How to listen to people who are incarcerated

Beatrix
Beatrix
Sep 7, 2018 · 3 min read

Note: I’m considering serving a New York state prison for my Social J community. This post is meant to address some of the limitations faced by other journalists reporting on the prison system and start thinking about ways other people facilitate reporting with incarcerated people.

Thanks in large part to the National Prison Strike, prison labor has become one of the top stories of the summer. In covering the story, journalists have been reminded that working with the prison community takes greater time and effort than working with other, more accessible populations. Communicating with sources in prison can sometimes require navigating prison access laws and other regulations, meaning that conversations that might have taken minutes over a phone call can take weeks of planning or back-and-forth.

John L. Lennon is one of the few working reporters not bound by those restrictions. “If I want to talk to a prisoner or an officer, I don’t have to get approval from an administrator, don’t have to have subjects sign waivers,” he told Nieman Lab. “With pen and paper in hand, I just talk to people and jot stuff down and write stories. This is my world.”

Lennon, whose reporting has appeared in The Marshall Project, Vice, The Guardian, and other national outlets, is a prisoner at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York State. Serving a sentence of twenty-eight years to life, he lacks access to basic tools like Google and Microsoft Word. But his position on the inside provides him with insight and access that other journalists lack.

Kerry Meyers, the former editor of prison newspaper The Angolite, says that working while incarcerated tipped him to stories other journalists missed completely. When a prison employee took his own life in 2011, most news outlets missed key context surrounding the tragedy. The Angolite broke the story in a print feature. As Meyers wrote in The Marshall Project in 2012:

“Having gone through the criminal justice system from policing to prison, incarcerated people understand the devil is in the details. Trials are full of them, as are sentences, parole, clemency, reentry, and seemingly every other part of the system. Still, reporters tend to gloss over these important issues as though they are incidental. About the details, it seems, journalists are uncharacteristically incurious, substituting easy-to-get official statements for answers to more relevant questions the public might have.”

By listening more closely to incarcerated people, journalists can create more relevant and thorough reporting on American prisons. One of the best ways to listen? Allow incarcerated people to tell their own stories.

In 2017, Razvan Sibii and Shaheen Pasha, two professors at the University of Massachusetts, taught the first Social Justice Journalism class at the Hampshire County Jail and House of Correction in Northampton, Massachusetts. The 10-week class brought students from UMass together with incarcerated people at the local prison to learn how to report on prisons. They were taught reporting basics: the inverted pyramid, interviewing skills, how to write a lede. They read examples of criminal justice reporting from The Marshall Project, Mother Jones, The New York Times, and other outlets. Although the course had the obvious benefits of rehabilitative programming, it also fulfilled a fundamental purpose of journalism: providing valuable and relevant information to citizens. As one instructor wrote in a reflection on the course:

“Society cannot make the best decisions about dealing with the effect of mass incarceration on communities without getting direct input from those living within the system. In teaching inmates to write well and think critically in order to share their stories, journalists can uphold our mission, while also providing valuable educational skills that can be used for rehabilitation when incarcerated individuals are released.”

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