Ryerson
Review of Journalism magazine | Spring 1996
Hard Labour Jim Campbell's solitary crusade to create a free
press behind bars
by Dominic Ali
Known to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation
and Correction as #170-590, Little Rock Reed is a convicted
armed robber and a journalist with 10 years' experience. Sometimes
it's difficult to tell which trade is more dangerous.
In May 1992, Reed was released on parole after
serving 10 years at the maximum-security Southern Ohio Correctional
Facility. While incarcerated, he reported extensively on Native
American prisoner rights and continued after his release. Ohio
authorities ordered Reed to stop publicly discussing prison
conditions or his parole would be revoked. When he refused,
a warrant was issued for his arrest. Reed promptly took it on
the lam to New Mexico, but like any devoted journalist, he kept
on writing. Among his stories was one predicting--a year before
it occurred--a riot at SOCF due to forced racial integration
within cells.
Last year, Reed convinced a New Mexico judge
that his life would be in danger if he were returned to Ohio.
In addition to refusing to extradite him, the judge agreed that
the Ohio prison and parole authorities' attempt to silence Reed
was a violation of his constitutional rights.
Now safe from the law in his New Mexico mobile
home, Reed continues to stick up for the rights of Native American
prisoners across America. And he continues to send his articles
to Prison News Service, a Toronto-based quarterly paper devoted
exclusively to prison issues, written largely by cons and prison
activists like Reed.
"Chain Gangs in Arizona: Barbarism Revisited,"
"CSC Guard Has History of Brutality" and "Torture in Connecticut's
First Super-max" are typical PNS headlines. Opinion pieces often
contain references to "Amerikkka," "the injustice system" and
"kkkops." Sometimes there are service pieces on topics like
safe sex practices or how to sterilize needles, and advice for
the soon-to-be released. Eyewitness reports from prison correspondents,
written in a tough, street-smart style, are regular elements.
There's even the occasional poem ("I always wonder why we let
freedom fighters/ rot their lives away in some jail/or go down
in murder-for-hire plot/rigged by the state").
PNS's look is surprisingly polished, more
like a college newspaper than an activist publication. Crisp
layout and classic typography make easy to read, and tasteful
line drawings by prison Picassos break up the grey columns of
print. But there aren't many newspapers, college or otherwise,
that run articles averaging 2,000 words. PNS is obviously written
by people with lots of time on their hands.
It's not just the length of stories that makes
PNS unique. In these get-tough-on-crime days, the public doesn't
care about prisoners or prison conditions. According to Peter
Moon, who has covered prisons for The Globe and Mail, the public
is massively ignorant of prisons, penology and criminology,
fed, in a large part, by the media." The mainstream media only
cover prison issues during times of conflict, like riots or
government inquiries. PNS fills in the gaps.
PNS was one of the first to report problems
at Kingston's Prison for Women, three years before the infamous
use of male riot squad members to deal with a disturbance there.
In the March/April 1991 issue, an anonymous article from an
inmate offered recommendations to the P4W warden. Among her
suggestions: replace male work supervisors, because they intimidated
female prisoners who were previously abused by men. It was also
PNS that carried a behind-the-scenes report of a violent 1993
prison riot at Little Rock Reed's alma mater, the SOCF in Lucasville,
Ohio.
Perhaps even more importantly, the paper gives
a voice to people who are usually muzzled. A 1995 article by
Robin "Zakia" Elliot detailed his experiences at Connecticut's
Northern Correctional Institution: "My first eight hours here
were spent (4-pointed) chained naked to a metal bed, forced
to urinate on myself while cold freezing air blew on me, all
because I would not allow myself to be degraded by lying face
down on a filthy dirty concrete floor, while fully chained--an
order that served no legitimate penealogical [sic] purpose."
Given PNS's subject matter and contributors, the paper's editor
is a surprise. Jim Campbell is a tall, gangly 46-year-old "collectivist-anarchist"
who's only been behind bars once: in 1986 he spent 24 hours
in a Chicago jail after being arrested at a political demonstration.
His early years sound like the standard rap
sheet for a child of the sixties. Campbell grew up on an isolated
dairy farm in rural Ontario, just north of Orangeville, and
left to study mathematics then political science at the University
of Waterloo. As a student he became active in various leftist
causes, including antiracism and labour rights, and eventually
left school without a degree.
