Teaching with American Prison Newspapers: Introduction

American Prison Newspapers is part of Reveal Digital

Reveal Digital develops Open Access primary source collections from under-represented 20th-century voices of dissent, crowdfunded by libraries.

This guide is designed for instructors, who want to facilitate interdisciplinary engagement with the American Prison Newspapers collection for themselves and their students.

This guide serves as a specially curated collection of instructional material and strategies that teachers and students can use to engage with the American Prison Newspaper (APN) collection. All materials in this guide are designed to be used in conjunction with the collection, which is an open access and primary source collection.

On the next tab are two ‘entry points’ into the collection. Through music and poetry, the entry points ease students into the subject matter before doing a deeper, more intensive dive into the collection itself. Each entry point has its own multimedia guide. Instructors can use their discretion in determining what materials they choose to present to students.

The American Prison Newspaper Collection chronicles over 200 years of prison newspapers across the United States from both men’s and women’s facilities. As a result, the collection traces the development and evolution of the American penal system across time, place, and policy. The newspapers demonstrate how people in prison use journalism to educate people on the inside as well as people on the outside about the criminal justice system. As primary sources, they provide crucial information about topics such as solitary confinement, sentencing policies, prison programming, and many more. While reading the newspapers, you can expect to find the following:

• poems
• artwork
• class/event schedules
• letters to/from the editor
• reporting on state laws
• letters of appreciation to staff
• profiles of important civil rights leaders
• entertainment such as crosswords, comic strips, and sudoku
• book reviews
• interactions with other prisons

Educational content for the collection consists of instructional guides, curated reading/viewing lists, and scholarly readings and media to facilitate accessible yet critical engagement with the newspapers. Furthermore, this content is representative of a broad range of fields such as Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, Law, Literature, Women’s & Gender Studies, Education, History, and Criminology & Criminal Justice. Instructors in these fields can use the newspapers in conjunction with their own expertise to provide opportunities for students to engage in small group/whole class discussions or research projects.

The content created for the collection has several aims/purposes:

• To humanize the experiences of incarcerated individuals
• To include a necessary voice within discourse about incarceration and the American penal system
• To support instructors and students using a primary source collection
• To promote independent research and discovery about issues related to incarceration.