The prison is the frontline war in a society that seeks to censor and control people and ideas. The current wave of censorship in schools and public libraries is an extension of the more highly advanced structures of control that have and are being developed in prisons and jails.
—Mariame Kaba, “Return to Sender”
Prison is war on many levels. At the most basic level, it is a war over freedom. The owners and operators have the keys which can deliver freedom to their captives, and the captives struggle for that freedom. But it also is a war over the narrative of prison, how the story is told and who does the telling. For decades, incarcerated people have struggled to make their voices heard, in some periods more successfully than others. As incarcerated writer Kevin Sawyer asserts: “If we can’t spotlight what’s happening behind bars, who can? The truth about what takes place in prison has to come from jailhouse lawyers, journalists, writers and artists.” For many years, especially during the rise of mass incarceration from the late 1970s into the early 1990s, the forces of law and order controlled that narrative by ensuring prisons remained a black box, an unknowable space.
However, the writings of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people over the years have pried that black box open at times. Christopher Blackwell, a celebrated incarcerated writer and activist, explains:
I feel like writing is the best way to change the narrative about people who are incarcerated. If we don’t tell our stories, then others will, and that can be harmful. Our voice is all we have to fight against a system that has and continues to harm our communities. . . . And I find my motivation in knowing I can add to a conversation that is often being had about us without us.
Brian Nam-Sorenstein, founder and editor of the abolitionist, now defunct publication Shadowproof, reminds us that “incarcerated journalists are the voice that informs the public and activists about what really is happening, especially the struggles that are going on and how to protect those who are under attack.” And that writing is often produced and shared despite the many ways in which prison authorities try to suppress it. This suppression is a reflection of the authorities’ recognition that prison writing has often been the spark that lights the flame of political awareness among the incarcerated population and their allies.
My own case is a good example. My career as a radical activist began with my 1971 encounter with George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, a collection of letters he wrote from prison to his mother, his lawyer, and to his close comrade Angela Y. Davis. For the activists of my generation, Jackson’s writings were our revolutionary Qur’an. His letters combined the fiery militance of a Black liberation fighter with the frustration and anger of a man locked in a cage, all woven together with a deep love of freedom and of humanity writ large. As a document of prison, the letters reveal the hell of prison life and how Jackson and other revolutionaries of his era resisted. They built their physical strength as warriors on a battlefield (George did a thousand fingertip pushups a day) and their intellectual awareness, placing the prison in the context of a global system of imperialism. His passionate prose was a cry for reflection and action. He left us some final words of advice: “Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here. . . . Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.” Not long after the publication of Soledad Brother, the guards at San Quentin shot him dead.
Since Jackson’s days, prison writing has traveled a long, bumpy, and at times brilliant road. People like Russel Maroon Shoatz, Mumia Abdul-Jamal, and Assata Shakur carried on Jackson’s revolutionary tradition by making their writings public, often at great risk to themselves. Other more measured voices have joined the chorus to reveal the many truths hidden inside the carceral black box of life behind the walls. Some of the most popular of these voices have come from prison newspapers.
These publications have a long and largely unsung history in the United States. The first newspaper produced by incarcerated people was published in New York in 1800, though it only lasted a few months. But in the 1880s incarcerated people began to find their voice. By the 1930s, nearly half the prisons in the United States had their own internal newspapers. As the paradigm of rehabilitation gained momentum, these publications not only grew in number but also in quality. Some from that era have survived, notably Minnesota’s Stillwater Mirror (started in 1887) and the San Quentin News (launched in 1940, though on hiatus from 1982 to 2008). The renowned paper from the notorious Louisiana State Prison, the Angolite, began in 1970. Many of these were distributed beyond the boundaries of the prison, providing a lifeline of communication across the walls.
But these publications sprouted up during the days before mass incarceration and long mandatory sentences. People went to prison expecting to get paroled quickly if they just toed the line. As well as telling the story of what happened behind the walls, writing for the prison newspaper was also a way to prove respectability to a parole board and provide evidence to support arguments for an earlier parole date.
But with the rise of mass incarceration in the 1980s and 1990s, prisons abandoned the paradigm of rehabilitation and opted instead for punishment. Prison newspapers were shut down as an anomalous relic. By 1991 only six prison newspapers remained in operation in the entire country. Without that line of communication, incarcerated people were being shoved back into silence. The realities of a prison population that was rapidly approaching 2 million were remaining hidden inside that black box.
From the 2010s onward, the mass mobilization in response to police murders (primarily of young Black men) brought the entire criminal legal system under a microscope. Suddenly people on the outside wanted to know more about prisons. Michele Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010) became a massive bestseller, while activists, students, academics, and funders began to target the entire edifice of structural racism. For the first time, police and prison guards were on the defensive. Demands came not only for prison and police reform but for abolition of the systems of incarceration and policing. Even football stars like Colin Kaepernick joined the abolitionist choir.
More from our decarceral brainstorm
Inquest—finalist for the 2025 National Magazine Award for General Excellence & cited in The Best American Essays 2025—brings you insights from the people working to create a world without mass incarceration.
Sign up for our newsletter to get the latest in your inbox every Saturday.
