Climate change, electoral politics, public education, inflation. These are just a few of the issues covered by incarcerated writers with the Prison Journalism Project (PJP). Pacifica Network’s Lisa Loving speaks with Mason Bryan, the Senior Editor of the PJP.
Lisa Loving: Thank you for speaking with me today, Mason. Tell me, what is the Prison Journalism Project?
Mason Bryan: Thanks for having me, Lisa, I appreciate the opportunity to talk about our program. The Prison Journalism Project is a national nonprofit journalism organization that trains writers in journalism and publishes their stories. In a nutshell, our writers come from prisons, mostly state prisons, some federal prisons, in states all over the country; and we work closely with writers in the same way that editors and journalists might work in a traditional newsroom, although with the obvious qualifications to that statement.
Lisa Loving: How did the PJP come together?
Mason Bryan: The Prison Journalism Project was founded during the pandemic by two women, Yukari Kane and Shaheen Pasha. Yukari and Shaheen are both career journalists who had pretty distinguished careers in traditional mainstream journalism. Yukari worked at The Wall Street Journal and Reuters. Shaheen worked at CNN and Dow Jones and other journalism organizations.
They found prison journalism through different means. After Yukari left The Wall Street Journal, she was teaching a prison journalism class at San Quentin State Prison in the Bay Area. She was going into the facility and working with the guys there who ran a newspaper. That was sort of her entree into this world.
Shaheen, on the other hand, comes by this work through a slightly more personal journey. Her best friend was convicted of a crime in the years after 9/11 for which he maintains his innocence. So, she had this very close friend who was thrust into the criminal justice system, sentenced to life in prison. That was her entree. Following his time getting into prison opened the doors to that world for her.
And Tariq MaQbool, the friend who I’m talking about, has become a really important contributor to the Prison Journalism Project. [He] has actually written for a number of outlets other than PJP, including Al Jazeera English and Rolling Stone, in some local New Jersey publications. [He is] incarcerated in New Jersey.
So, taking those two stories, Shaheen and Yukari ended up getting connected. Essentially, they decided that [because] there are a lot of people in this country who were subjected to the worst potentialities of the Coronavirus pandemic and who deserve to have a voice in the first draft of this historic, epochal event, why don’t we start publishing writers inside? It was a very sort of scrappy, two women operation for a while, and then soon there were a handful of volunteers who joined. They started putting up pieces submitted by writers from all over the country on a medium.com website, and they were taking basically anything. They were doing light edits, they were throwing it up, and they were starting to build an archive; and that archive has grown over the last few years to thousands of stories. The organization has become professionalized, has got some attention from some funders, and has started to make a difference. I hope.
Lisa Loving: I have to tell you that I fell in love with this piece called, “When Luigi Mangione Came to Our Prison.” And it’s making my mind tear in half a little bit right now because I want to ask you about the writers, but I’m also curious about the audience. This is news from the frame of incarcerated people; and, yet, this is a website anyone can read. So, talk a little bit about your intended audience.
Mason Bryan: By the nature of the circumstances that people inside have to deal with, they don’t have regular access to the internet. That is not to say that there aren’t people behind bars who have contraband cell phones and can access the internet. But, in general, people behind bars do not have access to the internet, so that leaves [a question about] the audience.
We like to think that our work is helping people on the outside, in particular, loved ones, family members of people who are incarcerated, [to learn] what life is like for their loved ones inside. So that’s our starting point. We know [this] from the analytics and metrics and this stuff that I don’t really understand. And we are widely read by journalists, academics, advocates, lawyers, people in the legal space who are interested in mass incarceration.
But at the core, we are trying to serve a very large percentage of the country. Some studies suggest it’s up to 50% of people in the country who are directly impacted by mass incarceration in some way or another. So a pretty big audience, lots of people with some interest in understanding what’s happening behind prison walls.
