“We have journalists every place in the world except in prisons.”

Christopher Blackwell is among a small number of incarcerated journalists to have achieved national recognition for their writing. His creative output is remarkable: he hosts a radio show and a podcast, writes books and articles, and codirects the nonprofit Look2Justice, all from a Washington prison. His recent coauthored book, Ending Isolation, is an incisive and extensively researched call for the abolition of solitary confinement, with which Blackwell has firsthand experience.

Blackwell is aware of the odds that are stacked against incarcerated journalists seeking to have their work published anywhere, let alone in national platforms. Look2Justice recently announced a new initiative, The Bridge, that seeks to counter some of the structural impositions that face incarcerated writers by providing them with ongoing mentoring and logistical support.

In the following conversation, we discuss Ending Isolation, The Bridge, and what kinds of changes—including legal changes—it will take for more incarcerated voices to be heard in the public sphere.

—Adam McGee
Managing Editor, Inquest

Adam McGee: Ending Isolation helps to clarify for readers that there’s not just one single thing that is solitary confinement. Instead there’s a range of practices—with lots of different names, many of them euphemistic—that prison administrators use to try to hide their use of solitary confinement. Could you share with our readers some of the key points about what this one term, “solitary confinement,” reveals but also conceals, and how that diversity is part of what makes it so challenging to try to eradicate?

Christopher Blackwell: The term people are most familiar with is solitary confinement. They often don’t realize that if they hear terms such as “restrictive housing,” “restorative housing,” and “administrative segregation unit,” these are all just different names for solitary confinement, plain and simple. And prison administrators realize that and weaponize using all these different terms as a way to confuse the public about what solitary is. Solitary confinement is also not only in prisons and high-security settings. Most county jails, for example, are functionally solitary confinement facilities: every single person in many county jails is alone in a cell for nearly the entire day. But we don’t think about it like that because those same facilities often also have a solitary confinement unit that they use for punishment.

For the purposes of our book, we kept things simple: if someone is isolated in a cell for twenty or more hours a day, that’s solitary confinement, period. I don’t care if it’s a juvenile center, a immigration detention center, a city jail, a county jail, a prison—it’s all the same thing.

This kind of clarity is really important because what we’ve seen happening is that states pass groundbreaking legislation aimed at ending solitary confinement—but after everyone has celebrated at the state house, it turns out they haven’t actually succeeded in changing the practice of torturing and harming people. They’re just reshaping and renaming it. In New Jersey, for example, instead of keeping you in your cell alone for more than twenty hours, they’re letting you out for four hours in a dog kennel in the middle of the unit. That’s not taking people out of solitary confinement. I would actually argue that it’s furthering the punishment and the torture because then you are being even more dehumanized by being locked into a dog kennel for hours.

So to me, a lot of these legislative efforts that look on their face to be huge reforms actually just further the torture of incarcerated people, and allow it to continue without oversight because we believe that something was done.

AM: The book takes a big-tent approach to arguments against solitary confinement. In details, it goes through an extensive list of reasons that it is, in effect, even worse than the reader might already think—everything from how it unequally impacts women and people of color and sexual minorities, to how it is exacerbated by climate change, to how U.S. courts have a longer history of opposing it than of permitting it. I’d love to hear more about the theory of change that you’re using for this book—or, put differently, what do you think it will take to actually end solitary confinement in the United States?

CB: In going through all of those arguments, I think we were looking for ways to show people who might be more interested in something like climate change that solitary confinement is an issue that they will need to take seriously to achieve their long-term goals. We know that we need to get more people involved, and showing people how it connects to whatever they’re really passionate about is a way to do that—so we looked for every angle.

Part of how we did that was to work with about forty incarcerated authors who contributed their own unique perspectives to the book, in addition to my main coauthors of Deborah Zalesne, Terry Cooper, and Kwaneta Harris. I had actually started writing this book by myself years ago. But then I was talking with Debbie about how it really needed a section about the Eighth Amendment and cruel and unusual punishment. And then Terry got involved and was able to bring a perspective from his psychological research on the effects of prolonged isolation. Then it just kept expanding as we talked with more people about the subject.

The book’s goal is to show people that solitary confinement affects us all in ways we’re passionate about in our daily lives. When you ask about a theory of change, this was a strategic effort to expand the base because the people we currently have who are fighting to end solitary confinement are mostly the same people who’ve been working on the issue for years. Some people for decades. And we’ve barely scratched the surface—despite having some apparent wins in some states where we passed bills. Seeing those bills pass and then essentially get killed in the implementation process showed me that we need a bigger base. We need an infusion of support, and that needs to come from the legal community, that needs to come from the medical community, from the environmental activism space, from women’s rights. And I think part of how we get there is by showing the harm that solitary confinement does in all of those areas.

AM: In addition to authoring this book and numerous articles, you also run a nonprofit, Look2Justice, that is engaged in work around narrative change. Can you share with our readers more about the work you’re involved with through that.

