Shelf Life: The Toughest Beat

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As prison publications quietly disappear, inmates’ fraying ties with penal officials, other inmates, the media, and the outside world will dissolve too. Explosive growth in the number of people who are incarcerated has shaped a vast potential readership; more than 2.25 million people were locked up as of June 2006 (see “America Incarcerated,” p. 54). But publications that cater to this growing audience are increasingly difficult to find. Paul Wright, editor of the venerable prisoners’ rights magazine Prison Legal News, guesses that fewer than 30 official prison newspapers are still publishing (down from 250 in 1959). The Angolite, the Texas Echo, and the Stillwater, Minnesota, Prison Mirror are among the best known of the survivors; the once-popular Presidio, Menard Time, and hundreds of others have been shut down.

What’s left of the prison press suffers from heavy censorship. “The sorry state of prison publications,” Wright says, “is that basically, they exist almost as the warden’s public relations link.” Even the Angolite, once held up as a bastion of uncensored prison journalism, has been tamed: Prison Legal News has “a lot more stories about the corruption at Angola than they do—because they don’t have any,” Wright says.

Some degree of censorship has always afflicted prison publications; the warden or some other official always has the last word. “There are no First Amendment rights in prison,” says Jim Danky, recently retired periodicals librarian at the Wisconsin Historical Society, which is home to the country’s largest collection of prison newspapers. He compares them to high school publications, which also must be approved by an administrator. The decline of the prison press, Danky says, is akin to a form of psychological torture: “Prison journalism can be seen as a way of coddling prisoners,” he says, and where officials used to believe that newspapers kept inmates busier—and, hence, more likely to stay out of trouble—today’s administrators want to “maximize the boredom” and maintain stricter control of prisoners’ perks.

Despite the fact that writing has long been viewed as a rehabilitative and educational exercise for the incarcerated, fewer institutions now provide a forum for it. “They want a cowed, silent, and ignorant prison population—it’s easier to manage,” Wright says. Censoring and shutting down these publications is part of what he’s observed as “a massive clampdown of everything to do with reading, communicating, and writing.”

And he should know. Wright began publishing Prison Legal News in 1990 from his cell in Clallam Bay Corrections Center in Washington state. It was never an official prison publication—Wright and his fellow editors sent their work to friends on the outside, who laid it out and published it—but officials tried to clamp down on it by bouncing Wright around to different facilities, keeping source material out of his hands, and banning bulk mail, gift subscriptions, and the magazine itself. He was released in 2003 and continues to publish the cleanly designed newsprint magazine every month, reporting on health care, drug use, violence, mental illness, inmate labor, and all manner of other human rights issues.

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