News Inside: What Mainstream Journalism Can Learn From the Radical Humanism of Prison Journalism

Abstract

What might we learn from mainstream journalism’s unfree counterpart in prison journalism? This research centers The Marshall Project’s News Inside, not as an antidote to the unfreedom of prison life, but as a space of significant (if censored) expression and collaboration between free and incarcerated persons. News Inside marks an alternative to the commercial-driven logics of the mainstream press, raising questions about normative notions of journalism’s role in constructing a nation-state-bound version of the public sphere. News Inside asks what it means for a collective of people who have been unpublicked by the state to create publicity.