Privileging the Penal Press: Inverting the Hierarchy of Credibility in Historical Prison Research

• In Event: Seeing Punishment: Understanding Incarceration and Structural Violence Through Visual Data

Abstract

The historical period leading up to the era of mass incarceration saw significant labor mobilization behind bars. Prison administrators of this time shaped dominant narratives surrounding prison labor struggles through unbalanced access to news media and presumed credibility in the public eye. To combat this, imprisoned organizers increased production of their own newspapers, through which they broadcast the agenda of this growing movement and presented the grievances and perspectives of the self-styled “convicted class.” For the prison researcher, this jailhouse journalism reveals valuable insights from the vantage of incarcerated activists and organizers pursuing legal personhood and improved labor rights and protections. This talk details methodological insights from an ongoing analysis of prisoner-produced archival materials, including over 1,000 articles and other entries published in prison newspapers as well as additional documents produced by prisoners’ union organizations. It describes the process of gaining access to such data as well as techniques of qualitative content analysis useful for analyzing them. This reveals the value of interrogating such data as part of broader efforts to invert “hierarchies of credibility” that traditionally obscure the perspectives of marginalized actors like the imprisoned themselves.

Author

• Michael Gibson-Light, University of Denver