Prison Newspapers

Welcome to Sunday Morning Coffee. I hope you have a restorative beverage in hand as you’re reading, and maybe you put down your old-school newspaper to check out this week’s blog, or perhaps you just switched tabs from your favorite digital news. Isn’t that something? I’m of an age that if, as a child, someone would have described digital newspapers to me, I would have blinked and politely said something like, “wow.” (I’m Southern, so I would never have said what I actually thought, which probably would have run along the lines of “you’re crazy”). When I was a kid, I was fascinated by journalism. I started a newspaper at my elementary school when I was in fourth grade. My main contribution every week was a cartoon I wrote and drew about my dog (he had died and I was seriously grieving him. Four years later. But that’s another blog for another day. Probably one about weird psychoses). I just wanted a way to publish my serial cartoon, so I started a newspaper. Our teachers copied it on a ditto machine. How many of you remember those? If you do, you spent a portion of your elementary school career high, sniffing your ditto’d worksheets every day. Yet another blog. lol!!!

In highschool, I started another newspaper. My bestie and I pitched it to our English teacher, and she sponsored it. My highschool only had 50 kids total and sat squarely in the middle of several miles of cotton fields, so…there wasn’t a lot of news. But we had fun coming up with stuff, and we enlisted the grade school kids to join in (that increased our readership by about 200 kids).

When I was a teacher in a public school, I launched a weekly TV news show (although it had a lot of entertainment as well) that my theater students produced. This was before digital came on the scene. We filmed with a home movie camera, then put the show on VHS tapes that teachers could check out of the teacher’s lounge every week. I found a minuscule ‘mixer’ at Radio Shack where we could do some cool effects, and eventually we raised enough money to buy a computer (insert angels singing here), and then we could REALLY do some cool stuff with our VHS productions. Those kids, who are now well into their 30’s and early 40’s, still contact me once in a while with a good memory from these shenanigans.

I think I just always felt like it’s important for students to have a voice. And an outlet for their voice. When I went to work for the Windham School District, one of our functions was the Echo, a newspaper written and produced by TDCJ incarcerated students and overseen by my dear friend Bambi Kiser. The Echo is printed on real newsprint and distributed amongst Texas’ prisons (I think the number of prisons is now around 87-ish), and you can also subscribe to it. One of my favorite columns is recipes that residents submit of the tastiest food ever made from some pretty crappy commissary purchases. Once, I made a chocolate cake at home out of some Oreo knock-off cookies and various other packaged items and a microwave just because I didn’t believe it would be truly editable. It was delicious. As humans, we’re ingenious at making something out of nothing.

At the DC DOC, I launched a newspaper and Bambi helped me a lot by being my biggest cheerleader. I ran a contest amongst all residents to name it, and they came up with The Inside Scoop (I thought that was so clever!). Later on, I launched a podcast that residents could access on their APDS tablets, and we named that show Inside Voices. The newspaper started with six students and a company called Ecoprint that printed it for us at no cost every month. The Washington Post did a story on the paper, if you’re interested in reading about it. We had so much fun doing it, and once every resident had a tablet, we digitized it.

The Prison Mirror is the longest-running prison newspaper in the country (based in Minnesota prisons). Just a weird piece of history: it was started by members of the Younger gang in 1887. You remember the Younger gang, right? They rode with the James’ brothers. My ancestors also rode with the Youngers and James gangs, but that’s another blog. The first editions of the Prison Mirror cost 5 cents. This article, “A Colorful History of the Prison Mirror” is a short, fun read about the newspaper and how it got its start.

The Angolite is probably the most famous prison newspaper in the US, not just because it was started in 1880, but because it was given unusual freedom in what it could report. If you look at the description for the Echo, for instance, it’s described as a “censored Texas Department of Criminal Justice publication produced and compiled by the publisher and resident staff for use by TDCJ residents.” Over the years, the Angolite has covered such topics as the death penalty, prison policies, mistreatment of inmates, and the societal costs of mass incarceration. You’ve probably guessed by the name that it’s run from the Angola prison in Louisiana. The paper has won numerous awards, and its history is a good read.

And in more recent history, the San Quentin News has made national news by going digital for the public, printing 35,000 newspapers each month, being totally funded by grants from foundations and generous private donations, and being associated with the crazy popular podcast Ear Hustle. The San Quentin News doesn’t produce the podcast, but the prison system’s establishment in the world of journalism was definitely a jumping off point. If you want a good read, check out the digital version of their newspaper, and if you haven’t listened to Ear Hustle, you need to get to it.

I love exploring the inner “ace” in people who’ve never had the opportunity to study journalism, and I love how giving folks a voice empowers and reminds them that they’re worthy, and smart, and still connected to the world. Interestingly, a historian writes that the launch of the Prison Mirror in 1887 “fit with the idea of prison reform, a burgeoning national trend, while also pioneering a new form of penal journalism.” You read it correctly. Prison reform was a thing in 1887. He goes on to write “modern prison journalism's true roots can be traced back to the late 19th century, an era in which corrections officials ‘believed earnestly that prisons were intended to make better people of their inmates and release them into society.’” We sure do talk about reform a lot, don’t we? I’ll leave you to ponder that.

Well, enough about reading about reading newspapers. I’ll let you get back to actually reading them. Enjoy your week, and maybe instead of pondering reform, we actually all do a thing, even a small thing, to move the needle.

If you’re interested in starting a newspaper and I can help, contact me here.

Tallyho!