I've spent my summer so far working as an editorial intern for the Prison Journalism Project (PJP), where I’ve been helping to edit and publish stories by incarcerated writers. When I was first invited to join the team, I assumed that I would be transcribing submissions -- these are typically written by hand and transcribed by interns and volunteers. I was thrilled to be given the opportunity to actually use my editorial skills.
This was probably because the Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of PJP, Yukari Kane, knows that I’ve been writing about mass incarceration and prison reform since 2017, when I wrote about James Forman Jr.’s book, Locking Up Our Own, and interviewed her about her volunteer work at the San Quentin News. I’ve been writing on and off about criminal justice since, most recently in an academic research paper about the impact of the Attica uprising on prison reform and in a feature story published in News Decoder about San Quentin State Prison’s in-house periodical, the largest prisoner-run newspaper in the country (William Drummond, the author of the definitive book on prison journalism, Prison Truth: The Story of the San Quentin News, read my article and even commented on my writing.)
I am grateful for the opportunity to work at the intersection of two things I care about -- journalism and criminal justice reform. I’m learning a lot about editing and publishing. Perhaps more important, I’m getting to know the Prison Journalism Project contributors. It’s a much more intimate and personal perspective on a topic that previously felt abstract.
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