Be it the ever-increasing wave of journalists killed while reporting from Gaza, or the massive amount of disinformation spread through the world’s digital ether as a matter of course, multiple societal markers reveal just how dangerous—and valuable—the pursuit of accurate information can be. Depending upon your global coordinates, the more marginalized a population, the more dangerous it can be to pursue the truth about anything. The more isolated and functionally illiterate a community is, the more valuable accurate information likely is to those who have it, and equally coveted by those who wish to acquire it. Scarcity of anything creates demand, value, competition, and, necessarily, power struggles ensue. Information can be wielded as a commodity, weapon, or salvation, depending upon who has it.
Free citizens who are mindful of how governmental power is deployed tend to be suspicious of unilateral authority, value liberty, understand the utility of protest, and participate in elections as an act of self-preservation. Those who don’t, tend to view the government more so as a protector, and likely wouldn’t ever think to look to prisons as a barometer of where their society might be headed, any more than they might care about what a convict, felon, prisoner, inmate, or lifer might think about anything. Yet, in recent decades, historians who examine American prisons have documented how the carceral state, much like Presidential archives, represents a darkroom of undeveloped human history film that hides from view an expansive trove of trapped truth that, when revealed, better informs the greater society about its own structural underbelly.
The carceral archive isn’t some dusty stack of files waiting to be discovered by an academic upstart—it’s the testimony living in the confined bodies who are finally beginning to develop their own film.
Heather Ann Thompson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood In The Water: The Attica Prison Uprising And Its Legacy, and the Frank W. Thompson Collegiate Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan wrote, “The Attica prison uprising was historic because these men spoke directly to the public, and by doing so, they powerfully underscored to the nation that serving time did not make someone less of a human being.” Be it speaking or writing about conditions of confinement, abusive treatment, or dehumanizing policies, the very act of public engagement itself is, often by design, an information war activity that confined stakeholders aren’t supposed to be permitted to engage in.
In the case of Attica, after the National Guard shot 128 and killed 39 prisoners and hostages alike during the take-back of the institution, it was the one-sided historical rewrite that prison officials intentionally lied to the media about—saying falsely that prisoners had slit the throats of corrections officers and castrated a guard—that destroyed an emerging sentiment of national solidarity with the civil rights plight of prisoners building in the public. That lie was coupled with another that denied the fact that troopers and guards tortured wounded and naked prisoners in the aftermath. Prison officials learned a valuable lesson: if you give prisoners media access, they will evoke public sympathy—if you deny them media access, you can run the table and control any narrative you wish to frame.
Armed with laptop computers and DOC-issued WiFi-enabled tablet devices with digital text messaging apps that send and receive textual copy from approved external parties using email addresses, unlimited taxpayer-funded outbound phone calls, and video call capability, California has handed each of its 90,000 indentured servants every publishing tool one needs to engage in the community organizing action work of activist journalism.
Having the tools doesn’t necessarily mean anybody will care about one’s carceral content enough to read or listen to it—but the tools enable one to door knock the world and go for broke. Be it Substack, SoundCloud, or any other platform, the vocation of independent journalism is as viable as the willingness of whomever might agree to receive, copy, paste, and upload whatever content an incarcerated citizen might push out into the world. To be effective, organized, and legitimate, the best way to build a community of incarcerated journalists is to coordinate that effort under one digital roof and approach the work in a manner nobody in the space has tried previously. Innovation is the best way to murder the dinosaurs.
Jedi, Imprint, Goon, Mundo, and Ghost sound more like graphic novel characters than journalists, but that is by creative design, as much as it is an act of self-preservation. There are intellectual property verticals to lay claim to beyond mere news articles that permit the full-throated exploration of one’s creative arts potential, while anonymity beats back two groups of antagonists: those who naysay incarcerated journalists as glory-seeking egotists vying for a commutation or parole date by praising the carceral state’s programmatic machinery; and those in power who might retaliate against the messengers. Anonymity centers the message and breathes life into a P/K/A byline that can elevate into iconography that might live beyond mere news copy. Agency is about setting the rules of engagement, not running on anybody else’s hamster wheel or confining possibility to an established colonial order of leashed autonomy—that’s not freedom.
David Greenwald, the publisher of the nonpartisan California-based Davis Vanguard, is enabling a small army of incarcerated thinkers to engage in public-facing journalism free of censorship and editorial dictum, using the full distribution power of a modern digital news room to democratize free speech.
In early 2025, our Inner Views project, produced by the Vanguard Carceral Journalism Guild (VCJG) and Ben Free Project (BFP) in partnership with the Vanguard Media Group (VMG), will unveil a first-of-its-kind long form virtual interview series of on-camera engagements with authors, scholars, thought leaders, and activists concerned with mass incarceration for digital on-demand consumption by residents of the carceral state, for free via the Edovo app.
Elizabeth Hinton, a professor of History and African American Studies at Yale University and a professor of Law at Yale Law School, who is the Co-Director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, and the author of America on Fire (2021), and From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime (2016), will, along with Thompson, be among the first academics to participate in our insurgent media lecture series.
With the digital technology assistance of BFP’s Production Manager and CROP fellow Eric Hudson, and the coordination of audio and video editing services supervised by Nathaniel Dahman, a lecturer of Music Technology at CSU Stanislaus who teaches Music at Merced College’s Rising Scholars program at Valley State Prison, the Inner Views project relies upon an all-volunteer people-powered collaborative effort of creators and contributors aligned in common purpose. It represents a truly grassroots community action project driven by carceral state stakeholders.
Without the cooperation of the nation’s top carceral studies scholars, this project wouldn’t exist. Professors and authors who easily command steep fees for speaking engagements and media appearances but opt instead to lean into passion projects like this that lack remuneration, are a unique breed of humanitarians. They deserve our best effort to deploy them wisely in service of our community.
To Elizabeth and Heather: thank you for trusting us.