CB: I’ve been very blessed to run Look2Justice with my wife, Dr. Chelsea Moore, who cofounded it with me. Our aim with Look2Justice has always been about making sure that incarcerated people are leading the work. We basically got sick of watching people grandstand and tell us what was possible and wasn’t possible, and that they were giving a voice to the voiceless.

I never knew I was voiceless until outside advocates just kept telling me how voiceless I was. Even though people’s intentions usually aren’t bad when they say that, you don’t need to speak for other people. Let people speak for themselves and empower them to do so. So we founded Look2Justice to help foreground incarcerated people in this work. We started with empowering incarcerated people through civic education, to help people understand the legislative process—something I had never learned growing up. The aim is to make incarcerated people less reliant on bigger outside advocacy organizations. If more of us understood how laws are changed, we could actually do the work ourselves.

Over the past two years, we’ve started to do a lot of work around narrative change. That can take a lot of different forms. For example, we run a radio show in South Seattle right now, Through the Wire, where me and another incarcerated person cohost it. I also do a podcast with a friend of mine who is a criminal defense attorney from Los Angeles called Broken Is Beautiful. And we’ve now launched our Writers Development Program because we wanted to train writers inside about how to do what I have been doing—how to build a platform, how to have a voice, how to get their footing in these movements and in mainstream media. We started with six people in Washington State, six men who had never published a single article. In a little under two years, they published over 200 articles—in places like the Guardian, the Seattle Times, all these amazing places that we would never think was possible. And that has given us proof of concept that people just need a bit of help.

Our next big initiative is something we are calling The Bridge. This will be a whole narrative arm of Look2Justice to support our policy work. Because we can’t change anything if we don’t educate people about what’s going on. We can’t humanize people if we don’t educate people about what’s going on. I’ll be leading that with Kwaneta Harris, an incarcerated journalist in Texas, to really show people that these kinds of initiatives can be led from the inside out.

Look2Justice is probably the only organization that currently has multiple full-time and part-time employees and an executive director who are currently incarcerated. We want to show that’s a model that works.

AM: How do you position your narrative change work in relation to prison journalism?

CB: We have journalists on the ground every place in the world, except in prisons. There are prisoners who are doing journalistic work with newsrooms that are in partnership with prison administrations, and that’s great. But that’s not what I want to do. I don’t want to be in any partnership where, as a journalist, I’m being told what can be said and what cannot be said. We need the same strong First Amendment rights as every other journalist—to not face censorship and be able to tell it how it is.

AM: A big part of what my comrades in the Institute to End Mass Incarceration are working on right now is an incarcerated journalists’ bill of rights that would serve as draft legislation for activists to attempt to pass in states to restore a number of basic rights to people who write professionally inside. What do you think are some of the changes that would make the biggest difference in your ability to do your work?

CB: I think that’s great. We definitely need to start passing some protective legislation around incarcerated writers.

In some states you can’t even get paid for your intellectual work. You’re only allowed to be exploited by prison jobs. How is that a law? In some states, you can’t have social media accounts in your name, even if someone on the outside is running those accounts for you. How is that a law? I should have a right to do that just like every other citizen of this country.

That last point touches on what, for me, is one of the biggest challenges we face, and that is our lack of ability to use technology. All the articles I’ve written have been entirely written by either creatively repurposing the tablet I have for electronic messaging—which is not a word processor, but which can be somewhat repurposed as one if you’re really determined—or else they’ve been handwritten or even transcribed over the phone. So we need access to technology. We should be able to use the Internet. How is it that parents can easily limit Internet access for their kids but we so far haven’t been able to do that for incarcerated people?

Our lack of technology means that the technology we do have access to is a monopoly granted to vendors such as Securus, which sells the tablets that are designed around their proprietary software, and then also sells everything that we’re able to use on those tablets, from phone and email services to entertainment that can be purchased, such as music. And as a result we’re not even able to keep up with today’s technology, even as this company is making a fortune.

We also need legal support. If someone’s writing for the New York Times and they get attacked, the New York Times is going to protect them. Why do we not have more clinics that are supporting incarcerated people who are trying to just get the word out?

Until those protections are in place, we won’t experience the groundswell we need of incarcerated writers combatting the narratives of dehumanization that allow us to be demonized. That’s also critical to ending the taboo that prevents our families from talking more openly about their experiences of having a loved one behind bars.

_{Image: Etienne Girardet / Unsplash}

Contributors

Christopher Blackwell Christopher Blackwell is coauthor of Ending Isolation: The Case Against Solitary Confinement and cofounder of Look2Justice, an advocacy and policy reform organization.

Adam McGee Adam McGee is the Managing Editor of Inquest.

Topics

• Decarceral Pathways

Tags

• Defending Prison Journalism
• incarcerated and formerly incarcerated authors
• solitary confinement