For the last quarter century, PEN has sponsored a contest for writers behind bars to help prisoners face these challenges. The contest honors the best short stories, plays, essays, and poems among hundreds submitted annually by men and women nationwide. Bell Chevigny, a writer herself and a former prison teacher, has selected the best of these to create Doing Time--a timely, beautiful, sometimes devastating, but vital work, which demonstrates resoundingly that prison wrting is a vibrant branch of American literature.

The fifty-one prisoners contributing to this volume deliver in singular voices surprising tales, lyrics, and dispatches from an alien world that, as Sister Helen Prejean puts it, "we hope we never do more than visit." The selections cover the life span of imprisonment, from terrifying initiations to deadly routines, many-layered games and hustles, poignant friendships, charged confrontations with family and the world outside, and death row. This is a universe of unspoken rules, treacherous codes and reversals, but also of extraordinary breakthroughs.

Doing Time also reflects the revolution in corrections of the last decades--from a relatively liberal, rehabilitative spirit of the 1970s (the "prison renaissance," according to one writer) to the harshly punitive one that prevails today. With 1.8 million men and women--roughly the population of Houston--doing time in American jails and prisons, the United States is rivaled only by Russia in its rate of incarceration, creating "a small country of throwaway people," in Prejean's words. Doing Time frees them from their sentence of silence. Now more than every we owe it to ourselves to listen to their voices.