Speaking Power to Power

Mass incarceration and the corporate-led consolidation of media ownership are entwined assaults on U.S. civic life. And for prison journalists, working within the overlap of these developments, one led by the government control and one driven by private profit, the result has been a dramatic change to their lives and vocation.

Six companies now own 90 percent of U.S. media, and conservative elites have openly inserted their ideological commitments into the media they own. Against tremendous odds, the past decade has also seen a reinvigorated sphere of independent and movement media, particularly online. Thanks in part to this development, prison journalists have, in recent years, been able to reach larger audiences than ever before, largely turning their attentions away from the collapsed ecosystem of prison newspapers to instead write for outside publications, which have the additional benefit of not being censored by carceral bureaucrats. These stories, often but not always grounded in first-person testimonials, have illuminated the human costs of maintaining the world’s largest prison system. In telling a different story about crime and punishment, these journalists have helped change the narrative about mass incarceration. Indeed, they have popularized the phrase “mass incarceration” itself. A term that began as a radical critique of the prejudicial and oppressive nature of U.S. prisons has become part of common parlance.

No less than in other realms of journalism, prison journalism is far from monolithic. It is possible to identify three distinct, if overlapping, kinds of incarcerated journalist.

One type we could call the local prison journalist, whom Phillip Vance Smith II described in Inquest as having the important role of “keep[ing] the facility’s . . . residents informed about life inside.” For those writing in the Angolite, the Nash News, and other officially sponsored prison newspapers, this includes coverage of repairs and construction, policy changes, and reviews of cultural programs. Though this role is arguably more important than ever, given the country’s vast prison system, its presence has declined precipitously as prison systems have closed in-house newspapers in recent decades. The death of local newspapers has brought less coverage of many critical topics, including conditions in prison towns. That impact is exaggerated further within prisons themselves, where imprisoned people have few formal opportunities to keep each other informed about events within a given institution or prison system.

A second kind of prison journalist might be called the radical journalist. This person writes to expose prison conditions and to rally solidarity, both among incarcerated people and between incarcerated people and those outside prison walls. Throughout the twentieth century, incarcerated Americans developed a slew of (short-lived) subversive newspapers that often existed to circulate this sort of writing. At San Quetin, Kalima Aswad edited the Black nationalist newspaper Arm the Spirit in the late 1970s. Ed Mead founded the Abolitionist at the Washington State Reformatory in the late 1980s after earlier attempts to start a newspaper there fizzled. Around the same time, Jim Magner and Larry Snyder developed the Prisoners with AIDS–Rights Advocacy Group (PWA-RAG), which published its own newsletter. Today, such writers can be found in the pages of the Abolitionist (published by Critical Resistance and unrelated to the earlier Abolitionist), theFire Inside (a publication of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners), Prison Health News, and in zines made by various activist groups.

A third category of prison journalist might be called the solutions journalist, who writes about prison topics largely for an audience of non-incarcerated readers. At times appearing in legacy media such as theNation and the New York Times, these writers more often appear in digital media publications such as Bolts, the Marshall Project, thePrison Journalism Project, Solitary Watch, Truthout, andInquest. This sort of prison journalist has also in recent years branched out into podcasts, both as guest and, remarkably, host. Their stories blend first-person testimonials, observational reporting, and a determined focus on what is to be done on issues ranging from solitary confinement and sexual violence to sentencing policy, environmental health, and parenting.

And yet, despite the fact that incarcerated voices publish with greater regularity than ever before, mass incarceration persists. An increased visibility of prison journalism cannot on its own turn the tide of a sclerotic political system. Despite well-circulated proposals for reform, few politicians have shown the tenacity to pursue the far-reaching changes needed to end mass incarceration. Aided by the cheap payoffs of crime coverage and entrenched power blocs, law-and-order orthodoxy has captured much of the political establishment. Initiatives such as the closure of Rikers Island jail have been bandied about as political footballs while the jail stays open and deadly. Others, such as the restoration of voting rights to many formerly incarcerated people in Florida, have been undemocratically abrogated by legislators even though they enjoy majority support. When many philanthropists, upset at the systemic inertia, abandoned criminal legal reform in the years following the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising, politicians had either already given up the issue or quickly dropped it.

