Formal Communicative Challenges of Prison Publications

face of a prisoner

In addition to economic and political challenges, prison publications face less appreciated formal challenges. Writing in 1910, a penal authority highlighted issues of style and tone in describing the contents of prison publications:

Long familiarity with many of these institution papers has revealed the pleasant fact that one may look in vain for “cant” in them. … The religious side has due prominence in most, but it is a sane religion, that appeals to reason and inspires to better living. …

There is almost nothing of the “goody-goody” style of writing in the articles contributed by the men themselves. If they have any advice to give, they chose language that meets their fellow convicts halfway. …

It is quite as important in prison literature to avoid unwise use of even good material as in speaking to the boys in chapel. A brilliant superintendent once said that, “Washington’s little hatchet and the prodigal eating husks are the bugbears of reform schools”….

There are articles on juvenile courts, on probation, on the indeterminate sentence, all with the right tone. …

But jokes! There is hardly one which does not show its American sense of humor by the jokes in every cranny and corner. Most are copied from other papers. They are not always very funny, nor always in good taste, though never vulgar. Here more than elsewhere a certain amount of slang finds vent.^

In the late twentieth-century, prison publications highly respected in scholarly discourse are styled as uncompromising, hard-hitting, rabble-rousing, fiercely independent, real, and anti-capitalist.^ ^ Prison publications’ lack of political consciousness of the overwhelming predominance of men in prison has never garnered scholarly mention. A prison editor observed, “Editing a penal publication is a delicate undertaking … if it is to serve any purpose beyond that of a provincial diary.”^ Seeking public significance implies communicating in a public style sharply distinguished from that of a provincial diary.

Prison publications seeking to be publicly significance face the challenge of sides. Prison publications often attempt to inform the public about prisons and prisoners. At the same time, prison-press editors are keenly aware that their readers often seek to determine what side a prison publication is on:

Reduced to essentials, it seems to be an either-or proposition – either the prison newspaper attacks the administration or it is against the inmates.^

A study of the Canadian prison press in the 1960s observed:

the format, style and substance of the prisoners’ publications became an important point of contention within prison populations. The population’s demand that their magazines more stridently air prisoner’s grievances was made in a period when censorship was heavy and administrative demands were largely in contradiction with those of the prisoners. This is played out in the pages of this press with the endless discussion and editorial commentary on the question of tone and content – bitterness and “crying” charges being countered with exhortations to be positive or to write more substantial critical analysis.^

A leading prison newspaper editor in the U.S. in the 1940s noted:

Being a prison editor meant walking a tightrope between officials and convicts, unable to tell the whole truth about either. I couldn’t give officials deserved credit without getting my back chewed on for being a handshaker, nor scream too loud about bad prison conditions without being listed as an agitator.^

Censorship through the force of prison officials affects what appears in prison publications. So too do reader demands to be on a side. Like non-prison newspapers, prison newspapers have universally covered sports.^ Sports reporting personally distances attention to sides.

Readers’ demands also arise from formal expectations and conventions. Readers expect texts of particular types to perform in particular ways. A prison newspaper editor explained:

Like an oil portrait, a prison cell or a poem, a penal publication is shaped as much by what is left out as by what manages to get in. To begin with you’ve probably read a thousand wet-eyed stories about inmates already. We mean every time you pick up any outside magazine or newspaper there’s some creepy article about them written by a social worker with a smug attitude, or a tower guard with a chip on his shoulder, or an ex-inmate who had a nagging mother and a lousy alcoholic father and a sister who was a you-know-what. … The truth about prison life won’t take you into a slick palatable fantasyland of Noble Savages or elegant gonifs with hearts as big as Alaska. Forget about that Disneyland stuff – those ideas are strung together like sausage links; just when you think they should end, along comes another piece of baloney.^

Another prison newspaper editor observed:

Many {persons outside prisons}, if they think of prisons at all, think of them either as places where men are subjected to all sorts of physical and spiritual torment and brutality – which is seldom true these days – or as reformation factories where erring offenders are magically transformed into tame and respectable and productive members of society –which has never been true. They think of prisoners as either Burt Lancaster in stripes, if they are romantically inclined or have read much cheap fiction, or as totally evil and degenerate and feebleminded types who are better off in prison anyway.^

Effective characters in public discourse are stereotypes – social worker, alcoholic father, Noble Savage, Burt Lancaster, you-know-what. Archetypes are deeply rooted in the human psyche. Widely circulated public works use and create archetypes and stereotypes.

