Sentence and Sensibility: News for Prisoners

Nearly three million people are incarcerated in US prisons, according to according to the US Dept. of Justice (as of June 2007). The vast majority of them won’t be in jail forever—which is only one reason why news organizations might consider prisoners as an important community with news and media needs.

US prison inmates overlap with a number of other communities—by race, gender, economic status, and religion, to name a few. The Sentencing Project (an excellent resource) estimates that, “One of every three black males born today can expect to go to prison if current trends continue,” and that women are also a growing demographic in the prison system. Worse, a staggering “two-thirds of women in state prisons are mothers of a minor child.”

US prison inmates have a great deal of access to daytime television, but internet access is very limited for felons. Some much-needed reforms are slowly occurring there, however. For example, this year’s Allied Media Conference (for “for alternative media makers and committed social justice activists”) featured a workshop on media access for prisoners. (More about why news orgs should check out this conference.)

The blog The Invisibility of Women Prisoners’ Resistance covered several ideas from this workshop for facilitating prisoners’ media access, including:

• Making room in publications for prisoners’ voices and stories
• Blogs and MySpace pages that publish letters from prisoners
• Call-in radio shows where prisoners and others can leave voicemail messages. For instance, the Appalshop radio project Holler to the Hood features messages from loved ones incarcerated listeners, because there is no way to phone a prison inmate directly.

Beyond facilitating much-needed reforms in the American judicial system and important avenues of communication, prisoners are avid consumers of media, and they need it badly. The publisher’s description of Library Services to the Incarcerated, by Sheila Clark and Erica MacCreaigh says: “Inmates, as much or more than the general population, need information and library services. They represent one of the most challenging and most grateful populations [librarians] can work with.” That logic of challenge and loyalty might well apply to news organizations, too. This book offers dozens of practical ideas for getting key media and information to prison populations.

Even the One Laptop Per Child program got the memo about the importance of reaching prison populations and how much they stand to benefit. According to a Feb. 3 OLPC news release: “It’s not only children that need an education. There is a whole other constituency that needs access to education and the skills that XO exposure can bring: prisoners.”

OLPC makes the point that US prisoners rarely have sufficient access to retraining and education that can make re-offending less appealing. But even worse, currently they have very little access to the kinds of networking opportunities by which much of the free population finds work. OLPC wants to provide prisoners with positive networking opportunities—in addition to reading, math, and life skills that a person re-integrating with society might need.

...Meanwhile, in several US prisons, prisoners have been creating their own news media for a long time. The 2001 book Jailhouse Journalism, by James Morris, explores the history of newspapers and magazines managed and published by US prisoners over more than a century.

By providing media for prisoners, your news organization could do far more than tap a “captive audience.” Publishing news and information for prison populations could help address the thorny effects of crime on communities. That might earn loyalty and respect from not only current and former inmates, but also their families, employers, and society at large. What are you doing to reach prison populations in the communities you serve?