Before September 2013, I had been in four prisons, none of them currently used to incarcerate people. I had visited them all as a tourist--in Argentina, Cambodia, Chile, and Vietnam--for the purpose of understanding the histories of these countries. My participation in this tragedy tourism certainly informs the reader of the incredible amount of privilege (both personal and communal--to travel internationally as a tourist, to have had the luxury of not having been to prison or jail myself or to have had a incarcerated family member/friend, of having broken the law many times but never getting caught/arrested/charged due to my social and economic positions, to travel to sites of incredible violence out of curiosity, etc.) with which I first came to teach in the prison. For the past three semesters, I have been teaching composition, creative writing, and literature at Alabama prisons. I taught for one semester at Tutwiler Prison for Women in Wetumpka and for two semesters at. St. Clair Correctional Facility in Springville (I am currently teaching there); both of these are maximum-security state facilities run by the Alabama Department of Corrections. Both Tutwiler and St. Clair have been in the news repeatedly over the past few years for egregious abuses of people incarcerated there. This thesis will, in an associative way, weave together disparate experiences and sources. I will include my personal experiences imagining and then teaching in the prison. Because it is unethical for me to share specific responses, verbal or written, from the students I work(ed) with in the prison, the prisoner voice in the thesis will be limited to narratives of prisoners around the United States excerpted from various published memoirs and collections. I will discuss the Free Alabama Movement manifesto produced by Mevlin Ray, who is incarcerated at St. Clair, which sparked labor strikes at three Alabama prisons in protest of cheap and free prisoner labor in January 2014. I will also contextualize the contemporary prison in the United States by discussing the punitive nature of the prison and its place in a U. S. racist institutional history that evolved from slavery and Jim Crow. I will be in dialogue with such prison theorists as Michelle Alexander, Angela Davis, Michel Foucault, and Lisa Guenther. I will also reference the many depictions of prison in popular culture, including everything from television shows like Orange is the New Black and Oz, to leaders such as Bryan Stevenson and Collin Powell, to the Monopoly board game. With Dan Savage's idea that "we eroticize that which we fear," I will also bring the incredible amount of prison pornography into the conversation. The goal of this thesis is not to be a comprehensive analysis of the infinite flaws in the justice system of this country or of the ways in which we collectively support, deny, and necessitate this system. I will touch on, but not exhaust, state surveillance, for-profit prisons, detention of undocumented people, and juvenile detention. The goal is, rather, to attempt to understand my intentions coming to the prison and my experience teaching there by relating my own thoughts and observations to the ocean of prison-related material that floats through popular culture and academia. In addition, I will move between the sources I used in my classes, both to talk about the teaching experience itself and because the experience of teaching, reading, and discussing these pieces inside prisons has shaped the way I consume and remember them. In addition, I will include lyrical descriptions of the prisons themselves.