The Prison Newspaper

0:28Amazon has everything for everyone on your list. Support for this show comes from Strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place? Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying, but are they actually just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from strawberry.me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner. Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer. I was laying on the bunk and a guy walked by and gave me this little magazine. I said, what is that?

1:10He said, this is the Nash News. The Nash News is a newspaper. Written, edited, and produced by the men incarcerated at Nash Correctional Institution in Nashville, North Carolina. Tell me what it looked like and what you remember thinking as you were kind of looking through it. I was amazed that people in prison could produce such a thing. It wasn't a newsletter, just printed on paper. It wasn't photocopied. It had real pictures. It was glossy. And it had weight to it. And I wondered, you know, who allowed somebody to do this? This is Philip Vance Smith II. He's been incarcerated for 22 years, serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

1:52He was convicted of first-degree murder for shooting a man in 2001. Nash Correctional is a medium-security prison with two manufacturing plants, one that makes eyeglasses for incarcerated men and women, Medicaid patients and state employees, and a print plant. The print plant is, I think, the 10th largest in the nation. It's also, I think, the second largest on the East Coast. They print business cards for state employees, school catalogs, stationery, and annual reports for local government agencies and courthouses. In 2005, two of the men working in the print plant wrote a formal proposal asking for permission to use the overstock paper to create a newspaper.

2:40Brian Scott and Mark Posinski, they came up with the idea. They pitched it to the plant manager. He approved it, and they brought it to the warden, and the rest is history. You know, every prison block has a bulletin board. We didn't want to be just a bulletin board. Nash News co-founder Brian Scott. We wanted to go beyond that. We wanted to tackle as difficult issues as we possibly could. We also knew that we would be constrained in some of that simply because of the environment we were in. But that was the ideal, and that was our goal. And I'm happy to say that in many cases, we've accomplished that.

3:22Brian Scott was released from prison in 2021 after 20 years. He founded a nonprofit reentry program called Our Journey. Now that you're out of prison, do you still read every issue? Definitely. In fact, it's the only newspaper I read. I don't have as much time for that as I used to. I should say it's the only newspaper I read cover to cover. Phil Smith remembers that it was one of Brian Scott's articles that got him interested in working on the Nash News. It was about a man named David Marshall Williams. David Marshall Williams did time in the early 1900s. A lot of people have never heard of him.

4:03They should have. He invented the M1 carbine rifle while he was serving time at Caledonia. He got a clemency from the governor. And during his lifetime, they bought six million of the rifles that he created while he was in prison. And Brian Scott wrote that article, you know, not to glorify guns, but to glorify the things that we can do behind bars, the things that we can be more. Right. And so that's what drove me to the Nash News. And what is your role now with the newspaper? I'm the editor of the Nash News. So as editor, I pretty much facilitate everything. When we have meetings every Saturday, I can imagine, just like any other newsroom, we have 15 staff members.

4:53I'm an assistant editor to the right, graphic designer to the left. We talk about existing projects. I ask guys what they would like to write about. We talk about what upcoming events are happening. We talk about gossip, the rumor mill, you know, what's going on over here? I heard such and such did this, right? And it's just a small community. I have a sports guy. I have a guy who's good at writing profiles. I have a guy who's good more at academic writing. And so I try to figure out projects and articles that fit their specific genre. We spoke with Phil Smith in the prison visitation room. Three administrators sat in on our conversation.

5:35So you meet on Saturdays for your editorial meeting. Take me through kind of the whole process from meeting to print. Well, we try to plan three months ahead. We print quarterly. So I've already designed the layout. I've already given them the articles. Most of the articles are already done. So I'll send somebody on assignment. They'll cover it. They'll take pictures. We take the pictures to the print planner, the camera. They upload the pictures. Graphic designer does the layout. He brings me a proof or emails it to our staff coordinator, Ms. Walco. I'll review the proof. My assistant editor reviews the proof.

