American Prison Newspapers, 1800‐2020: Voices from the Inside

Abstract

American Prison Newspapers is an open access digital collection of primary source newspapers residing on the JSTOR platform. It is one of Reveal Digital’s collections under the Diversity and Dissent Fund. As of late 2022, the collection contains 112 unique newspaper titles written and published from within American prisons, and approximately 8% of them originate from women’s prisons. The collection spans the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. High-resolution images of the newspapers load well in the native interface and download quickly as PDFs, but the images in neither format meet accessibility standards for text-to-speech software. In general, this collection is of immeasurable value to students and researchers in a variety of fields, including the humanities, the social sciences, and the interdisciplinary field of social justice studies, despite JSTOR’s limitations on advanced searching and accessibility.