When Reporting is a Crime
IEMI Executive Faculty Director Andrew Crespo and IEMI Policy Fellow Corinne Shanahan publish a detailed essay describing how retaliation, surveillance, and censorship stymie prison journalism in the United States.
Prisons are America’s dirty secret. No other institution in the country matches their size, scale, oppressive violence, or racial harm. And no other institution is so entirely cut off from public view. Prisons are built in remote locations, shielded behind wire and walls, and utterly severed from society’s truth-seekers—its journalists, its documentarians, and its scholars—and from the loved ones of those inside. Meanwhile, incarcerated people who dare to share their stories are hamstrung, censored, and punished by those in power.
None of this is accidental. By denying access and information to those inside and the broader public, prisons deny our ability to witness, fathom, and act on the gross violence, unconscionable abuse, and preventable death rampant inside—or to understand the ways incarcerated people find and forge their humanities amidst this violence. Prison journalism is thus a critical ingredient to exposing and undoing the injustices baked into mass incarceration itself. But for decades, the ability to report on the reality of prison life has been stymied—by laws and policies designed to keep nonincarcerated reporters out, and the stories of incarcerated reporters in.
In a free society, attendant to the needs of all its people, including most especially those rendered wards of the state, our government institutions should be held accountable to the public—by a free press. For that to happen in prisons, jails, and detention facilities, legal intervention is essential. Specifically, reporters inside and outside of prisons need meaningful, material, legal protections—and the tools to enforce them. Those protections should codify broad rights of access to prison facilities, to ensure unmonitored and uncensored channels of communication with press, and to guarantee access to the essential tools and resources—including funding and compensation—that will help prison journalism thrive. And they should forcefully outlaw, and provide viable redress for, all forms of retaliation against prison journalists.
In partnership with One for Justice, the impact team working alongside the release of the highly explosive prison journalism film The Alabama Solution, and the community of incarcerated authors and activists at Inquest, we are leading the fight to pursue these necessary changes. With feedback and support from those in the field, we at IEMI are drafting a model bill that we hope will inspire the enactment of Prison Journalism Bills of Rights across the country. In recognizing the critical connection between narrative and the law, we are pairing these efforts with a series in our decarceral magazine Inquest on prison journalism by incarcerated and unincarcerated activists, scholars, and practitioners. And across newsrooms, we continue to pursue just, responsible reporting as a form of movement building through Inquest’s work in the Movement Media Alliance, a coalition of social-justice oriented media outlets that we co-founded in 2024.
Read more about our defending prison journalism work:
Follow Our Inquest Series
Read the latest essays from incarcerated journalists across the nation and the experts and activists working to support them, as they share essential insights into the challenges facing prison journalism in the United States, and the path forward.
Launching New Initiative
IEMI Directors Crespo and Dharia announce the launch of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration’s new Defending Prison Journalism Initiative, in partnership with One For Justice and the impact campaign surrounding HBO’s The Alabama Solution.
The Alabama Solution
Watch the documentary that the Los Angeles Times calls “one of the most shocking, visceral depictions of our carceral state ever put to film.”
No More, Alabama.
Learn more about our partners’ impact campaign in Alabama.