Breaking Free: Prisoners Publish Their Stories in Zines

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At juvenile detention centers across the country, young offenders have an above-ground zine of their own: The Beat Within, a 60-some-page collection of youth-produced writing and art that’s published with the support of New America Media, a San Francisco–based association of ethnic media outlets.

The Beat has a built-in instructional component. The zine’s facilitators, who are sometimes former offenders themselves, conduct weekly workshops at about a dozen juvenile halls. They encourage kids to write about what makes them happy or what choices they wish they’d made. Staffers work with them and choose “pieces of the week” to print in the zine. Other submissions are sent in from around the country, from other juveniles and now-adult former Beat writers alike, and printed in the back. All in all, says cofounder and director David Inocencio, each issue of the Beat is pared down from at least 2,000 submissions.

“I tell the kids what they’re helping create, by telling these stories, is a history book of the week,” Inocencio says. “It’s an awesome platform when kids take it seriously and you’re able to watch them evolve as writers or as thinkers.”

The writing process, at any age and even without the mentoring component of the Beat, is a huge part of what makes prison zines so essential, particularly as public and private penitentiaries around the country cut funding for rehabilitative programming. It also makes sense that zines would be the go-to medium behind bars, since they’re cheap to produce, aren’t beholden to profit motives, and preserve the inmates’ rawest voices.

But down the line I hope that journalists and editors from larger publications come across these powerful tales and find a way to distribute the work more widely. At their best, prisoner zines humanize the institutionalized, which is the first step toward confronting a system that is desperately in need of reform.

Danielle Maestretti is the Utne Reader librarian. She manages the magazine’s library of 1,300 alternative periodicals, including magazines, journals, alt weeklies, and zines. Send her an indie-press tip at dmaestretti@utne.com. 

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