The following story by Joanne Laucius was published in the Ottawa Citizen on July 21, 2009. It features Justin Piché and Kevin Walby, Carleton PhD students who edit the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, an academic journal about prison issues that is written by prisoners.
Academic journals typically work at a glacial pace, with reviewers spending months combing through submissions, followed by interminable rounds of revisions and rewriting.
So imagine editing a journal whose contributors are almost all behind bars, where they don’t have access to a computer or the Internet, conversations are by snail mail and every scrap of paper is vetted by prison censors.
This is the work of the editors of the Ottawa-based Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, the only academic journal to examine the world of incarceration through the eyes of the incarcerated.
“Lots of academics will talk about what prison is like without spending more than a couple of hours in one,” says Justin Piché, a Carleton University PhD candidate in sociology and a JPP editor. “Go to the slammer for a week — or years. I won’t get the same experience of deprivation of liberty that they have.”
There’s a long tradition of writing behind bars. Magazines produced by prisoners are called “joint rags” and in the ’60s and ’70s, radicals including George Jackson and Angela Davis wrote from prison.
But JPP aims at stirring the experiences of prisoners into articles for an academic audience. The journal is peer-reviewed by prisoners, ex-prisoners, professors, graduate students and anti-prison activists. Reviews are done anonymously and there is an editorial board of almost 40 academics.
Submissions may be rejected or require minor or major revisions and must meet the standards of academic writing. Writers can’t use the journal as a soapbox for their own causes — many try — though prisoners may mention personal experience in passing if it is pertinent to the subject.
In one recent article, Rod Carter, the director of the restorative justice program at Queen’s University and an ex-prisoner who was pardoned in 1977, recounts how he “fell deeply and hopelessly in love with the printed word” while serving time in Kingston and Collins Bay in the late 1960s.
At the time, he wrote, missives to administration “were on par with an escape map, a gun carved out of soap or hacksaw blade.”
Another article is about criminology courses taught by ex-convicts and a third is about barriers to acquiring a post-secondary education while inside. (Canada’s correctional service dropped funding for post-secondary education for prisoners more than a decade ago). JPP’s book-review section contains critiques of publications with titles like Prison Sex: Practice and Policy and An Ex-con’s Guide to Getting Ahead in Today’s Society.
A future edition of the journal will focus on “prison tourism” — the practice of researchers and policymakers touring institutions without getting the opportunity to speak freely with prisoners. “It makes us feel like animals in a cage,” one prisoner wrote in a submission to the journal.
Of the 200 paid JPP subscribers, about three-quarters are professors and university libraries and the remainder are prisoners who pay a reduced charge of $11 a year. About 800 more copies are given away free on request.
The journal has received numerous letters from prisoners saying JPP has changed their perspectives on their lives, says editor and PhD candidate Kevin Walby, who got interested in the project while working with a campus group called books2prisoners.
JPP flips the conventional power by allowing prisoners to be the researchers, not the researched, he says. “We’re doing something unconventional by privileging the voices of prisoners.”
University of Ottawa criminology professor Bob Gaucher, now retired, was one of the journal’s founders in 1987.
The article referees are all academics with advanced degrees, but the writers don’t have to be university graduates, says Gaucher. “What they’re doing is ethnographic reporting. If the referees see it as suitable, it gets published,” he says.
Jon Marc Taylor, a Missouri inmate who acquired a PhD while doing time, is a prolific contributor to JPP. Taylor has served about 30 years so far. Online records indicate he was convicted of rape in both Indiana and Missouri.
Asked about Taylor’s convictions, Piché declines to discuss them. “We have a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy,” he says.
Jailhouse writers often submit articles written in longhand, which are transcribed by JPP’s volunteer editors. There is never any explanation of why material bound for prisoners is sometimes sent back to the journal’s office at the University of Ottawa Press marked “return to sender,” says Walby. In one case, a fat package of articles sent to Taylor to aid him in revising an article was held because the prison has a five-page limit for reading material.
“It’s always a hit-or-miss whether it will get through prison censors,” says Walby.
Increasingly, JPP is being cited by other academic journals, a signal that it is getting respect in the ivory tower. The journal is getting students to think about the way they see the prison system, and that’s important because students go on to become professors and decision-makers, says Piché.
Gaucher has used JPP as a text for his students.
“Students really like it. It’s accessible writing,” says Gaucher. “People are amazed prisoners can do something of this quality.”
But gaining respect outside academic circles is difficult.
“I’ve had some e-mails from Americans, really nasty stuff about our writers,” he says. “There’s negativity whenever you do anything with prisoners.”
Visit the Journal of Prisoners on Prison website at: www.jpp.org
Tuesday, July 21, 2009 in News Releases
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