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In recent decades, phrases such as “mass incarceration” and “prison industrial complex” have become part of our national vocabulary, indicating a growing awareness about the cost (in lives and dollars) of maintaining the world’s largest prison population. Indeed, 2019 has seen increased attention to issues of incarceration and justice from both conservative and liberal media sources; yet even as public discourses increasingly criticize the criminal justice system, we maintain the fiction of “crime and punishment” that serves as its basis.

\"This workshop is our connection to the outside world. A chance for us to be heard, something that teaches us how to connect through our writing.' —SpeakOut writer \"Miami inmates are what becomes of the chicken before I fry it up.\" —Thant T. Lallamont, Exchange for Change writer

Call for papers for Reflections Special Issue: Prison Writing, Literacies and Communities, coedited by Wendy Hinshaw and Tobi Jacobi.

Through community-based literacy work, writing teachers can encourage the development of prison narratives that counter social and media-driven stereotypes of prisoner identity. Such work thus situates writing workshops and other literacy-inspired programming for women as part of the emergent US prison abolition movement. This is a complicated equation to work through, however, given the sometimes competing sponsors of such literacy work and its reception within and beyond institutional contexts. This essay suggests that a nuanced reading of prison literacy programmes and their sponsors is necessary for contemporary educators interested in contributing to both educational prison programmes and the abolition movement. In order to explore such challenges and to illustrate individual and public tactics for emergent social justice, this essay offers sample texts and commentaries from the SpeakOut! women's writing workshop in the western US as a starting point for a larger consideration of the complexities that literacy educators confront when designing and facilitating such programmes.

In our call for submissions for the Reflections’ 20th anniversary issue, we invited shorter considerations about the journal’s impact to be published as a textual roundtable. As is usually the case, we got what we asked for: a number of short pieces that praise, situate, look backward in order to predict going forward, illuminate, and otherwise comment on the journal’s history, contributions to the field, weaknesses, and strengths. Below are several of these commentaries in conversation with one another. Together, they provide a glimpse into the journal’s past and begin to imagine its future.

In seeking to increase visibility of the experiences of incarcerated women involved with literacy programs, it is too easy to simplify the relationship among prisoners/teachers/texts and to overlook the material and rhetorical implications of literacy work behind bars. The article argues for methods of representing incarcerated women and their writing that resist mainstream subjectivities and provide means for more fully acknowledging the complex circumstances in which incarcerated women's writing is produced and circulated. In order to theorize a feminist ethic of literacy work behind bars, the article grounds its discussion in an analysis of the documentary What I Want My Words To Do To You (Katz et al. 2003) because it is representative of growing feminist efforts to document or otherwise transmit carcerai writing, particularly writing by women. The article calls for a feminist ethic for prison literacy work and suggests feminist practices for facilitating and representing writing programs based in understanding how complex material and discursive contexts might work to (re) shape institutional realities for the thousands of women and girls incarcerated around the globe.

Research on incarceration and educational access continues to reveal the stark reality for many adjudicated youth: without access to educational opportunities recidivism is probable. Yet conventional methods of teaching critical reading, writing, and thinking skills are not always successful for juveniles who have found little success (or hope) in traditional schooling. This essay argues that alternative literacy practices can effectively supplement conventional GED and vocational training courses by engaging juveniles through creativity, critical self-awareness, and a shift in how audience and authorship is understood. Research indicates that literate activity such as writing workshops, zine networks, peer and professional mentoring, and increased engagement with the publishing industry can meet the unique needs and expectations of youth offenders while also working toward the democratic principles held by many correctional educators and the general public. The essay suggests specific pedagogical approaches and practices for engaging juveniles by reviewing existing programs across the U.S. and articulates five core educational and life skills outcomes that can emerge as students learn to write beyond the sometimes limiting notion of school.

The Zine Project helps students and teachers consider the assumptions and expectations we have about how literacy functions in school and community contexts. In this article, Tobi Jacobi examines the relationships among composition theory, community literacy practices, and service learning, taking into account the complex possibilities and implications that arise when zines are incorporated into the classroom.