Yukari Kane is a professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. She has previously served as an instructor at University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and she is currently an adviser at San Quentin News, the United States’ only prisoner-run newspaper.
She is also the best-selling author of the acclaimed novel, Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs, which was translated into seven languages. In 2011, Kane earned the distinction of a Gerald Loeb Award finalist for her work on a WSJ internet privacy series team.
Today, Yukari Kane is the co-founder and co-director of the Prison Journalism Project, a nonprofit organization working to cultivate journalism within prisons across the country.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Harvard Political Review: For those who aren’t familiar with your organization, what type of work does the Prison Journalism Project do?
Yukari Kane: We train incarcerated writers in the tools of journalism, work with them on articles and essays, and get those stories out through our own publication at prisonjournalismproject.org, as well as by working in partnership with outside media organizations.
HPR: What types of outside media organizations does the Prison Journalism Project work with, and what do those partnerships look like?
YK: Well, we talk to everybody! For example, we worked with our correspondent at San Quentin State Prison, Joe Garcia, who is also an editorial associate for us, and he came up with an awesome idea about making a case for why prisoners should have internet access. It’s about how internet literacy is a necessary skill to succeed in life and if inmates are to have any shot at reentering society, then they need to be equipped with those tools.
Because prison journalism is not a big thing and there are few prison journalists, we train them to be journalists. We train them in how to think like journalists, and then we work on developing those skills and work with them on journalistic articles, reported essays, op-eds, etcetera. And then, especially when it comes to something like this MIT article, we’ll help them develop the idea, we’ll do a back and forth, and we’ll do some drafts before we send them out. On the other end, we often play intermediary, making sure that once the story goes out, they of course need to be paid. And if necessary, we’ll work with them so they’re filling out the forms correctly, and we’ll generate the invoice on their behalf. There’s a lot of stuff that happens in the real world that we don’t think about. And so we do that. Training that we’re providing is not for the writers to be exclusive to us — it’s to really try to get them out there.
HPR: What inspired you to establish the Prison Journalism Project?
YK: My partner Shaheen Pasha and I started this, and so, there are really two stories here. Shaheen and I are both journalists with about 20 years experience. Neither of us had any contact with prisons, but her childhood best friend got convicted of murder in New Jersey and was sentenced to 150 years. And so for Shaheen, that really changed everything. It just made her see a population that we really don’t see if you’re not touched by it directly, and made her aware of the dearth of opportunities for them inside and the lack of intellectual stimulation. Later on, as she became a professor at UMass Amherst, she started volunteer teaching at the local jail, and she taught journalism. That was probably her first realization of all the possibilities, and she got a Nieman Fellowship to explore this idea of creating a program and prison journalism programs nationwide; one of the reporting research trips she took was to San Quentin State Prison in California, which is where I was working.
I’ve been at Reuters, I’ve been at the Wall Street Journal covering business and technology, and I was covering the movers and shakers and the people with lots of money. I was covering stuff all the way at the opposite spectrum of where we are today. I began teaching at UC Berkeley, where I had an opportunity to teach at San Quentin, which has the only completely inmate-run newspaper in the country. And one of the programs that they offer is called the Journalism Guild, and it’s an intro to journalism program meant for guys who wanted to write for the paper. I developed a curriculum for them, created a reader, and that’s when Shaheen and I met. We really hit it off, and we decided to launch the Prison Journalism Project to expand prison journalism education inside prisons. That’s where we actually got our start about two years ago.
A year ago when the pandemic hit, we just felt like there wasn’t enough information coming from inside prisons. It was clear that prisons in general were not doing the best job at dealing with the pandemic and San Quentin in particular was the site of one of the worst outbreaks in the country. We just also really felt like it was important that these voices be a part of the historical record, and I think it was really clear that we were in this historical moment. History is littered with moments where voices like the men and women inside prison are not recorded or even noted in history, and so we created this publication on Medium thinking that we’d just collect some pandemic stories and publish them. And then George Floyd got killed and the Black Lives Matter movement was refueled, and so writers had a lot to say about that too. That’s when we realized that there was a lot that they wanted to write about, and that there was a way that we could take our background and experience and network inside the industry, to really develop prison journalism and help shape how that should look.