6:17And we go through that round a few times until we're sure that all the kinks are out. And then we ask the print plant if they will print it. The print plant will then decide if they have the stock. If they do, then it's laid up just like any other magazine they would print over there, and it has to wait in line for their paying jobs to finish, and then we're printed last. How many copies do you print? It varies. Typically, we print about 1 ,000. Is every person here given a copy of the news, offered? Is it free? It's free to everybody, and that's the idea. Initially, that's what the newspaper is for.

6:57We print it up for population, we read it, we share stories, you know. There's a long and complicated history of writing about life in prison, from inside prison, knowing you can be shut down by the administration at any time. In 1959, there were 250 prison newspapers being published on a regular basis. Today, there are 26. including the Nash News. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

7:42North Carolina actually has a rich history of prison publications. The first one started in the early 1900s, and it was called the Prison News. And incidentally, it started as a hobby craft. They brought in this little printing press just to give guys something to do. And they featured articles written by government officials and prison leaders. The articles written by prisoners were written as anonymous editorials. They had no bylines. That is the one that's known. There's also a lost history of prison publications. There's actually an unauthorized publication by prisoners. And this research is maintained by a friend of mine.

8:22Her name is Dr. Amanda Bell Hewitt. She's writing a book about mass incarceration in North Carolina. So she writes about the North Carolina Prisoners Labor Union, which started in 1973. And what was so dynamic about them is they had a$14 ,000 grant. They took this money, wrote literature, sent it out, had it printed, and it was distributed to other prisons. I consider it unauthorized because it was combative to the prison system. And many of the prison leaders didn't like it. It was eventually shut down in 1977. But I think the and a lot of their work is lost, like you can't find it anywhere. But we look back at that history.

9:04And we wonder how the Nash News came to be after we had the prison news, which was authorized. And then this one newspaper, which was used as a tool against the administration is now defunct. And I think what it relies on is the message. right? Our message is not compatible to institution. We focus more on what we do to change ourselves. I think taking a different tact has enabled us to last so long. Now there are times that we have written articles I would say that I thought pushed the limit but they were approved.

9:46Can we just start with you introducing yourself? My name is Charlotte Walco, and I've been at NASH for 13 years this month. Matter of fact, I'm the psychological services coordinator here, so I oversee the mental health department. Charlotte Walco started working on the NASH News in 2015. As she puts it, she acts as the go-between between the newspaper staff and the prison administration. I was always a fan because I enjoyed when it came out, and I loved looking at the artwork and such, reading the articles. But at the time that I started here, the articles were a lot more about kind of what was going on at Nash.

10:31Like, for instance, if the Muslims had a feast after Ramadan, that would be a focus. Or, of course, the sports here was always something that was talked about. Very safe topics. I'd have to call them that. We started kind of getting a little more edgy. They have taken a bigger focus on mental health, depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, because as we all know, prison is the new psychiatric hospital because the treatment out there has kind of just disappeared. She told us about another piece by the paper's co-founder, Brian Scott, about the constitutionality of juveniles being sentenced to life in prison without parole.

11:14I have several on my caseload. They've been in prison since they were 16, 17 years old, and they've served 20, 25 years. And, you know, one of them has no infractions on his record at all. So it's like, you know, kind of those things that I think are important to get out there. The piece ends with a group photo of six men at Nash Correctional who were sentenced to life without parole when they were teenagers. The youngest, Joseph Jones, was sentenced at 13. So at the time, no one had written an article in the Nash News talking about something like that. And we had one of the strictest wardens here at the time.

11:55So we submitted it to him, and he sent it back and was like, I love the article, just cite your sources. He's like, I don't want you to just write anything. He said, I really understand and respect what you guys are doing. So I think there is definitely a balance. If we submit something that the administration feels is not right or something they don't want to publish, they'll let us know. And luckily, we haven't had that experience yet.

