CHOWCHILLA, CALIF.—Valley State Prison (VSP) doesn’t have a formalized in-prison news journalism program — yet. But for seven hours on July 9, 170 residents of the carceral state became immersed in a sound stage-like environment during the Inside Knowledge journalism symposium, an event co-facilitated by Justice for Everybody (JFE) at the Yale Institute for Incarceration and Public Safety (YIIPS) and the resident-founded Carceral Studies Journalism Guild (CSJG).
The symposium featured journalism and creative writing workshops for resident participants in the Youth Offender Program (YOP), marking a media first for the Central Valley facility. The event was supported by JFE and the Challenging Discrimination in the Law Project (CDLP) at YIIPS. Led by Elizabeth Hinton—the Class of 1954 Professor of History and Black Studies at Yale University and Yale Law School and Founding Director of JFE—a team of faculty and graduate students, including a camera crew, traveled to VSP to co-run the workshop with CSJG journalists.
With multiple camera crews floating through a podium presentation of speakers, a slide show featuring residents’ work, and a live-action multimedia journalism workshop directed by resident mentor journalists, the interactive experience left VSP resident Brandon Givens remarking: “Today was the first time I didn’t feel like I was in prison, though in prison – I forgot where I was.”
During the workshops, visiting journalists, scholars, and VSP residents co-produced segments of the CSJG’s “My Teachable Moment” series, a first-person nonfiction narrative documentary format of testimonials from residents produced by CSJG co-founder Ghostwrite Mike and directed by CSJG journalist Dominick J. Porter. Surrounded by their resident peers and free world community visitors seated merely feet away, participants recounted the person, event, or insight during their incarceration that most impacted their ethical transformation. The footage, filmed by the JFE’s film crew, will appear on Inside Knowledge’s forthcoming channel on Edovo, where more than one million confined viewers around the country will be able to access it for free on-demand via their DOC-issued digital tablet devices.
“What made our symposium special was being able to team build on the inside, conceptualize our guild’s vision for this event’s many moving parts, and partner with top-shelf academics who traveled across the country to mentor and empower us,” CSJG journalist Louis Baca said.
Baca, who has appeared on the Everyday Injustice podcast and spoke to Khloe Kardashian on Hulu’s The Kardashians, was one of the speakers at the symposium, during which he and his colleagues discussed the transformative impacts of journalism and education.
While sharing a catered BBQ spare rib meal from Mac’nificent Cuisine with a group of residents sentenced to LWOP, Hinton, who is also the publisher of the forthcoming Inside Knowledge Quarterly digital magazine—which will debut on Inside Knowledge’s Edovo channel in 2026—said that “with Inside Knowledge, Justice For Everybody is working to enact the insurgent pedagogic vision of residents who are scaffolding a carceral journalism revolution.”
The JFE team who traveled to California for the symposium included Hinton, Yale PhD candidate and Rhodes scholar Kristine Guillaume, and the CDLP’s project manager Elizabeth Ross—a Harvard Law School graduate and PhD candidate at Harvard. Vanessa Díaz, an accomplished journalist and associate professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at Loyola Marymount University, and filmmaker Dennis Marciuska filmed the symposium, capturing a highly evocative series of “My Teachable Moment” segments with CSJG journalists and individual interviews throughout the day.
“Leveraging our institutional resources in service of the futurity that confined stakeholders aspire to curate for all residents of the carceral state, isn’t just a noble calling that fosters power in proximity,” Hinton said. “It is a mandatory action step we must all take together in order to re-imagine how best to digitally organize, communicate, teach, and mentor marginalized communities across the normative structural divides of the modern prison environment. Edovo is a game changer, if you know what you’re doing.”
During her remarks in the morning session, Hinton shared the podium with resident journalists whose work was centered on a wall-mounted projector screen as they spoke to the audience about the power of writing and reporting from prison. Dating back to before 2012 when women resided at VSP, the population had never before seen a guest speaker of Hinton’s caliber share the podium with residents, and nobody remembers any resident’s likeness or creative work being amplified on the projector for all to see. Throughout the day, participants of varied ages and cultural backgrounds remarked on the rare sense of community and autonomy the event fostered.
Michael Gonzalez, a non-violent third striker, told us he had “never seen so many people in prison behave as if they weren’t in prison at all.”
“The normalized environment I witnessed was really a sight to behold,” Gonzalez added. “Something special happened in that gym today. I got to see what some of my friends are really like underneath the stress and trauma of prison, when they’re not preoccupied with being imprisoned.”
Forrest, a multi-decade resident who partakes in IPIPS-supported Trauma Speaks self-help groups at VSP, assisted the film crew throughout the day by holding a boom mic during the “My Teachable Moment” segments and interviews with participants. He described the experience as “an outer body experience” that “teleported” him “from prison to a soundstage,” allowing him to imagine being on “a film set instead of a gym.”
Perhaps it is not where we are that defines us, but the things we do in that space that best reframes our purpose and reflects possibility. When confined people are allowed to constructively convene, create and collaborate, new identities can be forged. Like college classrooms in prison, creative learning environments need only for humans in mutual agreement to curate new experiences that affirm a re-imagined tomorrow.
