an essential way we center
the voices of the people directly
impacted by the issues we cover

The best people to talk to about working with incarcerated writers are the ones already doing it. Local advocacy groups, prison writing programs, and university programs may already know talented writers they can connect you with. Make sure to search your own outlet’s archives—your colleagues may have even done stories on prison writing programs in the past.

Within the journalism community, there are also newsrooms doing incredible work to support other outlets that want to work with incarcerated writers. Scalawag Magazine has a Press in Prison landing page, where you can find a guidebook, resources, and stories they’ve published by incarcerated writers. Empowerment Avenue is a fantastic organization co-founded by then-incarcerated writer Rahsaan Thomas that harnesses outside volunteers to support dozens of writers across the country and help them get published and paid for their work.

We love seeing the work of our incarcerated writers published in more outlets—as a small newsroom, The Appeal can’t possibly publish all the amazing journalism our writers produce. So please contact us or our writers directly. This is a core reason we do what we do: to help our incarcerated writers develop thriving careers as journalists. 

Like most freelance writers, many incarcerated writers want to be sought out by, and build relationships with, editors, so looking at existing published writers is a great place to start.

Here are some good lists:

The criminal legal system is opaque, confusing, arbitrary, and fragmented. Working with incarcerated writers will require a commitment to building a (highly valuable!) skillset and navigating complex systems. Here are some key things to know:

1. Reaching Out

Say you’ve identified a writer you’d like to contact, how do you do that? Start with your state Department of Corrections website and use their lookup tool. You will usually need to know the writer’s full name and facility name (the name of the prison). This will generate an ID number that you will use a lot, so keep it handy.

2. Communicating

There are a myriad of ways—and strict rules—to communicate with people inside, and these are different at every facility. The main tools you’ll use are:

3. Privacy

It’s critical to remember that no communication you have with an incarcerated person is completely private. All mail and e-messages are monitored and screened, while phone calls can be recorded. If you want to speak about sensitive information, anonymous sources, or other information that could put your writer or sources at risk, that is best to do in person, where possible, or over the phone.

Better yet, spend a bit of time creating a short policy about how you communicate with incarcerated people and sources. 

Here’s an excerpt from The Appeal’s Harm Minimization Guidelines on communicating with incarcerated people:

1. Editorial

Just as you’d adjust your processes to accommodate different needs and resources for staff members and freelancers in the community, you’ll need to do the same to work with incarcerated freelance writers. 

Many incarcerated writers—though not all—have access to tablets, but these possess incredibly rudimentary word processors. Here’s some tips on how to navigate the editing process:

2. Communication

It may seem a little strange at first, but involving a third person in the editing process can be helpful.

Some incarcerated writers will work with outside volunteers or loved ones who can send traditional emails or messages to editors on their behalf.

Even if this isn’t the case, we recommend getting contact details for an incarcerated person’s loved one. On more than one occasion, we’ve had a writer suddenly stop responding. By speaking to their loved one, we were able to learn that our writer had been moved to COVID isolation, the prison was on lockdown, or our writer had been moved ahead of a legal proceeding. 

These sorts of delays are par for the course, so keep notions of deadlines very flexible!

3. Revisit Your Style Guide

Since 2018, The Appeal has used person-first language when talking about incarcerated people and, when working with incarcerated writers, we follow their lead when it comes to preferred terminology. If you use language that feels exclusionary to your writers, you may undermine your entire effort by causing both hurt and harm.

Here’s The Appeal’s Policy and some People-First Language examples:

We identify people as people first, never by their carceral status or a crime they may have committed. This includes:

• Use of language that is empathetic but fact-based
• Treating people as the full, complex human beings they, and we all, are
• Checking ourselves on whether a desire to use certain phrases or processes is a futile attempt to uphold a false notion of ‘objectivity’.

Some examples from The Appeal’s Style Guide:

We make a constant effort to update our style guide and practices in response to changing norms and requests from impacted people, particularly when it comes to preventing stereotypes. If your policy is to always mention the crime someone was convicted for, ask why. The question we always come back to is, “Is this relevant to this exact story?”

See this excerpt from The Appeal’s Harm Minimization Guidelines:

Include only relevant information. It is a judgment call on when to include information on a person’s criminal record and/or charges they’re facing. If it seems important to include, publish only relevant information (ie. if we’re telling a story about a potential wrongful conviction or police abuse of someone accused of murder, their drunk driving conviction from 10 years earlier is not relevant and shouldn’t be included). 

Never include lurid/gory details.

If mentioning someone’s crime is non-negotiable for your outlet, do not just include it without discussing it with an incarcerated writer first as they may, like any writer might, choose to withdraw their work

3. Commission More

First-person essays about life inside are vital to the public’s understanding of the incarcerated community’s experiences. But, we urge you to keep expanding your work with incarcerated writers beyond narrative pieces. There are many talented writers in your local prisons who have not just remarkable skills but access to sources your reporters will simply never have. So work with them to investigate and report out critical local stories — our incarcerated writers have won multiple awards for their social justice and investigative reporting.

Paying incarcerated writers is complicated and scary for many outlets. States have different regulations around how and when you can pay people who are incarcerated, and methods of payment are not always straightforward.

At The Appeal, we are committed to paying our writers for their work. If you’d like to chat more about this, please reach out to us — we’d love to talk with you.