Prison newspapers are newspapers created within a prison, typically by the inmates.
The first prison newspaper is believed to have appeared in the 19th century in a debtors' prison. [1] : 86 Prison reformers in the US created a prison newspaper at the Elmira Reformatory in 1883. [2] : 36–38 It was "carefully assembled not to include items that officials deemed to have a bad influence on the inmates" and was instead intended for rehabilitative purposes. [2] : 40 The first inmate-driven paper was created at the Minnesota Correctional Facility in 1887. [3]
A 1935 study, the first on the topic, found that almost half of US prisons had a prison newspaper. [3] The genre reached its height in the 1960s in the United States, at which point circulation was approximately 2 million readers across 250 publications. [1] : 86 During this period "active and alert prison reporting" became more common, with inmates highlighting problems within the prison system. [4] The "Pulitzers of prison journalism", the Penal Press Awards, were awarded annually beginning in 1965. [5]
However, they faced issues around freedom of the press, as critiques of prison practices were met with institutional censorship. [1] : 87 In 1974, in the US Supreme Court case of Pell v. Procunier, the court ruled to uphold a California state restriction against prison inmates being interviewed face-to-face by the press. Journalists and inmates had contended that this restriction violated the First Amendment. [6] This ruling "largely replaced" earlier precedents supportive of prison reporting; subsequent court decisions also held that "the prison's security interests trumped the free speech rights of inmates" and that prisons could entirely forbid prison newspapers. [1] : 87 Similar patterns and tensions emerged in other parts of the world, such as Canada. [7] : 98 These pressures resulted in a quick and significant decline in the number of prison newspapers in publication between the 1970s and 1990s, with just six operating in 1998. [3] [1] : 87 However, more recently, "alongside a surge in bipartisan interest in criminal justice reform, prison journalism has reemerged and garnered the attention and support of funders, politicians, and the public". [8] As of 2023 there are an estimated 24 prison newspapers in the US. [9]
Early prison newspapers were typically "devoted to inmate activities: sports events, movies and other entertainment, personal items, blood banks, school and organizational activities, hobbies, and the like". [7] : 90 Humour was also often featured. [7] : 91 Sports remain a popular topic of reporting. [10] Depending on the level of censorship at a particular institution, such papers may carry stories critical of the prison administration. [10] [11] With the modern aging prison population in the US, obituaries have also become a feature. [10]
Challenges within the prison system, including potential reprisals against prison journalists, complicate reporting. [12] The US Federal Bureau of Prisons has an explicit ban on journalism by inmates, while most US states have restrictions that negatively impact journalism from within jails. [13]
The mass media in the People's Republic of China primarily consists of television, newspapers, radio, and magazines. Since the start of the 21st century, the Internet has also emerged as an important form of mass media and is under the direct supervision and control of the Chinese government and ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Media in China is strictly controlled and censored by the CCP, with the main agency that oversees the nation's media being the Central Propaganda Department of the CCP. The largest media organizations, including the China Media Group, the People's Daily, and the Xinhua News Agency, are all controlled by the CCP.
In the U.S. state of California, capital punishment is not allowed to be carried out as of March 2019, because executions were halted by an official moratorium ordered by Governor Gavin Newsom. Before the moratorium, executions had been frozen by a federal court order since 2006, and the litigation resulting in the court order has been on hold since the promulgation of the moratorium. Thus, there will be a court-ordered moratorium on executions after the termination of Newsom's moratorium if capital punishment remains a legal penalty in California by then.
San Quentin Rehabilitation Center (SQ), formerly known as San Quentin State Prison, is a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prison for men, located north of San Francisco in the unincorporated place of San Quentin in Marin County.
Turner v. Safley, 482 U.S. 78 (1987), was a U.S. Supreme Court decision involving the constitutionality of two Missouri prison regulations. One of the prisoners' claims related to the fundamental right to marry, and the other related to freedom of speech. The court held that a regulation preventing inmates from marrying without permission violated their constitutional right to marry because it was not logically related to a legitimate penological concern, but a prohibition on inmate-to-inmate correspondence was justified by prison security needs.
Rehabilitation is the process of re-educating those who have committed a crime and preparing them to re-enter society. The goal is to address all of the underlying root causes of crime in order to decrease the rate of recidivism once inmates are released from prison. It generally involves psychological approaches which target the cognitive distortions associated with specific kinds of crime committed by individual offenders, but it may also entail more general education like reading skills and career training. The goal is to re-integrate offenders back into society.
