Incarcerated journalists lead first-ever conference on strengthening U.S. prison journalism
Bridging the Gap, a conference focused on improving journalism in and on U.S. prisons and jails, will take place in Chicago on May 29 and 30.
For years, Christopher Blackwell attended journalism conferences the only way he could: calling in remotely from prison. But during a conversation with Dana Blanchard of Haymarket Books, Blackwell realized out loud that they were never led by and including incarcerated journalists.
It may have been an off-hand comment, but Blanchard said they’d make it happen. And now, it is.
Bridging the Gap, the first-of-its-kind conference dedicated to strengthening journalism about and in U.S. prisons, led by incarcerated writers themselves, is happening May 29 and 30 in Chicago. The conference is free to attend, and the two-day event’s programming includes a mix of currently and formerly incarcerated speakers leading workshops and panels, from how prison newsrooms are run to inside-outside collaborations on investigative journalism, and will incorporate discussion about prison journalism across mediums like film, poetry, and radio.
Blackwell is the co-founder of Look2Justice, a grassroots inside-out organization focused on advocacy, education, and journalism. It’s run by and for incarcerated people, increasing their access to information about criminal legal policies and capacity to shape decisions affecting their lives and conditions.
Changing the kinds of stories that are told about U.S. prisons and mass incarceration, Blackwell said, must include incarcerated journalists, who are “reporting from behind enemy lines.”
“We could be taken into solitary, our meals could be messed with, our visits could be stopped … we’re taking some of the biggest risks to share our truths with the world,” he said. “Journalism is open for everybody … this is a whole demographic that has almost been left out of participating in that.”
Conference seeks to build relationships across a historically patchwork landscape
Over 200 people have signed up for the conference so far, and Blackwell said he’s most excited about “seeing people in the room you wouldn’t expect,” citing the presence of Ivy League professors alongside community leaders and journalists from outlets like Huffington Post.
Conference organizers plan to record main remarks and panels, which will be available on Haymarket Books’ and Look2Justice’s Youtube channels.
Blanchard said people from Nevada, Louisiana, and all over the country are attending the conference, which they hope to make an annual event.
“There are lots of people doing this work — it is, in a way, siloed because so many people are doing it statewide or with particular prisons, because … there’s not a lot of groups who have the bandwidth to do national work,” she said. “We’re hoping this [conference] can … be a place where people can come to collaborate and build some of those relationships.”
The conference is supported by a litany of partners involved in prison journalism, including Empowerment Avenue, Center for Just Journalism, Truthout, Inquest, and the Prison Journalism Project.
Though the U.S. leads the world with most people in mass incarceration, outside media access to prisons has been curtailed since the 1970s, as have First Amendment rights for those incarcerated, creating opacity around the criminal legal system.
Efforts to foster connections with outside newsrooms, and to commemorate work on the inside, are comparatively young — despite incarcerated journalists having operating prison newspapers in some form or other since the 19th century, as recorded in the American Prison Newspapers collection.
The American Penal Press Contest was founded in 1965 to honor prison newsrooms’ work, but lapsed during the rise of “tough-on-crime” narratives and was revived just last year through the Pollen Initiative, which supports media centers in prisons across the country.
Related: The resurrected American Penal Press Contest honors incarcerated journalists
Meanwhile, organizations explicitly working to train incarcerated journalists like the Prison Journalism Project and Empowerment Avenue, were both founded in 2020 — a time when conversations about how journalism has perpetuated the harms of policing and the criminal legal system went mainstream.
While Blanchard said Haymarket Books is clear about its values as an abolitionist press, she and Blackwell worked to make the conference about “expanding the folks who are doing this work, not shrinking,” especially as transparent reporting on U.S. prisons, particularly from the inside, lacks critical legal protections.
“As much as my politics may be different than some of the editorial board on the New York Times, I want them to publish pieces from the folks that we work with because their audience reaches folks who we don’t have in our audience right now,” she said. “If you are new to this work and you don’t know what you think about some of these things, please come and be in this conversation with us.”
