The Prison Journalism Project might have started as a way to help incarcerated people share stories about life behind bars with the wider world, but the organization’s founders always wanted to do more than that.
“We have published more than 2,200 stories from over 700 writers in 34 states across the country. The stories are based on lived experiences, but they’re absolutely journalism,” says Yukari Kane, the other co-founder and the organization’s CEO. “One of our proudest accomplishments is the handbook and certification program.”
“The journalism education side of it was always the foundation of what the Prison Journalism Project was, even when we were growing as a publication and editing people,” says Shaheen Pasha, the group’s co-founder and chief education officer. “For the last few years, we had been working on creating this handbook, a first-of-its-kind prison journalism handbook that we are giving our writers.”
There are a series of 14 self-directed modules in the handbook, released earlier this year to some of the nearly 200 incarceration facilities across the United States where the Prison Journalism Program has writers, helping people progress from beginner to intermediate to advanced skill levels.
“Along the way, they’re earning certificates. They’re beginning to see growth. It’s something they can show people when they come up for parole, to show they’re working toward these things,” she says.
The handbook also contains a risk assessment quiz, developed in partnership with Global Press, to help people understand their own comfort level when it comes to writing different kinds of pieces.
“It’s been amazing,” Kane says. “Our first writers are starting to get their certificates. We’re also seeing where our path forward is. One of the ways it’s made a huge impact is for us to come to terms with the level of illiteracy in prisons. Seventy percent of the U.S. prison population is at a middle school literacy level or below. It’s not a thing about abilities. It’s based on the kind of opportunities and environment they had growing up and in the past.”
This has deepened the Prison Journalism Project’s commitment to the program’s participants in a new way:
“One of the most exciting pivots, in some ways, that we’ve been making is to really ground our journalism training in career readiness and literacy skill building,” Kane says. “We can work with our writers to get the stories we want to get out and help them get the stories they want to get out to shift the narrative and to continue to do this incredible journalism work. But if we can also train them, provide the training with career readiness and literacy skill building, we can also give them tangible skills that can help them in their actual lives.”
Yukari Kane and Shaheen Pasha, co-founders of the Prison Journalism Project, discuss the challenges of creating and implementing a journalism curriculum in order to help incarcerated people find their voice and share their stories with the world outside of prison.