Even where reforms are still under consideration, legislators often based their calculations on narrow political expedience over what we know works. Hence, for instance, early releases during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic prioritized those with shorter sentences for nonviolent crimes rather than those most at risk of dying from the disease; governors have all but abandoned their clemency power; and state legislators have approached sentencing reform in a manner sociologists Katherine Beckett and Allison Goldberg describe as “confusing, contradictory, and insufficient.” None of that is to diminish the ongoing grassroots efforts against mass incarceration, including the quietly heroic efforts to block new prison construction and stop the federal government’s efforts to turn empty warehouses into ICE detention centers. People are still fighting the good fight. But they do so in an environment where both mainstream media and elected officials are at further remove from public opinion. In short, criminal legal reform has joined health care, abortion, immigration, and a host of other topics as another arena of undemocracy, where the distance between what most Americans want and what politicians are even willing to consider widens further.

In this moment, what role can media generally—and incarcerated journalists in particular—play in advancing the cause of democracy against the reality of surveillance, punishment, and authoritarianism?

A recent report from the Roosevelt Institute calls for “a fundamental rebuilding and reinvention of . . . the U.S. public media system, whose reconstruction has a vital role to play in . . . democratic renewal.” In theNation, one of the report’s authors, scholar Victor Pickard, further argued that a “resilient, democratic, and independent” public media system could both “serve as a bulwark against fascism” and, in the long run, “gradually replace failing commercial outlets and media oligarchs.” Yet U.S. public media has never meaningfully included the countless writers who are incarcerated in what are, ostensibly, “public” (i.e., government-run) institutions. We must ask, if public as well as independent media are to play a role in pulling our democracy back from the brink, where does the prison journalist fit in this democratizing mission? And what resources would it take for prison journalists to meaningfully, not simply symbolically, be capable of taking part in this work?

In his contribution to Inquest’s Defending Prison Journalism series, Smith proposed that all journalism has a shared responsibility “to inform, challenge, and hold society accountable.” In that respect, the prison journalist needs what every journalist needs: the ability to speak freely with a range of sources, to publish truthfully without fear of reprisal, and to work in a safe, well-compensated, union-eligible newsroom. Yet the structure of prison itself is antithetical to those pursuits. Prisons are unsafe and restrictive, and imprisoned people have many limits on their ability to communicate or publish. They earn little money (some states even attempt to ban them from earning any outside income whatsoever) and are legally prohibited from forming unions. Special protections of the kind suggested by the Institute to End Mass Incarceration’s Prison Journalism Bill of Rights would provide the policy support needed to secure the ability of prison journalists to do their work.

That such protections are necessary yet absent is a paradox facing every prison journalist. Much like the heroic journalists of Gaza, reporting on genocide in hopes of stopping it, prison journalism is a journalism in pursuit of its abolition: The long-range goal ought to be reducing the number of prison journalists by reducing the number of prisons we have and the number of people in them.

Until such protections can be enacted, however, one hopes that free-world journalists would recognize incarcerated journalists as fellow members of their craft and offer solidarity to such pursuits. Indeed, journalists on both sides of the prison wall have something to teach each other. Free-world journalists have long reckoned with the constraints of privatization that prison journalists increasingly confront in an age of proprietary tablets and apps. And prison journalists are well acquainted with the state hostility, misdirection, censorship, and outright violence that increasingly define the U.S. government’s relationship to journalists who are not overtly loyal to the administration’s agenda. Incarcerated people’s approach to journalism insists on the moral clarity of exposing injustice, affirming alternatives, and recognizing people in prison as writers, readers, and storytellers.

Narrative change, the stock in trade of the solutions journalism that most non-incarcerated readers will encounter from inside, is a necessary but insufficient step in that direction. Yes, we need to keep informing people about the realities of prison and what happens to our neighbors inside of them. But speaking truth has diminishing returns when rising fascism discards the notion of shared reality and tepid liberalism contents itself with fact-checking falsehoods. To make the social change it seeks, narrative change must take physical form in organizations, campaigns, and policies. Prison journalism is an appeal aimed at the head and the heart, but one that requires our hands and feet to give it life.

We might see the different models of prison journalism—informative, subversive, solutions-focused—as offering a different journalistic mission. Here is a journalism for which commitment to accuracy is part of its higher mission of affirming human dignity and social transformation. Prison journalism has been far more willing, of necessity, to take a stand than conventional U.S. journalism. But honesty is not enough. Increasingly, it requires ongoing public mobilization. For we can’t just speak truth to power: we need to speak power to power.

_{Source image: Yves Cedric Schulze / Unsplash}

Contributors

Dan Berger Dan Berger is professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington Bothell and coordinator of the Washington Prison History Project. He is author of Stayed on Freedom: The Long History of Black Power Through One Family’s Journey, and the award-winning Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era.

Topics

• Institutions & Practices

Tags

• Defending Prison Journalism
• journalism
• prison journalism