On July 9th, 2025 The Carceral Studies Journalism Guild (CSJG), Yale University’s Justice For Everybody Initiative (JFE) and All Of Us Or None (AOUON) convened at the inaugural Inside Knowledge (IK) Carceral Journalism Symposium at Valley State Prison (VSP) in Chowchilla, CA.
The symposium featured presentations from resident journalists and delivered an immersive interactive workshop experience for participants where they co-produced the CSJG’s “My Teachable Moment” series, a first of its kind in person, nonfiction, live narrative documentary of testimonials from incarcerated people. Participants were able to share about the person, event, or insight during their incarceration that helped to shape or impact their transformation on camera. That same footage will be made available to the larger population via Inside Knowledge’s institutional television channel via the Edovo platform.
Alissa Moore, LSPC Re-Entry Coordinator, Journalist, and CSJG Advisory Board Member, toured VSP with JFE members the day before the symposium. She convened a CSJG stakeholder roundtable and excerpted comments from participants below.
PARTICIPANTS
Dr. Elizabeth Hinton, Professor of History of Black Studies & Law at Yale University and Yale Law School, and Founding Director, Justice For Everybody at the Yale Institute on Incarceration & Public Safety
Dr. Randall Horton, Professor at University of New Haven, Executive Director, Radical Reversal
Dr. Vanessa Díaz, Associate Professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies, Loyola Marymount University
Elizabeth Ross, Legal Advocacy Fellow and Operations Manager, Justice For Everybody
Kristine Guillaume, Production Manager and Advisor, CSJG
Mumia Abu-Jamal, Advisor, CSJG
Ghostwrite Mike, Founder, CSJG
Michael Bryant Alexander, 2025 Fellow, CSJG
Dominick J. Porter, Journalist, CSJG
Dr. Tanisha Cannon, Managing Director at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children
Michael Bryant Alexander:
The Inside Knowledge symposium invited us to share the podium, speak directly to our community, and collaborate as colleagues with esteemed scholars and professional journalists in the curation of a most immersive experience that we designed for our community in partnership with Yale’s Justice For Everybody team. I’ve never felt so seen in prison – this was the most transformative and humanizing environment I’ve ever been in. What made this special was being able to convene these different stakeholders, team-build with professionals, put this symposium in the can, and have folks like ARC’s Wajuba McDuffy and LSPC’s Dr. Cannon be in the room to watch us do it. This was a proof-of-concept moment for us that shows our community and the PIC alike that the CSJG deserves to be able to do this work.
Dominick J. Porter:
Working alongside my resident peers and free world creators to convene my community, center their testimonies, and help deliver real agency to those who are often never afforded counter-narrative creative control, was immensely empowering. Watching young men of color sit in the round and reflect publicly on camera about the teachable moment life lessons they are wrestling with from confinement, was the most inspiring thing I’ve ever witnessed in prison.
I was part of a team effort that convened a timed podium speaker series, conceived a slide show centering my peers, and produced a multi-camera filmed workshop that doubled as a documentary film production, while working alongside scholars from Yale, Harvard, and Oxford. Nobody from my neighborhood or family would have ever expected that I might have this type of enriching opportunity to learn and create when I was sentenced to life in prison. I’ve attended TEDx events at other prisons, and personally, I think that what we did here was more organic and profound. This was a history-making moment that set the bar for prisons that don’t have sanctioned journalism programs, but should. We demonstrated what is possible.
Ghostwrite Mike:
Immersive prison journalism challenges us to critically examine how we might more innovatively deliver the academy’s rich trove of brain food into the cell block in pursuit of literacy and desistance, while simultaneously facilitating the constructive export of humanizing portrayals of becoming that transform those who stand for count and are often marginalized as merely the dangerous few, into digital mentorship ambassadors other confined people might imprint upon, provided they can access those arc of change messages across tier, yard, and state lines. Inside Knowledge will be that insurgent two-way digital superhighway of authentic media that delivers what is most scarce behind the wall – agency.
If our objective is to normalize the craft of journalism in prison, we must identify and curate media that serves multiple masters and doesn’t compromise our core values. Centering transformation arc narratives accomplishes three things simultaneously: it humanizes the subject; affirms the in-prison programming modalities that enabled the change process we hope to highlight – giving the PIC its credit for availing that opportunity; and if produced properly, that content can be repurposed for impacted people to imprint upon beyond the prison it was captured in – that content can travel far and wide as digital mentorship that touches teens on probation before they fall, young adults in detention centers before they get permanently shelved, and lifers looking for a roadmap to redemption. We are our own best mentors – it’s about harnessing our stories of becoming, and pollinating that messaging through the digital ether via tablet device for every human flower in the dark garden to become inspired by.
Mumia Abu-Jamal:
I’d like to make an invitation. I hope you don’t understand it as a challenge, but it is a kind of welcome. Search and think about becoming the historians of the generation of the young today. Think about it now because when your history is written, either you will write it or the enemies of our movements and the fascists will write it. I invite you to join the struggle and the life of the mind to preserve the struggles of today, so that the children who are growing up in the next generations will know what happened.
