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, 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.