Word: prisoner
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Island Lantern, monthly magazine of the U.S. penitentiary at McNeil Island, Wash., was once a week late because of heavy fog: staffers were denied access to a remote warehouse where cover stock was cut. On the Observer, biweekly paper at the California State Prison at Folsom, reporters must be checked through as many as four inside gates in chase of a story. San Quentin's News has not etched its own engravings in years-not since some handsome counterfeit currency was traced to the prison print shop...
...Menard prison's eight-page, tabloid-size monthly newspaper is one of the best of some 200 publications produced by and for convicts. As a whole, they make for one of the more captivating aspects of the nation's press. They vary widely in style, from muddy mimeographs to a glossy, three-color quarterly, like the Atlantian at the U.S. penitentiary in Atlanta. Their circulation can be impressive: the biweekly press run of the San Quentin News is 10,000 copies, 1,481 of which go by mail to paid subscribers, including Actor Jack Palance and Society Columnist...
Editor at Large. The prison press must publish under conditions that would ulcerate an editor on the outside. Personnel turnover can be high or low, but it is never stable; for one issue the Utah State Prison's Pointer News had an "Editor at Large" on the masthead after its editor in chief resigned suddenly by escaping prison. Cell-block correspondents are notoriously jealous authors, who quit in pique at the slightest editing of their copy...
...some degree, all prison publications are censored. Newsmen at Folsom are ruled by instructions to show "mercy and kindliness" in print, "beware of seekers of free publicity," and avoid prison idiom, e.g., "isolation area" instead of "the hole." But the Angolite at the Louisiana State Penitentiary has published a cell-block correspondent's story griping about the chow. And the Menard Time recently printed a convict's poem to prison guards which began: "The screw stomps in on big flat feet...
Willing Wardens. Convict journalists* have responded to the qualified freedom they enjoy by turning out respectable papers and-in increasing numbers-respectable workmen. After spending 33 of his first 45 years behind bars, Morris Rudensky, alumnus of several prison periodicals, is a successful copywriter for Brown & Bigelow, a big and successful advertising-specialities firm in St. Paul, whose president also served prison time years ago. A former editor of the San Quentin News now operates three weeklies in Northern California...