Discover the stories of incarcerated writers, journalists, editors, poets, and printers.

In the 1880s, printing presses entered U.S. prisons. Since then, hundreds of newspapers have been written, edited, and printed inside prisons, by incarcerated people. These range from underground zines reproduced by hand to widely-circulated magazines and newspapers. Together, these texts form a powerful counter-archive to the wash of dime novels, government forms, envelopes, and church circulars printed for pennies on the dollar by prison labor.

This website explores printing and publishing inside prisons by telling the stories of the people who did this work. You might begin by learning about how printing presses came to be used in prison labor. Then explore our curated library of prison publications, which currently presents information on one publication, The Umpire, printed from 1913 to 1919 at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Every article of The Umpire has been indexed and tagged by our team; specific collections help guide the reader. More advanced readers may wish to download the data directly for themselves. Our team is currently working on building a reading room of stories and expanding our library to include Eastern Echo and Reformatory Record, both printed in Pennsylvania prisons. These will debut in Fall 2024.

This project originated in research and teaching conducted at the University of Pennsylvania and is proceeding one newspaper at a time. We are committed to thoughtfully curating the data contained within these newspapers and to sensitively telling the stories of those incarcerated writers, editors, printers, poets, and artists who made them.