Carceral journalism is an uncensored stakeholder-driven critical analysis of the carceral state — a for us, by us enterprise — unbridled by government influence. Publishing from the factory of violence, sans censorship, represents both an insurgent act of bold agency, and a manifest indictment of the state media propaganda machine, that is, the modern prison newspaper. For those of us who interrogate the same structure of state power being exercised over our bodies, that conveniently wields its totalizing capacity to censor the self-serving prison newspaper ecosystem of content it shapes, we consider the loosely applied term “prison journalism” — used since the early 1900s to describe prison newspapers — a pejorative.
Don’t call those of us who bravely elect to work from confinement, apart from prison newspaper censorship, “prison journalists,” and don’t describe the work we do as “prison journalism.” We reject that framing. They are not like us.
Those who attempt to flatten us into a homogenous community of compliant sock puppet state stenographers who cosign the prison administration’s approved party line, lazily view us through an uninformed lens that fractured long ago, and will be met with critical resistance. Those who choose to be forbidden from presenting to residents of the carceral state topics like prison abolition as viable subject matter, embody something other than journalism — a thing not of the requisite epistemological order — something less than craft. Those who refuse to publish outside the confines of the prison newspaper, content their minders would never approve, are either not competent enough to write beyond the state’s frame, or complicit in a counterinsurgent act of cultural suicide that contributes to the hermeneutical injustice plaguing the plight of those in surviving containment.
They are not the truth tellers our community needs.
Coined by Miranda Fricker, “epistemic injustice” is theorized as a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower, whereby one of its forms — hermeneutical injustice — addresses the existence of collective understanding and language that interprets and articulates the experiences and identities of marginalized populations. For people in prison enduring a minoritized or subordinated experience, being unable to share in an epistemological framework that defines the unique injustices they negotiate, creates a gap in collective interpretive resources, and disadvantages their capacity to share, define, and coordinate against the types of structural prejudices that hinder their ability to articulate their plight.
The abstract site into which undesirables are deposited considers human connection a form of contraband, where prison newspapers are but curated organizational veils that smother inconvenient truths, and censor the very conversations residents of the carceral state should be having with one another.
“If prison newspapers were what the state tells us they are,” says A. Belant, a youth offender lifer pursuing his Masters degree from prison, “we’d have them at every prison — they would be ubiquitous. But we don’t, because that would simply be too much information coming from too many sources needing to be censored in a coordinated fashion statewide. Besides, our guild was formed in the soil of freedom, right? We have never been censored, so why would we want to give up our autonomy now, just to go run on the state’s hamster wheel of information control? Like losing CRT [critical race theory], that would be a step backward for us.”
The very logic and praxis that undergirds the bedrock analyses of the history, purpose, and role of prisons in society — abolition — as well as the biographies of the thinkers who have shaped this body of scholarship — radical academics and imprisoned intellectuals — are either widely banned by prison administrators, or otherwise criminalized by prison policies. For example, possessing a book authored by George Jackson — a legitimate historical figure — can serve as a pretext for the prison to validate the reader as a member or associate of the Black Guerilla Family prison gang, though the gang itself wasn’t even formed while George was alive. How does the appropriation of a dead author’s work, by people he never met, become a legal basis to criminalize the reader of a book?
Testimonial injustice involves a wrong against a speaker, due to negative identity prejudice, resulting in an unfair credibility deficit, such as when a racially minoritized person’s account of the racism they experience is not believed because the interlocutor has biased perceptions of their race, or does not believe racism exists.
“You can’t have one without the other,” says Guy Erb, a writer pursuing his undergraduate degree, “because if you can’t listen to a speaker, or read a writer fairly, there will be a hermeneutical gap between them and your understanding, which disadvantages their ability to be understood. Hermeneutical injustice begets testimonial injustice, and CRT is a precise example of how the hermeneutical injustice of banning CRT contributes to testimonial injustice. It criminalizes the shared experience and the building of knowledge that shared experience should allow for. It’s like a tactical counterinsurgency designed to prevent the smartest among us — those of us in college who are learning and tutoring others — from engaging in organized intellectual activity. It’s about preventing our enlightenment, in order to keep us controlled.”
Frederick Douglass wrote about how slave masters kept certain passages missing from their sermons — something he discovered after committing the illegal act of learning to read and comparing the sermons against the Bible. Angela Y. Davis invoked Douglass when she opined about the hope religion seemed to rely upon in order to prevent slave revolts. Not much has really changed since then about how humans seek to control others — censorship is a weapon — and book bans, off-limits curricula, and prison newspapers similarly rely upon the virus of epistemic deprivation, in order to prevent the explication of shared knowledge. In prison, we need all the communicative and organizing agency we can muster, because for the journalism we generate – carceral journalism — the public isn’t our primary audience. We are
Our job is to gather the inside knowledge to be passed on, and curate the outside knowledge being imported, in service of our community. It’s an entirely insurgent praxis of self-organizing activity that operates in a manner contrary to what prison newspapers do. They confine information; we disseminate it. They silence curiosity; we covet it. We honor radicals; they ban them. If a prison newspaper cannot freely interrogate its publisher, critique the state, or intellectually wrestle with constructive abolition, it lacks the integrity, and autonomy — by design — to do its job. That’s not what journalism looks like to us.
