The experience of imprisonment is central to the political history of apartheid and post apartheid South Africa, and the documentation of that experience has long been a cornerstone of South African literary production. Prison memoirs and poetry chapbooks number in the dozens, while the specter of the prison hangs over the entire corpus of apartheid-era fiction and drama. The subgenre of prison literature has been subjected to extensive scrutiny in journal articles and book chapters by David Schalkwyk, Judith Lutgë Coullie, Barbara Harlow, J. U. Jacobs, and others. Curiously though, despite this proliferation of literary and scholarly output, no book-length analysis of South African prison literature as a whole has yet been published.