Mel, a Black resident entering his third decade of confinement, praised the programming designed for men of color to see and experience, including an audio message from veteran Black Panther, renowned journalist and author Mumia Abu-Jamal on the importance of prison journalism.
“Outside of my time at San Quentin, I’ve never seen Black men be allowed to hold high value technical gear here before,” Mel said. “Nobody who looks like me has worked in our Media Center for going on a decade; but today, Professor Hinton, Professor Diaz, and Ms. Guillaume each invited us to lean in, pick up a light reflector, uncoil the extension cords, and help move audience chairs around. It was like a village of harmony aligned in common cause. It was beautiful – almost as beautiful as hearing that soul-stirring message from brother Mumia. That was some real inspiration right there. I’ll never forget this day.”
Randall Horton, a two-time American Book Award-winning poet and Professor of English at the University of New Haven, also spoke during the morning presentations. As the executive director of Radical Reversal—a Mellon-funded nonprofit organization that installs creative studio spaces within carceral facilities—Horton has visited detention centers, jails, and prisons for decades. He described sitting in the “My Teachable Moment” circle as “one of the most transformational, humanistic, and inspiring spaces filled with grace and sharing I have ever been a part of.”
Guillaume said that she felt “inspired to hear the CSJG journalists speak about the transformative impacts of their work on both an individual and collective level.”
“The most important thing for anyone to understand is that throughout the planning and programming for the symposium, our team followed the resident journalists’s lead, especially in producing the multimedia journalism series, ‘My Teachable Moment,’” Guillaume said. “The footage from the symposium will reflect the power of storytelling and their vital and urgent vision of what carceral journalism is and what it can do.”
John Anthony Shahor, the founder of Redemption Road K9, a published canine performance scientist, and the Director of the K9 program at La Sierra University’s Criminal Justice Department, said “it was an honor to witness the power of so many mission-driven leaders and organizations coming together under one roof. The event reflected not only the urgency of the moment, but the readiness of those present to turn ideas into actionable change.”
Hoping to deliver comprehensive workforce development training verticals to VSP residents in the CSJG who aspire to work with canines and become certified tactical veterinary aides, Shahor expressed gratitude “for the opportunity to share space with such courageous thinkers and doers.” Referencing his forthcoming initiatives, he added,“together, I believe we can create something lasting—not just for those inside the system, but for the communities waiting to welcome them home.”
During the “My Teachable Moment” workshop, 15 participants were able to harness the power of storytelling and share their perspectives on camera. However, Givens, a first time offender serving time for discharging a weapon during a robbery, expressed frustration over not being permitted to use the workshop as a vehicle for expressing his remorse and making direct amends to his victims, owing to the no-contact protective order courts issue against nearly every criminal defendant in California. He expressed frustration with the system’s structural impediments that work to prevent victim-offender reconciliation and keep communities separated.
“I just wish there was more information available for victims who wanted to get closure with the people who hurt them, and a way for those of us who want to give them restorative closure could make that desire known to them,” Givens said. “The system doesn’t allow us to do that, which keeps people believing we don’t care or haven’t changed, though some of us have.”
The day prior to the symposium, Hinton, Ross, and All of Us Or None’s Alissa Moore toured VSP under escort by YOP coordinator, James Shelton. They visited the law library to speak to the law clerks, view the Racial Justice Act (RJA) resources available to petitioners of color, and explored collaborating with the prison’s librarian to furnish the law library with an RJA petition-dedicated computer workstation, tied to a digitized county-specific database of statistics residents can harness. “We got to speak to several residents who described for us the many obstacles they encounter in accessing the public data that factually informs a RJA petition of merit,” Ross said.
Moore, who served more than twenty-five years as a YOP lifer, and nearly half of that at VSP before moving to Central California Women’s Facility across the street, pointed to the ad-seg cages in the rear of the VSP library. These are now filled with books and boxes instead of the humans they used to hold when the women resided here.
“That used to be the only way I could get over here. I was always in trouble, under restraint, and separated. Walking around as a free person today is pretty disarming, but the work IPIPS hopes to do here is worth all the unresolved PTIS I feel just being back here today,” Moore said, referring to what she calls “Post Traumatic Incarceration Syndrome.”
“Doing good work that serves and protects our community is the best therapy,” she added.
The ambition is to deliver to VSP a full-fledged media program that installs dual studio suites inside the VSP Media Center and the forthcoming YOP trailer space, in partnership with Horton and Radical Reversal. Hinton aims to overlay the studios with journalism training that empowers VSP’s residents to publish administration-approved content on the Inside Knowledge Edovo channel, and house it in the Inside Knowledge Carceral Studies Archive. VSP could become the home of the most progressive prison media program in the nation.
“Journalism,” Hinton said, “is really mentorship media.”
Along with Ghostwrite Mike, Moore assembled a roundtable of the symposium’s participants for the August All of Us Or None issue, which can be found here.
Watch the Inside Knowledge carceral journalism symposium trailer here.