Randall Horton:
I’ve been visiting populations on the inside around the country for years, and what I witnessed at Valley State in that ‘My Teachable Moment’ circle was one of the most transformational, humanistic, and inspiring spaces filled with grace and sharing I have ever been a part of. The alchemy of outside-in collaboration and authentic resident testimony on display was something unique to behold, and speaks to the attention to craft with which Ghost and Dom orchestrated a quality production while operating in a space usually fraught with chaos and custody intrusion. The CSJG community really demonstrated what its members are capable of when given some autonomy, and I salute VSP’s Warden Bailey and his team for facilitating such an anomalous event.
Vanessa Díaz:
Joining the residents of Valley State Prison for a day of collaboration, listening, learning, and being in community was transformational for all of us. The residents got to work with us to let their talents shine in writing, speaking, creative arts, and media production. More than anything, we got to hear each other, and process together–be human together. As the daughter of someone who was incarcerated and who was the victim of murder, it was complicated yet healing for me to hear about the experiences of incarcerated individuals. We had deeply empathetic exchanges that demonstrated the power of communal action, communal writing, communal expression, and communal healing. This is the key for societal transformation and I am so grateful to have been able to contribute in any way to documenting this moment and collaborating with residents to produce this revolutionary content for the Inside Knowledge channel for Edovo.
Kristine Guillaume:
The most important thing for anyone to understand is that throughout the symposium’s planning and programming, our team followed the resident journalists’ lead. The footage will reflect the power of storytelling and their vital and urgent vision of what carceral journalism is and what it can do.
At the CSJG and Inside Knowledge, we view our work as joining a long lineage of journalistic work produced by residents of the carceral state. Print culture from prisons comprises a rich and urgent archive that documents life in prisons and the rise of the American carceral state. We are developing a guidebook for residents offering an overview of carceral journalism, its history, and the basic principles of effective journalistic writing. The book is designed as an accessible toolkit for journalistic writing, including a series of writing exercises that residents can work on individually or in collaboration with each other — an aspect that is particularly important to me.
What I’ve learned as a journalist and what was so clear at the July 9 workshop is that journalism is a necessarily collaborative and social enterprise; it’s reliant on conversation, curiosity, accountability, and interest in the world and people around us. It was amazing to see that in practice as residents directed and partook in the ‘My Teachable Moment’ workshop, assisted our crew with filming, and conducted interviews with their fellow residents.
Elizabeth Ross:
During our visit to VSP, Elizabeth Hinton and I had the opportunity to tour the law library and to speak with the resident law clerks and staff librarians. We discussed California’s Racial Justice Act, a law that helps people fight against racial bias in the criminal legal system. We heard directly from them about the difficulties in accessing the research and data needed to successfully utilize this law. That conversation planted the seed for a new project that Yale’s Challenging Discrimination in the Law Project is currently developing: the Racial Justice Act Toolkit. This experience highlights the power of talking directly with those most impacted and listening to them when they tell us what they need.
Dr. Tanisha Cannon:
One of the most powerful things about the Inside Knowledge Carceral Journalism Symposium at Valley State Prison was how many of the residents said today felt normal. That word held weight. It meant they felt human again. It reminded them what being seen and treated with dignity feels like.
Storytelling creates that. It reminds people that their lives matter; that their voices can shift perception, policy, and hearts.
I’m deeply grateful to have been there, to witness that kind of presence and truth-telling. I want to uplift everyone who poured into making it happen. The care, intention, and love that went into creating this space was felt in every moment.
My biggest takeaway, my teachable moment, was being able to speak on the importance of lifting up our people’s narratives. Because, as one of the brothas reminded us, all it takes is 26 letters to liberate a people.
That’s the power of narrative.
That’s the movement we’re part of, building platforms where our folks inside can author their own humanity, in their own words, across every medium.
Dr. Elizabeth Hinton:
We came to Valley State to pioneer a revolutionary approach to constructive media-making behind prison walls—one that empowers residents as creators, affirms their role as historians, recognizes them as colleagues, honors them as subject matter experts, and models for authorities how mutual interests can be advanced when storytelling becomes a form of community empowerment in service of public safety.
Our Inside Knowledge channel on Edovo will showcase our Witness article archive alongside the All of Us or None Newspaper, share lectures from the academy, and offer books, podcasts, films, and homegrown zines created in collaboration with incarcerated creators across the country. At its center will be our flagship publication, Inside Knowledge Quarterly.
In California, where peer mentorship is a foundational pillar of the rehabilitative model, the same social influence that pulls a disaffected youth into gang life can also spark a non-reader’s curiosity or inspire an introvert to sit in a circle and speak their truth. But mentorship can’t be confined to the rooms we physically occupy—if it is, the message dies there. With audio and video tools, we can design content intentionally for widespread circulation across the carceral system, freely accessible via institutional tablets.
On Edovo, Inside Knowledge will be available to over one million incarcerated people—free and on demand. For communities of color especially, access to culturally relevant intellectual nourishment is the antidote to the malnourishment and structural disconnection that prisons produce.This is the revolution. And as we’ve just shown at Valley State, contrary to the old adage: it will be televised.
For more photos and to see the layout, click here!
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