Economic and political factors help to explain the disappearance of most prison newspapers and magazines since the mid-1980s. The U.S. prison population began growing rapidly about 1980 and subsequently became exceptionally large. Mass incarceration contributed to prison crowding and other strains on prison resources and management. In such circumstances, support for the prison press lost out to other prison priorities.

The economics of the prison press have never been favorable. Prisoners editing The Monthly Record at Wethersfield State Prison in Connecticut about 1960 earned 25 cents per day. In contrast, prisoners working in the boiler room earned 75 cents per day.^ Editors of the Angolite in Louisiana State Prison in the late 1970s estimated that they earned about 5 cents an hour.^ Prisoners, like other persons, will write for newspapers and do other work for little pay if they feel such work is important and valued. Income to cover prison press expenses for supplies, printing, and distribution has come from inmate welfare funds, general prison revenue, subscription fees, outside grants, and to a much less extent, advertising. Contributions and grants to the prison press matters materially and symbolically:

Under {U.S. President} Reagan, the NEA {National Endowment for the Arts} severely cut financial aid to fledgling magazines, and by 1984, every journal devoted to prison writing had gone under.^

Prison publications have tightly constrained prospects for subscriber and advertiser acquisition campaigns. Economic pressures easily cause prison publications to fail.

Political problems can also cause prison publications to fail. Prison publications’ editors and supporters have highlighted the role of these publications as members of the “fourth estate.”^ ^ ^ ^ Prison publications could provide the public with information useful for effectively governing prisons and guarding against abuses. Prison publications that are weak, complacent, or co-opted by administration interests might fail to perform these functions. Moreover, the concept of the fourth estate tends to presume that the public has an interest in continually addressing and correcting prison problems. For the public as a whole, that does not seem to be true.

In the early 1970s, prisoners began having some success in getting substantive judicial review of prison administrators’ decisions concerning the prison press. Prior to the mid-1960s, U.S. courts usually took a “hands-off” approach to prison administration.^ That approach subsequently changed. In 1971, prison officials at the Western State Penitentiary of Pennsylvania, for reasons that are not clear, padlocked the office of the prison publication Vibrations. The prison officials refused to allow prisoners to continue publishing Vibrations, and they placed prisoners associated with the publication in solitary confinement. The prisoners turned to the courts for redress of these actions. A U.S. appeals court found that the transfer to solitary confinement, without notice of charges, a hearing, or unusual circumstances, did not meet minimal due process requirements.^ In 1974, a U.S. District Court ordered the Vermont Department of Corrections and the Warden of the Vermont State Prison:

To cease suppression of the January, 1973, issue of The Luparar {a prison newspaper}, to return the copies of that issue that they seized to the editor and staff of the Luparar, to permit that issue to be mailed to subscribers outside the prison, to promulgate regulations dealing with the publication of the newspaper if there is continued interest in publishing it, and to provide a review procedure in those regulations in accordance with that described earlier in this opinion.^

In the early 1980s, California courts ordered prison officials to reinstate an editor of the San Quentin News and to allow that newspaper to resume publication.^ California courts also ordered prison officials to allow the Soledad Star News to publish a cartoon, a photograph, and two articles.^ At the same time, prisoners lost other cases in which they asked judges to overturn prison administrators’ decisions regarding prison publications.^ Nonetheless, by the mid-1980s, prison administrators could no longer be confident that they could control prison publications without concern for judicial review.

Increased judicial engagement with prison publications probably prompted prison officials to avoid creating or sustaining such publications. A perceptive judge observed:

A warden seldom will find himself subject to public criticism or dismissal because he needlessly repressed free speech; indeed, neither the public nor the warden will have any way of knowing when repression was unnecessary. But a warden’s job can be jeopardized and public criticism is sure to come should disorder occur. Consequently, prison officials inevitably err on the side of too little freedom.^

In considering a prison publication case in California, another judge similarly explained:

It is recognized that the department {California Department of Corrections} is under no compulsion to permit the publication of newspapers within our prisons. It has, however, made a stab in that direction but, for its pains, has been subject to a rolling barrage of First Amendment artillery. If the department can live with the guidelines promulgated in this opinion – as I have suggested at the outset, it can – no harm will be done. On the other hand, if it finds the guidelines intolerable, it will simply have to discontinue a worthwhile educational and vocational training program.^

By 1985, five out of seven California state prison newspapers had vanished. One of the remaining two was printed only sporadically.^ Prison newspapers in the three federal prisons had also disappeared. An attorney with the U.S. Bureau of Prisons explained:

“Rather than continue litigating and letting the courts decide what we could print, we took action, “ said John Shaw, an attorney with the Bureau of Prisons. “With no newspapers, censorship isn’t addressed.”^

Hundreds of prison newspapers existed under the “hands off” judicial position prior to the 1960s. The absence of such publications now seems to be of little judicial or public concern.

Legal victories for First Amendment rights, like literary awards, are highly prized. To the extent that such victories hurt the persons made the objects of battle, champions might respond by pointing to the need for further, bigger victories. The Warren Courts’ enlargement of crime defendants’ constitutional rights probably contributed to the rise of mass incarceration.^ Legal victories that the prison press secured in the 1970s and early 1980s similarly contributed to its subsequent demise.

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.