In 1976, looking for a change, Campbell moved
to Vancouver and became interested in publishing while helping
to produce an anarchist periodical called Open Road. Two years
later he returned to Ontario and lived in a commune, where he
started sending letters as a way to improve his writing skills.
"I'd much rather learn to write by writing, instead of reading
about writing," says Campbell. The future editor of PNS quickly
noticed that prisoners responded faster than other correspondents,
and he soon had a list of regular prison pen pals.
While visiting Toronto, Campbell met a handful
of other activists through the anarchist scene who were interested
in prison reform, and they decided to reprint their jail mail.
The group, taking on the tagline: "The only vehicle for prison
reform is a bulldozer," started Bulldozer magazine. In 1981
Campbell cut his hair, moved to the big city, and got a well-paying
union job, which helped finance later copies of Bulldozer. In
1985, after eight issues, the magazine folded because Campbell
was "personally and politically exhausted." But he maintained
contact with a few friends, including one in Marion Prison,
Illinois.
Two years later, Campbell was contacted by
this correspondent to help produce his newsletter, The Marionette.
At first, Campbell combined The Marionette with a separate section
of news from other prisons called PNS. By 1991, PNS had evolved
into a regular paper assembled by the Bulldozer collective,
a group that includes radical leftists, feminists, activists,
former teen offenders, and ex-cons. Today, the paper has a circulation
of 6,000 and is distributed to over 100 North American prisons.
Finding material for each issue is rarely
a problem. "All need to do prison work is mailbox," says Campbell,
sitting in the small basement office of his dishevelled one
bedroom row house in Toronto's Cabbagetown district.
Each week he retrieves 60 to 80 letters, most
of them handwritten on legal-sized foolscap, from a postal box.
The majority are address changes and subscription requests,
but Campbell also receives about 200 editorial submissions every
two to three months. Of those, 20 to 30 are chosen by collective
for publication in the next issue.
The seven members of the Bulldozer collective
input and proofread the stories, then Campbell does the page
layout on a friend's Macintosh. Story ideas usually come from
the prisoners, but Campbell will sometimes suggest topics for
longtime contributors. And although Campbell says, "Working
with anarchists and ex-prisoners is not the most stable political
milieu," the collective has missed producing only two issues
since the paper's inception.
Because of the large proportion of American
subscribers--3,000 to 200 Canadian ones--PNS consists of mostly
U.S. reports. "We got criticized for not having enough Canadian
content, but we've tried to jump that up," admits Campbell.
But there are a lot more prisoners in the U.S.--1.4 million
compared to 34,000 here--and they tend to be more politically
interested, he adds. Prison politics are racially charged, and
one of PNS's strengths is that it discusses volatile prison
issues without alienating anyone. "People can read a lot of
different viewpoints in PNS, and they can learn a lot, even
if they don't agree with each other," he says.
Unlike mainstream publishers, Campbell doesn't
have to worry about offending advertisers. PNS doesn't have
any. The entire venture is self-supporting, and survives on
subscriptions and donations. The biggest donor is Campbell himself."
PNS is the product of my union job," he says. He estimates that
he put $6,000 into the paper last year, almost two-thirds of
the annual $10,000 budget. Time is his other big contribution.
He spends, on average, 40 hours a week putting PNS together,
on top of his full-time job as a meter reader for the City of
Toronto. "People should work against the system as much as they
work for it each week," he jokes.
But other prison publications aren't as lucky
to have a generous sponsor like Campbell. Joint newsletters
are generally self-published booklets, circulated among inmates
at the institution where they are produced. But these newsletters
often fold due to lack of finances, poor planning and personal
squabbles.
They are also subject to censorship--all inmate-produced
publications must be approved by the warden, and articles criticizing
prison conditions or treatment by guards are rigidly vetted.
"Ultimately, the warden can censor anything, any time and for
any reason," observes Patrick Rafferty, editor of Out of Bounds,
a 500-circulation magazine he produces from British Columbia's
William Head Institution. "Many times the papers will hit on
a touchy subject once too often and get closed down, never to
be heard from again," adds Keith Elliott, staff writer for Louisiana
State Penitentiary's highly regarded news magazine, The Angolite.
