In a concrete classroom, two hands meet in a welcome handshake. One belongs to a professor who has never seen the inside of a cell and the other to a graffiti artist whose decade behind bars taught him to read power like fault lines in stone. Eleven years later, that handshake has transformed into Critical Prison Theory and Literature: Palimpsest.

The authors put themselves, stories, and theory about prison in conversation, following five metaphors through mass incarceration: retribution as code, isolation as cell, trauma as wound, creativity as graffiti tag, restorative justice as kitchen table. Pairing texts across centuries--Moby Dick with Batman comics, Hamlet with The House on Mango Street--this book represents their part of that larger conversation.