It arrived in my California cell like a thought arrow, quivered within an envelope bearing a postmark from the storied city of “New Haven,” home to Yale University, the University of New Haven, and the faint echoes of a Black Panther radicalism and student protest era stalking a revival. Comprised of eleven 8.5″ x 11″ landscape-oriented white pages of typing paper, folded and stapled into pamphlet formation, this forty-four panel community zine bears multi-font text, original prison art creatives, screen-grabbed handwritten prose, and clip art that centers eleven core testimonies from Connecticut’s carceral state, asking readers to “Read, React, and Reimagine better tomorrows.”
Best considered an anthology of bite-sized op-eds that articulate unjust and inhumane conditions within Connecticut’s prison system, Liberation Live! follows in the rich tradition of subversive prison print struggle movements, bringing to bear an insurgent methodology of community organizing, grassroots epistemologies of self-care, and courageous witness accounts from stakeholders that articulate and humanize their shadowed appeals. This is contemporary prison literature, from the underground.
Distinguished from institutional prison media products like The Angolite and The San Quentin News — two of the nation’s largest state-authorized in-prison publications that formed the vanguard of sanctioned prison media during the era of mass incarceration — Liberation Live!, like our CSJG/Witness platform, publishes in spite of the leviathan. So too, unlike the Black-owned retail publishing and print press networks writers like Etheridge Knight relied upon to reach out to the world from prison, zines, like letters, represent the modern version of the epistolary networks writers like George Jackson relied upon in order to urge the public to investigate its prisons.
By theorizing the logics of containment, shared space, involuntary servitude, sleep deprivation, price gauging, and the custody-driven indoctrination of dehumanization, the men from Connecticut responsible for curating this political ethnograph – more than half of whom are degree-seeking college students of color enrolled in the Yale Prison Education Initiative’s (YPEI) collaboration with the University of New Haven (UNH) – and those organizing on their behalf beyond the wall, have deconstructed the psychic toll of these accumulated state-caused harms, and published a creative manifesto demanding life-affirming treatment from the apparatus that contains, surveils, and punishes their pursuit of liberty while they attempt to learn and achieve academic success.
Deploying comics, portraits, murals, urban iconography, verse, opinion, and essay, Liberation Live! frames people-powered demands for a nourishing protein-rich menu, timely access to indigent hygiene supplies, conjugal visitation with family, photo-taking with family members during visits, and discontinuing the slippery misuse of “discretion,” in favor of merit-based concrete metrics, for determining parole suitability. Each of these asks pursue hallmarks of normalization that already function as fixed programmatic verticals in state prison systems across the country, exposing Connecticut’s glaring lack of penal progressivism.
It should come as no surprise that there might be a chorus of concern about inhumane conditions at Connecticut’s maximum security prison singing through a resident zine, curated by the state’s most educated confined learners engaged in undergraduate coursework taught by instructors from Yale; after all, the architect of the police state culture that pervades MacDougall-Walker’s hallways today, was none other than John Armstrong, the state’s former Department of Corrections Commissioner, who, as H. Bruce Franklin chronicled in “The Inside Stories of the Global American Prison,” for Texas Studies in Literature and Language, “after being driven out of his position because of sexual and other tortures revealed by both the ACLU and Amnesty International, became deputy director of operations for the entire Iraqi prison system.” The disgraced former overseer of Connecticut’s prison system, also presided over the Iraqi prison system — which contained the notorious sins of Abu Ghraib — where inhumane regimens of daily torture, fetishized tactics of prisoner sexualization, and the abusive deployment of canines echoed the horrors of Nazi concentration camps.
YPEI alum Maurice Blackwell, who paroled from MacDougall-Walker prison after twenty-five years of confinement, and attends UNH, said “Liberation Live! is an appeal for fairness, safety, and humane treatment. I salute the Yale Institute on Incarceration & Public Safety (YIIPS) for centering Connecticut’s own, because I’ve been there, and I consider it an honor to represent those I had to leave behind when I came home. Liberation Live!, our community organizing, and the legislative objectives we are pursuing will make sure none of my brothers – and none of our sisters as well – are forgotten. We aim to secure justice, for everybody.”
Founded by Yale historian Dr. Elizabeth Hinton, YIIPS recently named Blackwell as Director of Community Outreach, and announced online via justiceforeverybody.org its partnership with Liberation Live!
Describing Maurice’s unique role, Hinton said, “He represents the very transformational promise we all have for folks leaving confinement – provided they get a real chance to come home. Maurice did, thanks to a state law that still needs a more equitable application for all. His becoming, demonstrates the need for that resentencing remedy, and Liberation Live! is the collective voice of those who the state law still ignores, and those who the state’s prison system refuses to regard as worthy of dignity.”
In 2026, YIIPS will deliver Liberation Live! content digitally to confined DOC-issued tablet users from its dedicated Inside Knowledge channel, via the Edovo app. To support LiberationLive! visit https://liberationlive.org.
