Excerpts from “Graffiti as a Sense of Place”

Editors’ Note: This photo essay, created by an undergraduate student at Howard University enrolled in a service learning class taught by Arvilla Payne-Johnson, preserves and documents the graffiti at the now closed Washington D.C. area Lorton Prison. The essay highlights a genre of hidden literacies claimed by inmates even in spaces of vast power differentials and exaggerated social control. We suggest that readers inspired by this project to pursue similar work also consult Jeff Ferrell’s Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality (NY: Garland, 1993), Ralph Cintron’s Angels’ Town : Chero Ways, Gang Life, and the Rhetorics of Everyday, and Pete Vandenberg et al.’s “Confronting Clashing Discourses: Writing the Space between Classroom and Community” in Reflections 2.2 (Spring 2002): 19-39.