Listen to Ghostwrite Mike, co-founder of the Carceral Studies Journalism Guild, discuss the abolitionist mission of radical carceral journalism and the CSJG’s project in a conversation with Kristine Guillaume, one of the CSJG’s advisors. Ghostwrite Mike describes the CSJG — which produces uncensored, independent journalism from inside — as “an insurgent community of captive intellectuals who are digitally tethered across prison walls.”
“The public isn’t our primary audience. Rather, our content priorities are uncensored, tactical resilience to be a lifeline for captives and, you know, deliver the smuggled save yourself inside knowledge that prisons criminalize,” Ghost said. “We also don’t valorize being published in free world publications, no matter their supposed literary prestige, unless they position their content where captives can consume it. That’s a litmus test for what we do. Instead, the CSJG really is actively engaged in the building out of an autonomous information ecosystem futurity that nobody really thought we deserved, and too few so called abolitionists have worked to enable. So we honor the foregrounded struggle work of the true political prisoners, thought leaders, and activists who came before us.”
In the interview, Ghostwrite Mike invokes the Black radical feminist tradition, Orisanmi Burton’s conception of the “disloyal lens,” and the teachings of Angela Davis, George Jackson, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Dylan Rodriguez in a phone call from prison that critiques the “controlled speech model” of the penal press, calls for increased academy-captive solidarity, and describes radical carceral journalism as “what abolition does.” Ghost discusses the work, and resisting the PIC’s “two-front disinformation war” criminalizing the embargoed knowledge of radical thinkers.
