Dorothy Maraglino awaited her C-section operation while chained to a hospital bed. Before deputies drove her to the medical center for the birth of her child, they cuffed her hands and shackled her ankles with leg irons. After her penal institution refused her desperate, repeated appeals for permission for her mother, sister, or any one of her family members to be present in the delivery room during the birth, she had no choice but to sign her unborn child’s life away to a virtual stranger through adoption. As she went into labor, “The monitor showed that I was having contractions, but I could not feel them,” she wrote. “My body felt so disconnected from me.”
Aside from hushed whispers shared on time-restricted payphone calls and in brief exchanges with visitors through glass walls, as one warden noted, inmates are “literally buried from the world.” Save for the occasional public scandal, stories from behind jailhouse walls rarely ever enter the public sphere. This lack of information and understanding fosters the pervasive notion that incarcerated individuals somehow belong to another, lesser class of humanity than that of free citizens.
Lorie Goshin, associate professor at Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing in New York and the lead investigator of a recent study about the treatment of incarcerated pregnant women, notes that, “We dehumanize this group of women to such an extent that we don’t see how wrong [shackling pregnant prisoners] is – just how unnecessary and cruel it is.” According to a 2017 criminal justice report from the American Psychological Association, “Women subjected to restraint during childbirth report severe mental distress, depression, anguish, and trauma.” Psychiatrist Terry Kupers observes that, “Women who get locked up, tend on average to have suffered many more childhood traumas,” and as a result, prison staff must “be very careful that we do not re-traumatize them because re-traumatization makes conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder much worse.”
Amy Ard, executive director of Georgia nonprofit Motherhood Beyond Bars, highlights how the psychological trauma of shackling damages incarcerated mothers’ self-image. Many question how they can see themselves as competent parents, with the capacity to care for their children, if they are also perceived by society as someone who needs to be jailed or chained. By limiting prisoner contact with the outside world and carrying out unseen abuses behind the walls of penal institutions like those that Dorothy endured, the U.S. criminal justice system has established structural barriers to bridging the rift between incarcerated and free individuals in the minds of the public.
In an effort to disrupt this culture of isolation and lack of awareness about the true nature of maternal health in prison, Dorothy is one of many inmates who contribute to the Prison Journalism Project, a forum for incarcerated Americans to openly share their stories and provide the public with insight into their daily experiences behind bars. The PJP’s mission is to “help incarcerated writers and those in communities affected by incarceration tell stories about their world using the tools of journalism: gathering and testing facts, writing with nuance, texture and insight and reaching a thoughtful audience.”
Approximately one in three Americans have a relative who is currently serving or formerly served time in jail or prison. The powerful memories that dwell in the minds of detainees also loom heavily over the daily lives of their family members. The experience of incarceration haunts the lives of all those touched by the criminal justice system. Even after prisoners are released, when they often have difficulty gaining employment and readjusting to life as a free civilian, the Prison Journalism Project not only offers convicts a vehicle to express their voices, but also, it provides them with vital career skills, opening the door to unique employment opportunities and writing careers once they enter the outside world. For example, the recidivism rate of former staff members of the San Quentin News (a prison publication that PJP partners with) is zero.
Today, there are less than ten prison publications in existence, yet there were once more than 250 prison publications circulating in the late 1950s. Over time, however, the majority of these newspapers were dismantled due to insufficient resources and uncooperative prison administrative institutions. Despite burgeoning interest and high success rates in prison journalism programs, the broad majority of prisons and prisoners still lack access to journalistic support or teaching materials.
The resulting inability to broadly share the stories of incarcerees has brought about devastating consequences for the historical record, especially during a moment as pivotal as the COVID-19 pandemic and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Though these events have both disproportionately impacted people of color, who comprise a significant majority of the U.S. prison population, coronavirus fatalities, and victims of police brutality, their voices have largely been excluded from the conversation. Yukari Kane, co-founder of the Prison Journalism Project, noted in an interview with the HPR that “history is littered with moments where voices like … the men and women inside prison just are not recorded, they’re not even noted in history.”
As a volunteer for the PJP, in transcribing and fact-checking meaningful stories written by incarcerated journalists, I have witnessed first-hand that prison newspapers are a vital resource worthy of being fostered by prison administrations. Prison journalism is not just beneficial for reducing recidivism rates and creating job opportunities for inmates once they are released, but it is also a vital resource for shedding light on abuses and injustices that occur in prisons yet are often silenced. Kane explains, “We tell our writers that we want them to bring their stories alive and outside the echo chamber, and so when people are voting on policy or when they’re having dinner table conversations, these are writers who they see in their minds when they say something about criminal justice.”
The cruelty of life behind bars is often exacerbated by the all-encompassing dehumanization of being silenced. While visiting the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, infamous for its psychological torture practices, Charles Dickens once condemned “this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.” Worse yet, Dickens observed that, “ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye,” as the prison “extorts few cries that human ears can hear.” In an environment where inmates are deliberately disconnected from the outside world and often sustain significant physical and psychological trauma, journalism among incarcerees is essential. It offers convicts a rare chance to expose their anguished cries to be heard by human ears around the world and shed light on stories that have been silenced for far too long. Prison publications must be instituted and maintained nationwide — with or without cooperation from prison administrations.
Image by Emiliano Bar is licensed under the Unsplash License.