Lisa Loving: And yet, when a reader goes to the website and starts scrolling through the stories, some of them are heartbreaking and some of them are hilarious, and it’s a little confusing to me, like I don’t know what I expected there. Can you talk about how incarcerated people get involved in your program?
Mason Bryan: If you don’t mind me responding to your impression of the heartbreak and the humor, this is definitely true. My experience is like this often, too, where I’m reading our stories, or I’m reading submissions from writers, and often the work is very traumatic. I don’t want to sugarcoat that at all.
People experience very difficult things behind bars, terrible, terrible things. But like any space where there’s a lot of different humans, you’re going to encounter the breadth of what humanity is capable of producing. So you have people surviving, enduring, difficult circumstances. But you also have people who, under such circumstances, have figured out ways to survive creatively, to pass the time productively, to make the best of what they’re dealing with. So, you read stories about elaborate meals that people have prepared from the food items bought from the commissary, which is essentially a general store, a gas station type store behind bars. You’ll have stories about the incredible artworks that people have made from materials that would shock people on the outside. A whole range of human experience exists behind bars because a whole range of humans exist behind bars, so I totally hear you on that and experience that same impression a lot in terms of getting involved.
Right now, things are changing a little bit with regards to how we accept submissions and how we work with writers. More to come on that hopefully. But one thing that I thought would be worth saying now is [that] we have a newspaper that goes inside. It’s called PJP Inside, and it has stories that we published on our website, but it also is primarily a training newspaper, a journalism education newspaper. So, it’s shaped like a newspaper, but we have content in its pages that provides information and training about how to do journalism.
We’ll take a story that we’ve published on the website, and we’ll break down that story for readers of the inside newspaper. ‘This is what the lede is doing. This is what the nut graf is doing. This is ways to think about arranging your stories or telling stories.’ So it’s a training newspaper; but, that newspaper, right now, we’ve been sending in as a print copy. Starting soon. sometime this year, [that] newspaper will be accessible on a tablet application called Edovo, an education content platform that hosts a number of different educational apps and programs. There are about 15,000 people, I think, in this country who have access to tablets behind bars and therefore access to this application. So our newspaper will be going on there. We will be able to reach a lot more people that way.
Lisa Loving: Years ago, I had a beloved family member who was incarcerated, and one of the things that the rest of us in the family wanted to know the most was how to support that person. In fact, he was a teenager at the time. And one of the things that strikes me about your website, prison journalismproject.org, is that there’s a whole drop down menu, state by state, about that information. So again, it goes to the audiences that you’re serving, supporters and people on the outside and people on the inside. Can you just talk a little bit about hitting that balance?
Mason Bryan: There’s a balance there, sure.
If you don’t mind, could I ask you what it was that your loved one ended up needing, as far as support. What worked for them?
Lisa Loving: What we really wanted to do was send him books. This was in the California Youth Authority 25 years ago, right before they shut the whole damn thing down because it was so oppressive, and so we couldn’t send him books. We had to photocopy each page of the book and send him the photocopied pages. We couldn’t send cards. I still don’t understand that, but we could send photocopied images of cards. We couldn’t even make sense of what we were and were not allowed to send. And we had the sense that there was a system somewhere that did not want our beloved family member to come out as a whole person.
Mason Bryan: Your experience sounds very familiar. The regulations and systems can feel very Kafkaesque, and they vary from facility to facility and from state to state, and sometimes things will get rejected. You won’t know why it’s been rejected. You won’t hear about it being rejected. It can be very, very frustrating.
Our primary community is writers who are incarcerated now. With that said, we have worked with writers who have gotten out since working with us. And when folks are released, it’s a whole other world of complications and barriers and difficulties, getting back on your feet after being incarcerated for years, sometimes decades. It’s very challenging. One writer that comes to mind is a guy named Ryan Moser who lives in Pennsylvania and has written for publications there, including The Philadelphia Inquirer. He started working with us while he was incarcerated; and, since he got out, he’s been writing for publication. I mean, he’s working really hard. Journalism doesn’t pay out the bills, so he has to work other jobs in addition.