Although PNS has editorial freedom, its contributors
are often behind bars, and they face problems not encountered
by mainstream journalists. Zoltan Lugosi knows this from firsthand
experience. He served seven years on drug-related charges at
two maximum-security Ontario prisons. The one-time editor of
Kingston Penitentiary's newsletter, Telescope, received his
high-school diploma in prison, where he also started writing
for PNS. Since his release from Millhaven in September 1994,
he's kept on contributing.
Dressed head to toe in black like a villain
from a spaghetti western, Lugosi becomes wildly animated when
he talks about prison reporting. In a voice that sounds as if
he's smoked hand-rolled cigarettes from birth, he rumbles, "Prison
journalists end up standing alone. Your name on stories with
a controversial issue makes you a target."
Lugosi once wrote an article about HIV risks
in prison. One heroin-addicted inmate thought Lugosi had singled
him out and voiced his displeasure. "When a guy in for murder
threatens you, you tend to take it seriously," says Lugosi without
the hint of a smile. PNS correspondents often face threats from
prison officials as well. "The weirdest thing that's happened
to me as a journalist is the retaliation by the guards and prisoncrats,"
says John Perotti, an inmate at the Southern Ohio Correctional
Facility. In October 1995, Perotti was awarded $10,200 after
an Ohio jury agreed that guards violated his rights by retaliating
against him for writing about prison conditions for outside
publications, including PNS. Correspondents are often locked
down more than 23 hours a day, or isolated in solitary confinement,
which presents unique problems for a cell-block scribe. But
even in the hole, prisoners gather information, write stories
and file their articles with Campbell. Some pass "kites"--letters--to
prisoners bringing them food. In general-population areas prisoners
can talk to each other and see what's going on. Writers also
cultivate reliable contacts and seek out documents when possible.
When working on an article, Little Rock Reed, for example, corresponds
with prison officials to get their side of a story.
Access to writing materials can also be a
problem. Zoltan Lugosi recalls using the rubber sole of his
running shoe as an eraser because he wasn't allowed eraser-tipped
pencils. And Little Rock Reed was once in a control unit where
pencils longer than three inches were banned because they could
be used as weapons. He wrote his reports with a pencil stub
on toilet paper.
Fact-checking stories is difficult since correspondents
must confirm rumours, opinions and hearsay through the prison
grapevine. Campbell admits that it's tough to verify information
from his reporters. Like any newspaper editor, he relies heavily
on long-time contributors who document their sources and his
own intuition and common sense.
The key to fact-checking is maintaining good
contacts on the outside who have access to writers on the inside,
he says. An article about a Kingston Penitentiary prison guard
with a history of abusing prisoners, for instance, was confirmed
by a lawyer working on a related prison case. Like its contributors,
PNS isn't perfect. It doesn't devote much space to women prisoners'
issues, although this could be because of the lack of submissions
it receives from female writers. And occasionally, its hard-core
political opinion pieces turn into literary drive-by shootings.
In the September/October 1994 PNS, a militant black prisoner
wrote an article accusing an alternative publication called
North Coast XPress of racism. Some PNS readers felt the prisoner's
story was offensive and racist.
Professor Bob Gaucher, a University of Ottawa
criminology professor and expert on the penal press, thought
the article was an example of PNS getting caught up in its own
politics. "If the prisoner had been a white person and had written
that way, he would have been called a neo-Nazi and a racist.
I thought it was terrible that Campbell allowed this kind of
pejorative bullshit to go on."
Nevertheless, Gaucher believes PNS fulfills
an important role, and has even used the paper in his graduate-level
classes. "It tends to be polemic, but it's certainly as worthy
of consideration as any dominant Canadian newspaper. The mainstream
press refuses to look at these stories." Which is exactly why
Campbell keeps PNS going--to "educate and organize and agitate."
As he says, "If PNS can help a prisoner develop enough to avoid
the vicious cycle of recidivism, then I think we've scored a
real social victory." Campbell plans to agitate for the next
four years; when he reaches age 50, he'll reconsider his position.
Until then, he plans to print articles that are "interesting,
informative and inspirational."
For its writers and readers, PNS continues
to arm them with knowledge instead of shanks. "In any newsletter
put together by prisoners in institutions, the warden is the
editor," sighs PNS reporter Little Rock Reed, enjoying his freedom
in New Mexico. "And whenever there's an article written by the
mainstream media about prisoners, it's almost like they're written
by the warden too."
