A Counter-Archive of Imprisonment: The Washington Prison History Project

Abstract

This essay explores the prison as an archive by focusing on an emerging digital humanities project about the history of prisons. The Washington Prison History Project (WPHP) began with the donation of two decades of records of prisoner activism; it includes an assortment of correspondence, self-published newspapers, photographs, and even a text-adventure computer game that was first designed in prison in the late 1980s and which the authors have recreated. The authors—a professor, a recent alumna, and two librarians—describe the origins and development of the project as a counter-archive of prison. Drawing on artifacts from the project, they argue that this alternate archive provides a means to teach, learn, and interpret the prison from the perspective of incarcerated people and their supporters and loved ones.