Great piece by LAist
“Writing is not easy,” said the paper’s features editor Sagal Sadiq.
“But when the perfect sentence is down on paper, it’s like, yes, it’s beautiful. [There’s] nothing like it.”
Tucked away in the Central Valley, Central California Women’s Facility sits off Highway 99 between Fresno and Merced. Farmland surrounds much of the prison, and visitors are rare.
The 640-acre facility is the largest women’s prison in California, and holds more than 2,000 women, nonbinary and transgender people. In total, women make up just 4% of the state’s prison population.
For these reasons and more, the prison in Chowchilla seems an unlikely place to have its own newspaper. But last year, an organization for prison journalism helped open up a media center and started training journalists there.
In September, they put out their first issue of The Paper Trail, an in-house newspaper written and edited by incarcerated people. Its supporters say it’s the first effort of its kind at a women’s prison in the U.S.
“?It’s been amazing to be a part of something starting here for women that inspired a lot of women,” said Megan Hogg, a writer for the paper who has been incarcerated at CCWF for 12 years. “The first issue that came out, people were like ‘Oh, wow, we have a newspaper.’ You cannot find a copy now. People are like, ‘Can I look at yours?'”
I visited the prison in December. It was so huge that my escort told me corrections officers use tricycles to get around. It took us more than a half hour to walk from the prison’s front gates into the media center. Along the route were long, sparse yards, check points and a cafeteria.
The prison grounds were mostly quiet on the Friday morning of my visit, but the newsroom was abuzz. A handful of staff members sat in front of desktop computers while others gathered around a table to discuss story ideas and works-in-progress.
Behind them, writing on a whiteboard declared: “Journalism: providing information to people so they can make informed decisions in their lives.”
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