While writers working with Empowerment Avenue have been published in national news organizations like Rolling Stone, Esquire, and the New York Times, the organization’s executive director Rahsaan Thomas says he hopes the conference will kickstart more partnerships with more local newsrooms, and be a testament to the importance of incarcerated journalists’ coverage.
“I hope new attendees to this work see the quality of the work and the urgency of [it] now,” Thomas said via email. “More importantly, I want them to see that a person in prison can participate in freedom of speech when surrounded by a community that realizes they are still a necessary part of our society.”
Pushing for narrative justice around the prison-industrial complex
Part of Bridging the Gap’s intention is to offer a space for outside editors and journalists to confront their assumptions about prison journalism and reporting on prisons in service of strengthening the ecosystem of journalism at large.
“When studying journalism as an autodidact, nearly every book commanded the same thing: never write yourself into the story,” Phillip Vance Smith II wrote on the role of a prison journalist. “But every publication I pitched wanted my stories to be about me.”
Corinne Shanahan, a policy fellow at the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, said outside journalists can learn a lot about fighting suppression and censorship through connecting with journalists on the inside, who incur internal retaliation and arcane technology in their efforts to publish just a single story.
“People inside prison who have been doing journalism have faced the threats for a long time,” she said. “The importance of journalism about prisons cannot be overstated, and I’m really excited for this conference to help focus on a critical element of our democracy and our free press.”
Related: Will prison journalism save democracy?
For journalists on the outside, Thomas from Empowerment Avenue said, it’s critical to write stories pushing back on a frame “where the system is the first, middle, and last word in the article. Even when someone opposes, the system is still the dominate narrative, with the loudest megaphone, and instant access to the largest platforms.”
Bridging the Gap is also a launch event for The Bridge, which is intended to facilitate that platform through building support systems and pathways to inside-out collaboration and publication, like the National Writers Cohort.
Kwaneta Harris, a lead advisor on the cohort, said via email that the cohort will facilitate more perspectives, “and more perspectives means a more honest press.”
“It’s building entirely new rooms where voices that have never had a seat at the table can finally shape the narrative,” she wrote.
Among the resources The Bridge hopes to offer through the National Writers Cohort are a newsletter for incarcerated writers in their network to read each others’ published work and include content written by writers for other writers, and a set of training materials created by established incarcerated journalists for others inside looking to get involved with journalism.
There are nearly 2.0 million people in U.S. prisons and jails — comparable to the population of Philadelphia — so The Bridge complements, rather than strictly duplicates, the work of Prison Journalism Project and Empowerment Avenue.
“Having a couple of organizations existing to support incarcerated writers is just, on a straightforward level, not enough,” said Ethan Corey, Look2Justice’s director of narrative development.
A former research and special projects editor at The Appeal, Corey remembers talking with journalist and Look2Justice advisor Phillp Vance Smith II early into their working relationship.
“He often felt lonely about being the only professional writer in his facility and not feeling like there’s anyone to share those experiences with,” Corey said.
Vance Smith II said via email that working with The Bridge “will give incarcerated writers the help we need to continue exposing the harms we face on the inside by bringing our voices to the people who need to hear them most: change makers.”
Ultimately, Blackwell said, his hope is that The Bridge will push for narrative justice through increasing the number of incarcerated journalists who are published.
“Whether [or not] you agree with someone caused harm [and that] they should be incarcerated for a long time … for you to not have all sides of the pieces and not understand the mitigating factors that led someone to a life of causing harm or receiving a serious sentence in a prison, that’s a problem, right?” Blackwell said. “A lot of the time, when we share about the situations that put us here … people don’t feel the same, and we can also see that the system isn’t serving us to actually keep us safer.”
James Salanga is the co-director of The Objective.
This piece was edited and copy edited by Gabe Schneider and Marlee Baldridge.
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