In the course of an initiative to provide higher education to adults in prison, incarcerated men enrolled in an undergraduate degree programme were offered the opportunity to participate in a series of writing workshops. This article examines the products of these workshops, specifically the ways that language chosen by the writers serves as a tool in the process of identity construction and expression. Choices made in discourse, shown to be deliberate, demonstrate the men's awareness of relationships between language, identity and power, as well as testifying to the significance of these connections for writers.