That really coincided with self-reflection in the journalism industry where a lot of my colleagues and a lot of people in industry were just thinking about how we can bring more equity into journalism. It’s traditionally an industry that is populated by people with high levels of education, mostly white, and elitist, at minimum. So, in some ways I think the time was right. Right now, we’re doing this work where we’re trying to figure out what journalism from inside prison looks like, and how to make sure that it has the integrity that the industry demands.
HPR: The idea of some voices being excluded deliberately or implicitly from the historical record brings to mind the massive waves of social changes occuring right now. In this historical moment, what do you think the impact of work like yours will have in sharing the stories of incarcerated people?
YK: We hope it’ll have an impact in a lot of different ways. One is that, at minimum, the stories will be here when historians look back, when researchers look into things, when reporters like yourself are wanting to learn more, our stories are going to be out there to be found. We know that there are researchers, and we have a very focused subject and region tab, keyword system in our search function, because they do come to our site and look for stories. And so that’s one way that we hope will have an impact.
I think the other way is just contributing to the discourse in society, not just in the media, but more broadly. I think on a personal level, we know that our writers really feel empowered, they feel seen and they feel more connected with society, and I think that that is another way that we can have impact. And collectively, I think these stories are about shifting the narrative. We tell our writers that we want them to bring their stories alive, 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.
Journalistically, I think there’s real potential impact to be had. We’re still just getting started, we’re in the incubation stage, we’re still developing a lot of the training materials. But if our writers do the work of journalists from inside prison, which happens to be one of the largest industries in this country, and the coverage about it tends to be controlled, what is the information we can find, and how can it inform all the conversations that are happening right now about how this system needs to be changed?
HPR: As you mentioned earlier, there aren’t a lot of prison publications in existence today in the United States, so would you mind discussing why that is, and if you’ve ever encountered any sort of hostility when trying to integrate the Prison Journalism Project in different prisons nationwide?
YK: To the best of our knowledge, there were upwards of 150 prison newsletters and newspapers around the 1950s, and we guesstimate that there’s less than 10 today. The reason for that is firsty, the criminal justice system and the mass incarceration system has become more punitive. Budgets have been cut. And then, perhaps most importantly, there have been key court decisions that gave prisoners First Amendment rights. I believe that one of the biggest cases was in the 80s. And so, wardens responded, of course, by saying, “Well, if we can’t control the content, then we’re just going to take away the paper.” And therein lies a really interesting journalistic question because writers inside prison today have First Amendment rights, but they don’t have the freedom. They don’t have the agency of other physical beings. They’re not free. And so, they might be able to write whatever they want, but there’s a lot that could be done to them, which makes it very difficult for them to get those stories out.
Right now, we haven’t had a lot of resistance, which may be partly because we’re flying under the radar. We’re still getting word about ourselves out there. Our writers are still training to be journalists and so, we’re figuring out with them what kind of journalism can be done from inside. But as we do more of this work, we do expect that prisons will have a problem with this. One of the things that the pandemic did was allow us to figure out that we don’t have to work with prisons to get their stories out, that we could work with them individually, that they do have the freedom, they do have ways of communicating with us. We work with them through U.S. postal mail. We’re the USPS’s biggest fans. We work with them through JPA and Corrlinks, which are electronic messaging systems as well.
HPR: Since you mentioned how the pandemic is impacting the kind of stories that prisoners are producing, and in turn, shedding light on different policy changes that need to be made, how do you anticipate the Prison Journalism Project reaching legislators to enact a lot of these reforms, by not only spreading awareness but by promoting actionable change?
YK: One of the walls that exists in journalism is between journalism and advocacy. And so, we ourselves would probably not do the kind of advocacy work where we’re trying to affect a specific change or we’re trying to directly influence policy. However — anybody who’s covering this space — our job is to expose problems or shed light on areas where we want to invite readers to think about the way things work or draw questions about how things are working. I think the first step is to get the information out there. The policymakers could give us ideas for stories, but we do think a lot of criminal justice effort goes into policy, and we just think that journalism is complementary because, ultimately, voters have to vote on the policy. There has to be a bigger shift in mentality. The way that we’re approaching this is that we want to work with our writers to shed light from inside. There’s great work being done from the outside by ProPublica by the Marshall Project by The Washington Post. There are a lot of publications that are paying more attention to this and there’s great work being done from the outside, but inside, there’s 2.3 million people and maybe less than five known prison journalists. There’s just a limit to how much can be covered from outside, and so, we want to try and fill in that missing piece.
Image Credit: Yukari Kane.