Newsletter
This shift opened the door to a new, wide range of prison writing and in-house journalism. A number of long-term prisoners, including Shaka Senghor, Susan Burton, and Dorsey Nunn, published their autobiographies. The zeal for prison stories opened the door to other spaces for writings by incarcerated people. Even mainstream publications like the New York Times gave a platform to a few incarcerated writers, as did more niche projects. For example, since 2014 The Marshall Project has produced a daily online paper written by a team of professional journalists, including some incarcerated writers, focused solely on the criminal legal system with a heavy emphasis on prisons and jails. Beginning in 2019, The Marshall Project also launched an approximately quarterly print news magazine, News Inside, circulated inside some prisons.
The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic provided a further opportunity to make the stories of incarcerated people and their vulnerability more relevant than ever. At the same time, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals were pushing a new line, adopted from the disability rights movement: “Nothing about us without us.” Not only did incarcerated people want their story told, they wanted to do the telling. A number of activist intellectuals organized projects, secured funding, and persuaded some prison officials that professionalizing prison journalism would help lower recidivism. Projects such as the Prison Journalism Project, the Pollen Initiative, the PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Project, and Empowerment Avenue, among others, developed curricula to train incarcerated writers. Several of the incarcerated writers to emerge during this wave, notably Christopher Blackwell and Kwaneta Harris, have gained national profiles, though often at risk to themselves.
The boost to prison journalism has been indisputable: by 2024, the Prison Newspaper Project had a database of twenty-one prison newspapers—up from six in 1991—and a website that could connect people on the outside to stories by incarcerated journalists on everything from prison flag football league results to op-eds on the problems of prosecuting people who survive domestic violence by fighting back. The San Quentin News, which publishes both online and in print, boasted a circulation of 35,000 in 2023. A small handful of prisons have even created media centers where incarcerated writers can not only produce newspapers but make videos, podcasts, and post items to their newspaper’s websites.
Women’s institutions have been important in this renaissance of the prison press. For over two decades, the Fire Inside newsletter, written by women who were connected to the California Coalition on Women’s Prisons, published at Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF). In 2023 the Paper Trail, also based at CCWF, launched as a newspaper. Kate McQueen of the Pollen Initiative told me she worked with women from CCWF to lay the foundation for it as “a center of high quality, verifiable information operating under the standards of Society for Professional Journalists.”
Beyond these organized professional efforts which often have the backing of prison authorities, the presence of WiFi-enabled tablets provided to incarcerated people in many states—and the ease with which cellphones can be acquired in many others—have created new avenues for reportage. Incarcerated voices are now frequently called upon for interviews for podcasts, news reports, and expert opinions on a range of topics. The San Quentin prison podcast Ear Hustle has been downloaded over 50 million times. These media offer people on the outside not only direct communication with incarcerated people but, thanks to cellphone video, viewers can see what a prison dorm or cellblock looks like in real time.
More importantly, these devices provide a vehicle for inside organizers and protesters to document and display their grievances and, at times, chronicle confrontations with authorities that are difficult for supporters on the outside to conceptualize. A perfect example of this dynamic was the way in which the leaders of the Free Alabama Movement publicized the realities behind their 2016 general strike by sharing videos shot inside the prisons, often narrated by the organizers themselves, particularly Robert Earl Council (aka Kinetik Justice) and Melvin Ray (aka Bennu Hannibal-Ra-Sun). However, use of this technology is also risky. Possessing a contraband cellphone in prison is a crime in most states, and efforts to share video shot on them is often punished severely. Inquest contributor Ivan Kilgore was punished, for example, for sharing video with VICE showing lack of COVID precautions inside of his California prison. After the release of the HBO documentary The Alabama Solution, which makes extensive use of footage shot inside of Alabama’s prisons by members of the Free Alabama Movement, several of the movement’s leaders were transferred and placed in solitary confinement. Moreover, when contraband cellphones are discovered by prison authorities, it offers an opportunity for them to track activities and add phone numbers, text messages, and phone conversations to the databases that the DOJ and other authorities already have.
While people in prison have a constitutional right to freedom of expression, prison authorities do not always honor that right. A 2023 Prison Policy Initiative report “found that while explicit bans on prison journalism are rare, a web of complex and vague policies make” practicing journalism “extremely difficult and sometimes risky.” According to that report, forty-six states censor correspondence with news media and thirty-three limit compensation for incarcerated journalists for their work.
Prison authorities are not the only obstacles to prison newspaper freedoms. Emily Nonko, who cofounded Empowerment Avenue, a nonprofit that promotes incarcerated writers, told me that the mainstream media often doesn’t value the perspectives of incarcerated people or is hamstrung by editorial policies that hamper the ability to work with incarcerated journalists, including house policies requiring that all incarcerated people cited in stories be identified alongside the crime of which they were convicted.
The 2020 uprisings in response to the murder of George Floyd precipitated a vast series of mobilizations and attracted thousands to abolition and other radical paradigms. George Jackson’s fire might seem out of place to a more level-headed cohort of prison journalists, but nonetheless the flames for transforming the prison system are still burning, even if fueled by a somewhat different ideology.
Image: Viktor Forgacs / Unsplash
