This seven-part interview series features the Davis Vanguard’s executive director and Everyday Injustice podcast host David Greenwald discussing the future of carceral media with incarcerated Vanguard Carceral Journalism Guild fellow Ghostwrite Mike. (Click here to listen to the full episode).
With nearly 2,900 newspapers shuttered or merged since 2005, the local news crisis has left many communities without access to professional nonpartisan journalism, which experts warn poses severe risks to civic engagement and government oversight, comparing its impact to a Great Recession for the news industry. The structural shrinkage of the news-making landscape writ large only more so marginalizes the concerns and lived experience of the many citizens impacted by the justice system, be they confined, or living in the invisible prison of probation, parole, or under the dead weight of a felony conviction.
As local outlets disappear, vulnerable citizens are left increasingly uninformed, jeopardizing the health of democracy itself. Reflexively, faced with fewer options, consumers tend to migrate toward sources that reflect their existing views about the issues they care about. Digital algorithms only more so affirm those views by curating news that abides consumer preference, resulting in a silo-society of categorical news feeds that message instead of report. For incarcerated information consumers resisting censorship, book bans, and limited academic variety in college programming, data is the new contraband.
Since reading was to slavery as information is to mass incarceration, confined newsmakers, to the extent they are enabled, must become brain food curators for the next crop of incarcerated revolutionaries, thought leaders, and social justice activists. This is an information war. We must do more than talk, sing, write, complain, and urge—we have to train our peers to gather data.
The Vanguard has made it a priority to center the voices of the incarcerated, empower confined newsmakers, and devote resources to support the development of carceral content that is curated by and for those subject to state power. These are perspectives few other outlets deem worthy, and too many nonprofit actors vulture in order to secure grants without delivering agency to stakeholders. Ours is a principled commitment to democratize speech, deliver publishing equity to all justice-impacted persons, and magnify the human rights of those living under the pressures of state power.
The Vanguard Incarcerated Press (VIP) presents an uncensored monthly newsletter product created entirely by incarcerated stakeholders who operate beyond the dictums of prison administrators and enjoy an editorial autonomy not found inside of today’s few prison newspaper operations. While the Everyday Injustice podcast presents incarcerated guests in a public-facing audio format without censorship, the Vanguard Carceral Journalism Guild Fellowship program affords anonymized byline and contributor agency to proven journalists working from confinement via the Witness platform, and the Inner Views series is engaging top-shelf academics and thought leaders in long form discussions about issues that relate to carceral life and the mechanisms that sustain it.
What exactly is prison journalism?
It’s an oxymoron, because in the carceral context, journalism is free speech that interrogates the power structures of the government and amplifies the human rights imperatives of those being confined. It’s literally about the intersection of state power and a most vulnerable population—us—subsisting and resisting under the control of that power. We are the subject matter. But for there to be any real examination of what’s happening at that very busy intersection implicating nearly two million colonized citizens, there must be an autopsy performed upon the prison leviathan corpus.
Carceral journalism is the justice-impacted community’s history in the making. It’s an ethnograph. It’s about carceral studies, convict criminology, community action, people power, artivism, abolition, and witnessing from the margin. It’s a living and breathing digital humanities project anchored at a university library near you, a poetry slam, a human rights mixtape, a we-were-hear audiobook, and a tell-us-your-story podcast. Its a my-teachable-moment documentary, a historicized BIPOC love letter, and a live-from-the-pen public-facing, no-filter journalism byline.
It’s also mobilizing philanthropy, concerned academia, accessible publishing, and building an organic peer-facilitated community triage unit with love. It’s a look-in-the-mirror confession, tell-us-the-truth interrogation, and a most necessary two-way street civic engagement mission that doesn’t just normalize our societal participation in the inside-out manner that resists the civil death prisons were designed to deliver, but also circles the feedback loop of outside-in engagements delivering nourishment back into our community for direct consumption. It’s a revolutionary undertaking when its truly enabled and engaged in.
It’s how we elevate from a booking photo to having our humanity restored. Its how we get to post-carceral. It’s how we shape-shift from inmate, prisoner, and felon – to student, mentor, and citizen, be we confined or returning. It’s how and where we have conversations about this man-made paradigm of human control called the carceral state – how it was formed, dissecting all of its bloody legacies, discerning what its objectives are, and examining what its consequences have been relative to those stated and sublimated objectives. It’s how we find out about being stamped from the beginning – understanding what that means – chewing on what we might learn about ourselves while riding an elevator with a Jason Reynolds character, or swallowing reclamation while swimming in a John Murillo poem.
Most importantly, it’s about who gets to participate in those conversations. Being marginalized isn’t just about what the Death Star does or doesn’t do to us – what it doesn’t permit us to do – it’s also about those non-state actors who make a living speaking, writing, performing, teaching, and publishing about this carceral paradigm and who, too often, leave us on an island by ourselves without coming into port. Public-facing platform embedding and on-demand consumption via Spotify, Apple Podcast, and YouTube are not enough, because the most important aspect of this is the feedback loop the public and advertisers don’t care so much about or reflexively see value in, but that nourish our community on the inside.
As much as we’re concerned about pushing authentic narratives, art, and testimony from the margin into the middle of the proverbial page for the free world to see, hear, and read, we care more about feeding our community the brain diet that is what this conversation, and others like it, might mean to them, if only they might be enabled to consume it. We aspire to build a content portal that allows folks like Elizabeth Hinton and Heather Ann Thompson to speak directly to our BIPOC community as the concerned and lettered aunties we never had in life – imparting the vital wisdom that might save a generation – or at least spark the mind that might become our next thought leader.
We have the tools—we just need the spirit, the will, and the collaboration of like-hearted intellectuals who value this audience half as much as the prison industrial complex desires to keep it ignorant, conflicted, enslaved, and uninspired. We are not here just to be heard—we are REALLY here to be the umbilical cord that forever resets what carceral media can be. After us, nothing will be the same. We have summoned the dragons, and they are inbound. When you see them hover and you hear them scream, do not turn in fear. Be warmed by the fire of their long-awaited truth.