Reforma is a Mexican newspaper based in Mexico City. It has 276,700 readers in Mexico City. The paper shares content with other papers in its parent newsgroup Grupo Reforma. Reforma is named after the Mexico City avenue of the same name, Paseo de la Reforma, which is in turn named after "La Reforma", a series of liberal reforms undertaken by the country in the mid-19th century.
Penal labour is a term for various kinds of forced labour that prisoners are required to perform, typically manual labour. The work may be light or hard, depending on the context. Forms of sentence involving penal labour have included involuntary servitude, penal servitude, and imprisonment with hard labour. The term may refer to several related scenarios: labour as a form of punishment, the prison system used as a means to secure labour, and labour as providing occupation for convicts. These scenarios can be applied to those imprisoned for political, religious, war, or other reasons as well as to criminal convicts.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is the penal law enforcement agency of the government of California responsible for the operation of the California state prison and parole systems. Its headquarters are in Sacramento.
Riot in Cell Block 11 is a 1954 American film noir crime film directed by Don Siegel and starring Neville Brand, Emile Meyer, Frank Faylen, Leo Gordon and Robert Osterloh. Director Quentin Tarantino called it "the best prison film ever made."
Censorship in Myanmar results from government policies in controlling and regulating certain information, particularly on religious, ethnic, political, and moral grounds.
Censorship in Turkey is regulated by domestic and international legislation, the latter taking precedence over domestic law, according to Article 90 of the Constitution of Turkey.
John P. Whitley is a former Louisiana corrections officer who served as the warden of Louisiana State Penitentiary, the largest maximum-security in the United States, from 1990 to 1995. Time magazine credited Warden Whitley with turning around hopelessness and violence at Angola with "little more than his sense of decency and fairness."
The print, broadcast and online mass media in Burma has undergone strict censorship and regulation since the 1962 Burmese coup d'état. The constitution provides for freedom of speech and the press; however, the government prohibits the exercise of these rights in practice. Reporters Without Borders ranked Burma 174th out of 178 in its 2010 Press Freedom Index, ahead of just Iran, Turkmenistan, North Korea, and Eritrea. In 2015, Burma moved up to 144th place, ahead of many of its ASEAN neighbours such as Singapore, as a result of political changes in the country.
Mount Tamalpais College, formerly known as the Prison University Project, is a two year liberal arts college that offers an associate's degree program in Liberal Arts and intensive college preparatory courses in math and writing to mainline residents of San Quentin State Prison. Courses are all taught on-site by volunteers, most of them graduate students, instructors, and faculty members from San Francisco Bay Area colleges and universities. Until 2020, the college was operated as an extension site of Patten University by the Prison University Project, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. All credits and degrees were issued by Patten. Since 2020, Mount Tamalpais College has issued its own credits and degrees as a Candidate for Accreditation by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges. The college achieved Initial Accreditation in January 2022.
Jones v. North Carolina Prisoners' Labor Union, 433 U.S. 119 (1977), was a United States Supreme Court case where the court held that prison inmates do not have a right under the First Amendment to join labor unions.
The Angolite is the inmate-edited and published prison magazine of the Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola) in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana.
Southern Metropolis Daily (SMD) is a for-profit tabloid newspaper located in Guangzhou city, China, and its circulation is throughout the greater Guangdong and Pearl River Delta region. SMD is a constituent of the Nanfang Media Group, which is under the supervision of the Guangdong Provincial Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The newspaper publishes daily, with 72 pages and multiple sections relating to consumer products, international affairs, sports, and other topics of the public interest.
Censorship in Indonesia has varied since the country declared its independence in 1945. For most of its history the government of Indonesia has not fully allowed free speech and has censored Western movies, books, films, and music as well. However, partly due to the weakness of the state and cultural factors, it has never been a country with full censorship where no critical voices were able to be printed or voiced.
Censorship in Vietnam is pervasive and is implemented by the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) in relation to all kinds of media – the press, literature, works of art, music, television and the Internet. The government censors content for mainly political reasons, such as curtailing political opposition, and censoring events unfavorable to the party. In its 2021 Press Freedom Index, the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranked Vietnam as "very serious" at 174 out of 180 countries, one of the lowest in the world and the worst ranking on their five-point scale. Similarly, Freedom House's 2021 Freedom on the Net report classifies Vietnam as "not free" in relation to the Internet, with significant obstacles to access, limits on content and significant violations of user rights.
Prison Journalism Project is an independent, nonprofit organization founded in April 2020 to train incarcerated writers to be journalists and publish their stories. Prison Journalism Project provides correspondence-based lessons on the tools of journalism to incarcerated writers through its PJP J-School program, and it publishes their stories on its online magazine.