But, we keep tabs on him. Increasingly, we are trying to build a community of formerly incarcerated PJP contributors coming together. Just over Christmas, we had a few folks who have been involved at the program at some point or another come together in a Zoom Town Hall of sorts. And, we shared with each other and talked about the experience of these writers since they’ve been out. And so, we’re trying do more and more in terms of building that community and making sure people still feel like they’ve got a friend in PJP when they get out. We occasionally publish work from formerly incarcerated writers. That definitely happens. That’s another way we stay connected. But, primarily, you know, there’s a lot of people inside and a lot of people who are trying to learn to write and trying to make lemonade out of a really bad situation. And we try to be there for them.
Lisa Loving: I think this is maybe the biggest question I have. What are the issues you’re hearing about from your participants?
Mason Bryan: They span the gamut. Lisa. Overcrowding is an issue you hear about in facilities across the country. Understaffing is another issue that you hear about. Prisons have had a lot of trouble keeping staff, keeping guards; and, when there’s reduced staff, there’s reduced recreation time, there’s reduced freedoms. There’s a whole waterfall cascade of consequences that happens when prisons can’t keep their facilities well-staffed. So that’s something you’ll hear a lot about.
Shower time, for example, is one thing you might get less of if there’s not enough guards for the shift. Drugs behind bars. Addiction, substance abuse issues. That’s a perennial problem. It has gotten worse with the rise of synthetic marijuana and fentanyl. You hear a lot of writers talking about overdoses, talking about solutions to these problems, the need for substance abuse treatment programs. This is something you hear a lot about.
Right now, we are hearing from a lot of writers about the experience of winter in prison. We’ll be publishing a series soon about this. We’ve collected short dispatches from, I think, 27, almost 30 writers from across 17 states about what their experience in winter has been like this year. Very sobering.
So, these are environmental issues, climate change issues. In the same way that they affect us outside, they have particularly impactful consequences for people inside. Staying cool in the summer is hard. Staying warm in the winter is hard. Of course, [it] depends on where you live, on the geography, but that’s certainly a problem. There’s a whole litany of things.
Lisa Loving: And again, the website, prisonjournalismproject.org, it’s huge. It’s a planet. There’s so much on there. I went there expecting certain things, and my expectations were blown out of the water.
Mason, what do you hope will come from the work you’re doing at the Prison Journalism Project ten years from now?
Mason Bryan: It’s a good question. Lisa. Our aims are both modest and ambitious.
Maybe, first and foremost, we want to support writers who have a story to tell in developing their voice, in gaining skills like writing and reporting. That may not translate into journalism jobs after incarceration but may translate into skills that support them in their reentry journey, to other jobs and careers.
So, if we can impact a handful of people in that regard, fantastic. If the stories we tell, the stories we edit, and the stories we package and share with the world can help change people’s minds, can help challenge stereotypes about what life is like behind bars, what people are like behind bars, that’s also fantastic. I would be proud of that. I’d be happy about that.
If we can help cultivate writers who do, in fact, take up the mantle of journalism once they’re out, or take up that mantle with pride and seriousness and professionalism from behind bars and continue to tell stories with integrity and credibility from behind bars, shine light on the things that are happening behind prison walls, that too would be a phenomenal achievement; and we already have some writers who are doing that. I’m very gratified and proud to be part of their journey. So I hope PJP continues to do all of that.
10 years. Man, it feels like a long time right now. So it’s hard to say, but I would love to be hiring formerly incarcerated journalists at Prison Journalism Project and helping us stimulate a flagging journalism industry with fresh writers who have different experiences and can bring something to the table that people without that experience can’t, more experiential knowledge.
Lisa Loving: Something that struck me as I was reading through your website is that I saw reference to the different levels of training that your writers have. Some are going through journalism training. Others are writing from their point of view. Can you talk about that a little bit? There’s different layers of the writing.
