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Afterword PAUL WRIGHT T he United States has had prison publications almost as long as it has had prisons. There are two types of prison publications: the “in-house” prison press, which is published and supported by the state while prisoners are the nominal writers and editors, and which is often the de facto press office for the warden; and the independent prison magazines and newsletters written and published by prisoners with no government support, and which are sometimes critical of the prison and jail regime. Some of the government-run prison magazines have achieved public acclaim beyond the prison walls, such as the Angolite in Louisiana and the Prison Mirror in Minnesota, in large part because the government allows them to publish in the first place, and because of their longevity in publishing for decades. Prior to the 1990s almost every prison in America boasted an in-house publication. As the prison population exploded in the 1990s and the repression of American prisoners dramatically increased, among the first casualties were the in-house prison publications, the vast majority of which were simply shuttered and closed. The few that remained were often shadows of their former selves, where the weightiest topics discussed were the prison softball teams. The real story of prisoners and prisons has for the most part been told in the independent prison magazines and newsletters published by prisoners and their supporters inside and out. Today, Prison Legal News, which I started while confined in a maximum-security prison in the State of Washington in 1990, is the longest-running prisoners’ rights magazine in American history, having been published monthly for twenty-one years. But we were not the first. Starting in the late 1960s, prisoners and ex-prisoners began to publish their own magazines and have their own voice, unmuzzled by the state, where they could talk about their dreams, their aspirations, and the brutal cesspools of criminality known as the American gulag. Prisoners’ Digest International was one of these publications. And it enjoyed much distinguished company. Continuing into the 1990s, the best prisoner writing on and about prisons was published in the Prison Law Monitor, California Prisoner, Prison News Service, and many more. The prison press was often a voice of resistance. At the time he was murdered 214 | Afterword by New York state police during the Attica uprising, political prisoner Sam Melville was publishing a newsletter appropriately called The Iced Pig. PDI was one of the first independent prison publications to give voice to current and former prisoners. Unlike the government-run prison publications, PDI and the free prison press were not the warden’s press office and could, and did, tell it like it was. This was a time of social ferment in American history when many other oppressed groups were, for the first time in history, finding their collective voice and publishing journals by and for their members, with the goal of organizing around demands for greater rights and equality, and also educating the mainstream American public about these issues. Like many of these publications, PDI did not have a long life in terms of longevity or issues published. But it had a profound impact. It has been in the pages of these journals, a tradition that Prison Legal News continues to this day, that the daily reality of the American carceral experience is exposed and discussed in the words of current and former prisoners themselves. The sad reality is that as the number of prisoners in the United States reaches the highest numbers, raw and by percentage of the population, known in human history, the prison press as an institution has largely collapsed. When Prison Legal News started in 1990, it was a newsletter focused on the State of Washington, one of at least forty other independent prisoners’ rights magazines that were publishing at that time. California alone had six! The decline of the penal press probably does not have any single cause. Rather it has a variety of causes, ranging from violent repression and censorship by the government, to economics, and to the statistical profile of the average American prisoner as a functionally illiterate, mentally ill substance abuser—a tough combination for any publishing industry to overcome. It’s hard to pitch publications to a population that cannot read. But the biggest killer of prison publishing has most likely been apathy and lack of hope on the part of prisoners. In the 1970s, prisoners were no richer...

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