Consider Jack Henry Abbott. In 1965, while in prison for forgery, Abbott stabbed to death a fellow inmate. He later escaped from prison, committed a bank robbery, and was recaptured. In 1977, Abbott read that Norman Mailer, a prominent author, was writing a book about a person who had been convicted and executed for murder. Abbott began to correspond with Mailer. With the help of Mailer, Abbott’s letters to Mailer were published in 1981 as a book entitled In the Belly of the Beast. Abbott, like Mailer, became a celebrity. Vigorous public support helped to win Abbott’s early release from prison. The editor of an anthology of prison writings described more of the story:

David Rothenberg {a prominent New York theater publicist who founded for ex-prisoners the Fortune Society and served as its executive director for 18 years} recently described Abbott on his second day of liberty, sweating through an appearance on Good Morning, America, in which Mailer answered Abbott’s questions for him. Rothenberg invited Abbott to drop by the Fortune Society for help with the deinstitutionalization process. Abbott was not interested. Within a month, he had killed a man in a fight. The romance between writers and convicts had run its course, and prisoners were out of fashion in the eighties.^

Fashions, like prisoners, have many more dimensions than being in or out. Nonetheless, public works tends to generate a battle between two champions, a story of good versus evil, and representations of characters much less complex than real persons.

The prison press has sought to communicate that prisoners are people. A prison newspaper editor about 1963 forthrightly declared:

We hope to communicate to the public that we are men and women, not ogres, as they so often believe.^

A scholar of the penal press observed:

In trying to show that “we are people, too,” these editors rely on news about the worthy activities and projects of inmates, but they also make a direct “pitch” in columns and editorials. Scores of articles, though the words are different, are on this same theme. Typical of these is the following from the Marquette {Michigan} Weekly Progress:

“Contrary to the opinion of many, convicts ARE people. They are just people. …

Convicts ARE TOO people.” ^

Public texts are not formally oriented to communicating personal existence. Personal existence is experienced in personal encounters that public works don’t provide.

Suffering is a formal problem for public works. Violence and pain attract attention. A poet explained the problem:

Human tragedy is naturally compelling and the telling of human pain has always had an insidious attraction for human beings; yet after a while, a tale poorly told will grow tiresome and the listener numb to its details, to the pain. Such tales tend to fade away, to be put aside. The ones that last are those that transcend the pain.^

An artist who hopes for something more than just enduring fame confronts a conflict in writing for the public:

Yet, for the artist, a strange conflict remains, for if the artist has suffered, … he or she does not want the art to be read simply as art, as something that transcends the details of its history, the details of the moment, the details of the cause.^

In a review of poetry by a prisoner who experienced ineffable horrors, a reviewer wrote:

The literature of suffering – though it seems tacky to think of it as a genre – often invites us to wonder whether appalling experiences are somehow “worth” the poetry they can inspire. Abani gives us a terse answer: no.^

The review concluded by urging readers, as a matter of duty, to read Abani’s book:

The least we can do, belittled as we can’t help but feel, is listen to it.^

Emphasizing the public’s duty to read public works won’t sustain them. Emphasizing the public’s duty to read public works won’t make public works into a communicative form other than what they are.

The collapse of the prison press since the mid-1980s anticipated more recent difficulties in the press outside of prisons. Newspapers traditionally have sought to obscure the personality of reporters and highlight information of general public importance. Information of general public interest is now widely available through a multitude of online sources. At least in the U.S., post-World War II newspapers embraced a style of professional detachment and neutral viewpoint. They also claimed special public importance and journalistic privileges. Digital networks that allow anyone to make works available to everyone makes that style and those claims less interesting and less credible.

Public works are a poor form for some important communication. A prisoner who won a PEN literary award declared:

When I won the award, it gave me an overwhelming sense of acceptance. I now felt that I had something to offer humanity.^

The award that this prisoner won is given to only one author per year. Seeking such an award is an exceedingly inauspicious path for persons to gain a sense of acceptance. Public works are something that persons offer other than themselves. Humans owe nothing to humanity other than themselves. Public works obscure that reality. Only in personal communication is an offer of nothing more than oneself satisfying.

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