12:25There are Nash News pieces about COVID, a profile of Thurgood Marshall, articles about drug addiction, CrossFit, and the importance of fantasy football to the men who live there. In one issue, a reporter named Kenneth Meeks wrote about the history and impact of restorative justice. There's information about a meditation group in memoriam notices for people who have died. Most issues contain a lot of art, sometimes drawings of famous people, Madonna, Mary J. Blige, Prince, There's a drawing of a man holding a baby called First Visit, and short stories and poems and comic strips. Phil Smith says for their next issue, a writer who is also a veteran named Joaquin Melendez is working on a piece about veterans with PTSD in prison.

13:21So he gives us the long and the short of how unaddressed issues can lead to crime. We also have Kwame Teague, who is a creative writing instructor. He holds small workshops at times. And I got with him and I asked him to write just a small article to give people an introduction to what creative writing is. Because we have so many guys who are in prison who are looking for things to do. And so we try to help them along the way. And this would actually be a continuation of a column that we used to have called Grammar School, where we would actually put in, you know, what is an adjective, what is a noun, what is sentence structure, subject and a predicate, things of that nature.

14:05At the end of every issue, there's a note that says, Perhaps you recently transferred to Nash Correctional Institution from another prison camp. If so, while we do not wish for anyone to be in prison, we welcome you to your new community. And under that, they print some information that might be useful, like the address of the prison, the phone number, and the names of the wardens.

14:40The oldest known prison newspaper was published in 1800, in a debtor's prison in New York. A lawyer named William Keteltis couldn't pay his debts and was sent to prison. In the early 1800s, you could be sent to jail if you were$25 in debt, even less, sometimes$10. It's not known how much he owed, but William Keteltis couldn't afford to get himself out of jail by repaying the debts. So he decided to wage a campaign against the existence of debtors' prisons altogether with a newspaper. He wrote,

15:27On March 24, 1800, the first issue of William Cateltas' newspaper, Forlorn Hope, was published. The oldest continuously operating prison newspaper is the Prison Mirror, founded in 1887 by a group of men incarcerated at what was then called Stillwater State Prison, and today is known as the Minnesota Correctional Facility, Stillwater. The Prison Mirror told readers that it was not established, nor is it to be run for the laudation of the prison administration. Its editor said, The Mirror belongs to the prison library, it is the convict's paper, and it will do all in its power to lighten the darkness of our prison cells.

16:16It still exists today, with the slogan, It's never too late to mend. In 2012, the Prison Mirror conducted an investigation into Minnesota lawmakers' use of prison canteen profits, money spent by prisoners. The profits had previously flowed back to the inmates in the form of extras, like phones, movie rentals, and library books, things not paid for by the Department of Corrections. The prison newspaper investigation found that in 2011, $1.2 million of canteen profits were instead used to offset state budget cuts. That same year, the San Quentin prison newspaper, the San Quentin News, released an investigation into an attempt by the California legislature to remove$68 million from the state's inmate welfare fund.

17:16After the investigation was published and the prison newspaper lawmakers reversed course.

17:24Some of the most famous prison reporting in the country has come out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola. The Angolite was founded in 1952. A man named Wilbert Rideau spent 44 years at Angola, beginning in 1961. He tried to join the Angolite staff, which was all white men, and was rejected. And so he started his own prison publication, a magazine called The Lifer. Eventually, after mandatory desegregation policies were implemented in 1975, Wilbert Rideau was made editor of The Angolite. Under his leadership, they won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and the George Polk Award.

18:14It's about routine. It's about carbon-copy nothingness. Here he is on fresh air, speaking by phone from the office of the Angolite in the early 90s. Your entire existence is dedicated to trying to weave meaning into that, because every morning you wake up, you have to justify your existence to yourself. You know, because people in prison live for the same reasons you live. I mean, the same things that they have their dreams, they have their desires, they have their needs. And prison is all about deprivation. It's all about pain, misery, and suffering. And, you know, the present is an intolerable situation.

18:57So the only thing that keeps you going is the hope of tomorrow.

