“In the Killing Chamber,” an essay by Doran Larson, the Edward North Chair of Greek and Greek Literature and Professor of Literature & Creative Writing emeritus, was the cover story for the October issue of Prison Legal News, a project of the Human Rights Defense Center. The article previously appeared in Transformative Justice Journal (Vol. 6, Issue 1, July 2025) and details Larson’s 2023 tour of the Texas state death house in Huntsville, where nine death row inmates are housed as they wait their turn.
“The onsite cells are numbered one to nine. Their inhabitants move down after number one exits for the last time; then another is shipped into cell nine,” Larson wrote, going on to describe the “willfully dull” faded grays and browns of the brick and concrete that are the standard in US prisons.
The tour was arranged by organizers of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism conference at Sam Houston State University, where Larson would present a talk on the history of writing by incarcerated Americans.
He said the central thesis of his paper was straightforward – “the consensus of writers who have documented over two-and-a-quarter centuries of incarceration in the United States is that prisons simply don’t work. They never have.
“From their beginning, they’ve been this nation’s master class in three-card monte. Rather than deterring crime, prisons degrade prospects for employment, marriage, and community connections, making resisting crime harder despite reformed intentions,” he wrote.
Larson started teaching writing workshops and organizing college programs in prisons in 2006. He has read thousands of essays by incarcerated people from across the nation, and in 2014, he published Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America, a collection of some of those essays.
With the essays collected for the book as a starting point, in 2014 Larson founded the American Prison Writing Archive. The collection continues to grow and is now housed at Johns Hopkins University.
Posted January 7, 2026
