The Captive Press

The five men who publish the monthly Menard (Ill.) Time are serving a total of 130 years for felonies ranging from statutory rape to murder. Each workday, in the interests of some 2,350 convict readers, they troop in prison dungarees to the Menard Time* office to practice journalism behind the walls of the Menard branch of the Illinois State Penitentiary. Menard's Editor David R. Saunders has had job offers from several newspapers and a wire service. But it will be a while before he goes to press for pay: he has 32 years yet to serve on a 40-year stretch for murder.

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 Cobina Wright (no alumni). Inside the walls they are consumed with the avidity of men who have nothing but time on their hands. "The Atlantian must be well received," says Associate Warden Virgil Breland at Atlanta. "We don't find the commodes jammed up with torn copies."

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. The

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.

To 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.

Such rehabilitation is a major aim of the prison press--and most wardens are all for it. Says Menard's Warden Ross V. Randolph: "The prison publication is a morale builder, a source of enlightenment, and a medium to educate the public--on the fact that prisoners are people." For such a purpose, the wardens are inclined to suffer occasional lapses in ethical journalism--such as convicts who send messages to their lady friends outside under the guise of news items.

* Named not for TIME but for what the prisoners are spending behind Menard's walls.

* Most famed of convict journalists was the old New York Evening World's talented, sadistic City Editor Charles E. Chapin, sent to Sing Sing in 1919 for the murder of his wife. As editor of the Sing Sing Bulletin, Chapin drove his convict staffers as hard as he had the worldmen, ended up tending the prison flower garden after authorities, unappreciative of Chapin's aggressive editing, suspended publication.

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