All good points, Julie! I sometimes think of Oscar Wild. We all know why he ended up in prison. (He should not have.) And then, by contrast, there are really messed-up people who should be locked up to protect the public.
There are experts who feel that after a certain age, most (if not all) felons should be released (after rehabilitation) from prison, because they are no longer young and wild, but slothful middle-aged people who just want to sit on the couch and watch TV and are no longer at all interested in committing the kind of crime they committed as a young person.
In most other countries (mostly in Europe I think), prisoners are released much earlier than they are in the US. And most of those former criminals no longer have the inclination to commit a crime.
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I think it's one thing to publish a great poet who happens to be incarcerated, and another to make the primary criterion for publication in a particular issue the fact that the poet has served time.
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That’s an excellent point. There are, of course, journals (or their issues) that are specifically devoted to writing by various groups of people — like women poets, gay poets, black poets, disabled poets, or poets who are doctors, farmers, laborers, cattle herders, and whatnot. So maybe having an issue for current or former convicts falls into the same sort of thing? I’m not going to attempt to answer that question.
I like what Roger said: “So it's okay to have an issue devoted to poetry by people in prison, but only if the thing they did to land in prison wasn't really all that bad?”
But speaking of
Poetry, I don’t subscribe and rarely read it, especially lately, as I don’t visit the library (due to the pandemic).
(Cross-posted with James and Mark.)