower figure of 53% of those in state prisons who have committed violent crimes; James Foreman, Locking Up Our Own (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 230. And Kushner perhaps does not avoid the fallacy of focusing on “relatively innocent” criminals by making Romy’s victim a stalker.
112 Kushner, The Mars Room, 38.
113 Ibid., 25.
114 Ibid., 131. The Rampart scandal of the late 1990s involved shootings, beatings, robberies, drug dealing, etc. by members of an anti-gang LAPD unit.
115 Ibid., 262.
116 Ana Lopez, “Critical Witnessing in Latina/o and African American Prison Narratives,” 64.
117 Judith Scheffler, “Imprisoned Mothers and Sisters: Dealing with Loss through Writing and Solidarity,” 119.
118 Kushner, The Mars Room, 288.
119 Caleb Smith, The Prison and the American Imagination, 66–72,76–77, 198–9.
120 Forman, Locking Up Our Own, 221.
121 See Smith and Kushner, “Discipline and Abolish,” 91–93; Rachel Kushner, “Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind,” New York Times Magazine, April 21, 2019, 36–57, and reprinted in Rachel Kushner, The Hard Crowd (New York: Scribner, 2021), 175–98.
122 Kushner, The Mars Room, 244.
123 Ibid., 170.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Michael Tager
Michael Tager is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Marietta College in Ohio. His research interests are in Public Law and Politics and Literature. He has published articles on Primo Levi, Joan Didion, and other writers.