Jailhouse Journalism

The Fourth Estate Behind Bars

James McGrath Morris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351511230
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In the 1980s alone, some 100 periodicals were published by and for inmates of America's prisons. Unlike their peers who passed their sentences stamping out licence plates, these convicts spent their days like reporters in any community - looking for the story. Yet their own story, the lengthy history of their unique brand of journalism, remained largely unknown. In this volume James McGrath Morris seeks to address the history of this medium, the lives of the men and women who brought it to life, and the controversies that often surround it.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• Introduction: Putting Down Doing Time
• 1 — Forlorn Hope
• 2 — When Luceppa Bared Her Bosom
• 3 — The Summary
• 4 — The Reformists’ Newspapers
• 5 — The Prison Mirror
• 6 — The Mentor
• 7 — The Subterranean Brotherhood
• 8 — Federal Scribes
• 9 — Can Opener, New Era, and the Wobblies
• 10 — The Rose Man of Sing Sing
• 11 — Harelike Growth
• 12 — Chronicling Wrongful Imprisonment
• 13 — Der Ruf
• 14 — Leaves from a Lifer’s Notebook
• 15 — Yoke of Censorship
• 16 — Bayou Style
• 17 — Fighting Back
• 18 — The First Amendment and the Prison Press
• 19 — Prison Journalism Writes “-30-”
• Epilogue
• Appendix I: American Penal Press Contest Winners 1965–1990
• Appendix II: Prison Publications by State
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index