Mason Bryan: Absolutely. The vast majority of writers that we work with are amateur journalists. They’re learning how to do this for the first time.
There are, of course, people who have had past lives, some as journalists, some as writers, some as copywriters or at an advertisement, agency, a whole swath of people.
But in general, the vast majority of people behind bars don’t have a high school education. Many people behind bars for a slew of systemic and structural reasons have not received adequate education opportunities that have permitted them to become competent readers and writers. So there’s a whole range of considerations that we have to keep in mind when working with this community of people, including what their reading/writing levels are. So we have tried to develop ways to lower the bar to entry for folks to participate in journalistic conversations, but without having to write. For example, the 1000 word feature story, which is hard enough for me and for many other people, let alone someone who has been denied again and again meaningful education opportunities.
So, [in] this winter project that I mentioned, for example, we’ve been developing what we’re calling a Mad Lib journalism form, which is essentially fill in the blank reporting. I know it’s cold in my prison when blank, and we ask the writer to take that simple sentence and elaborate on it. So there’s sort of a structure there for the writer already, and what’s on them is to report what’s happening in their immediate circumstances. What can they observe? What can they hear? What can they smell?
You know, that’s basic, but the types of information that it reveals is often very profound, often very poignant. It’s very poignant to know, for example, that some writers during the winter wake up next to the toilet that’s in their cell and there’s ice in it, right? And that’s an image that a writer can share that communicates a lot to readers, that maybe communicates more to readers than even a 1000 word story could do.
And, of course, we have writers who are more advanced, who have written 1000 plus word features for reputable journalism organizations, including The New York Times, including The New Yorker, including The Guardian, places like that; but the vast majority of people who we work with and the vast majority of people behind bars may not ever publish a story for The New York Times or The New Yorker, but they have important contributions to make to the discourse around mass incarceration and criminal justice, and we are supporting that.
Lisa Loving: And you also had people who were covering the elections last fall.
You already mentioned how probably half the people in the United States of America have some connection or some impact in their lives from the prison system. We’re talking about the prison system, state, federal, county jails, city jails, all of that. For so long, the United States actually incarcerated more people in absolute numbers than any other country in the world. And so, when I’m reading through your website, when I’m thinking about the work you do, I’m thinking about all the people who have no idea that they are going to be impacted by this, whether it’s their family member, whether it’s something that happens to them.
And now we have a new political administration that seems to be shifting a lot of rules and regulations. It makes me wonder how many more people are set to be incarcerated because of the shift in our politics. And so the last question I have for you is, do you have a sense of something really important about the reality of incarceration in this country that you wish more people understood?
Mason Bryan: I mean, you said earlier, Lisa, that you went to the website and you discovered a planet. I feel that way a lot too [when] reading the work of our writers. And, like any planet, it’s extraordinarily complex, like any sort of civilization. It is complex, and it features all sorts of people experiencing all sorts of different things.
So, I don’t mean to be trite or say something cliche, like there’s so much humanity behind bars, there is; but I think more people would take the time to learn and read about the experiences of real people behind bars. They, like you, Lisa, would be surprised at what they found. I suspect they would be. They would find that they have more in common with people behind bars than maybe they thought, that the ways that we’ve been doing things with regards to corrections and rehabilitation and punishment in this country are having the opposite effects of what is intended. I think people would be shocked in many ways to learn how their tax dollars are being spent with regards to incarceration and the maintenance of prison systems.
There’s so much to learn. There’s so much to be humbled by [in] the experience of people who are incarcerated that it’s worth giving those folks that have, by definition, been marginalized and in many ways forgotten, it’s worth giving them the time of the day. It’s worth stopping to see what it is they can teach you about their experience and about our country.
Lisa Loving: Thanks, Mason.
Mason Bryan: Thank you, Lisa. I really appreciate the time.
Find out more about the Prison Journalism Project.
Edited for print by Diane Reinhardt and Stephanie Schubert