19:11We'll be right back.

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20:30There have been hundreds of prison newspapers over the years. There was one in 1937 in Oklahoma called the Granite Nugget. It had a staff of 10. The menu for Christmas Day was printed under a drawing of a Christmas tree. turkey, cherry plate pie, celery, candied sweet potatoes, coffee. In a column called Babblings from the Shoe Factory, an unnamed writer says the prison is manufacturing more than 1 ,500 pairs of shoes per day. There was one from the early 70s in California called The Speaking Leaves. The first issue reads, The Speaking Leaves is a publication put together by Indian inmates from within the walls of the California penal system.

21:18The editor describes a, quote, long, hard-fought battle for the approval to publish, and says, How about that? Once again, the Indian wins. But as always, we won't make it in history. There have been times when prison newspapers simply re-ran outside journalism, including pieces critical of the criminal justice system. In July of 1972, a Florida prison newspaper called What's Up reprinted a piece from the Washington Post about the parole process. Quote, The uncertainty and the mystery surrounding the parole process not only demeans the whole notion of rehabilitation, but is also the most burdensome of all the antiquated aspects of our creaking penal system.

22:10Today, you can read What's Up or The Speaking Leaves or The Granite Nugget or The Nash News online. Since 2020, a small group of archivists have been scanning prison newspapers and putting them on the Internet. We have done 208 individual newspapers, and that's of, like, yesterday. And with those, we're always including as many issues of each as I can get my hands on. And we've done about over 198 ,000 pages, and there's a ton more to do. Anne Ray is the managing editor of the nonprofit Reveal Digital. Just to give you a sense of the scale, when I started working on this project, we had identified about 500 individual newspapers from across the centuries and spanning all 50 states, including D.C.

23:05And that's like a lot on its own. But since then, our own list of things that we've identified has grown to over 750. And it grows every week. Every week I hear about one that I didn't know about. How are you finding them all? So this has become an incredible process of discovery in terms of how we get a hold of the print copies. A lot of times what happened is that when a prison newspaper was printed, it might have gotten sort of shuffled in with like other government documents that were produced by the prison, which is kind of strange in and of itself. And so sometimes those paper copies ended up in like a state library or a state archive.

23:46So I've been really fortunate to work with a lot of archivists in those kinds of places. And they've been wonderful about loaning us the few copies that they do have. And sometimes the libraries don't even know they have them. I had one institution where I contacted the University of Kentucky, and they knew that they had some, but then the wonderful person doing the scanning, you know, like the collecting of them and actually putting the physical papers on the scanner to send the digital files to us, She went down to the shelf and she looked where she thought the ones they had were, and she found like two others that there were no records of in their catalog.

24:26They were just sitting there. So it's like this wonderful process of complete discovery. I mean, it was interesting. There really isn't much written about them. We were expecting to find a lot more about the history of these present newspapers when we started working on this. Right. And I really feel like the fact that these newspapers aren't online is sort of a barrier to people studying this history. And so now that we've made this archive, like people will really be able to look closely over the decades about what the history of them is. And it's going to help the lives that were there inside prison continue to be visible over the centuries.

25:12So now anyone can go online and read the Nash News. Absolutely. I love being able to see it free, out in the world for anyone to look at.

25:24In the fall of 2022, Anne Rae invited Brian Scott, the co-founder of the Nash News, to join the project. You know, during my incarceration, and this happens to everybody who does any amount of time, you get the sense that nobody out here really does care. I mean, you have your family, you have, you know, close-knit friends. But beyond that, as far as the general public, you know, you just don't think there's much understanding, a lot of ignorance. And so it's easy to think that, you know, nobody cares. And seeing this collection all put in one place was such a powerful and moving moment for me because it shows that people do care and that they are interested.

26:13We couldn't have possibly imagined that someday somebody in, you know, Indonesia could pull up a copy of the Nash News. That is a thrill.

26:28We'll be right back.

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