“Voices from inside”

An oral history of the prison publication Stateville Speaks

By BRIAN DOLINAR

to say often. “Once I grabbed ahold of hope, then I said, ‘How do we paint this?’” The answer was Stateville Speaks , a newspaper produced by and for people inside prison.

Started in 2004 at Stateville Correctional Center, about 30 miles southwest of Chicago, the newspaper is one of the longest-running prison publications in the country. It has overcome attempts by prison authorities to ban its publication. Today, Stateville Speaks is circulated widely throughout all Illinois prisons.

When Stateville Speaks began, the community organizing across prison walls was small. There were a handful of writers in prison who worked persistently to get their voices heard. Organizations to support them were few and underresourced. It was difficult for prison writers to find outlets to publish their works. Slowly, over the past two decades, attitudes have changed. Mass incarceration has become the civil rights issue of our era.

In early 2022, a new interim team started to artworks in bright color, poetry, investigative essays, law articles, updates on related legislation, and announcements from several organizations that now fight for prison reform in Illinois. You can read new and archived copies at statevillespeaks.org.

A journalist myself, I regularly write articles investigating the stories of my pen pals in prison who send me tips on the bizarre and brazen misdeeds of prison authorities. Most recently, I wrote an article for Truthout about guards who used prison labor to raise funds for golf tournaments and holiday parties, which we reprinted in Stateville Speaks

M oving forward with Stateville Speaks , I wanted to first take a moment to look backward. I reached out to several people involved with the newspaper over the course of its history. I talked to Renaldo Hudson, who was granted clemency by Governor J.B. Pritzker in 2020 after serving 37 years in prison and is now education director at Illi- nois Prison Project. I interviewed his friend Bill Ryan, longtime advocate for those inside prison; Deirdre Battaglia, who was warden of Stateville in the early days of the paper; Alan Mills, attorney involved in two lawsuits against censorship of the newspaper; Cynthia Kobel, journalist and publisher; Vincent Galloway, the second editor of the paper; and Joseph Dole, legal editor.

S tateville Speaks has immediate name recognition by anyone who has done significant time in the custody of the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC). About 2,000 copies of each issue are sent inside, but a single newspaper passes through many hands in prison and has a circulation that is much wider.

Lockdown Prison Heart

The idea for Stateville Speaks evolved out of an essay contest that Hudson announced in 2003. People in prison were invited to submit essays on the topic, “Who am I? What can I do to be better?” The prompt came from a speech by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan that, Hudson recalled, “changed my life.” It was the first essay contest that people from across the state were allowed to participate in by IDOC.

There were 38 submissions, mostly handwritten, from people in six different Illinois prisons. The essays were collected into a book called Lockdown Prison Heart, proceeds from which went to an organization promoting reconciliation between victims and those who committed acts of violence.

The contest was won by Joseph Dole, who has since published three books, many articles, and is cofounder of Parole Illinois, an organization addressing the harms of extreme sentencing. For several years, Dole was listed as legal editor of Stateville Speaks. Back then, he was locked up in Tamms prison with Hudson’s brother, who told him about the contest. “It was the first essay I ever wrote in my life,” Dole said. “I ended up winning, which shocked the hell out of me.”

The contest made clear the apparent need for a regular publication to cultivate and feature writing by those behind bars.

This is our newspaper

The first issue had a bold banner that read “Stateville Speaks,” under which was the subtitle, “Voices from inside.” It was a 16page newspaper printed in black-and-white. It included editorials, poetry, artwork, a legal page, and an article about the importance of exercising to prevent back pain.

“ I want to spell relief,” Hudson, who was listed as editor in chief, wrote in the first issue of Stateville Speaks. “How do you spell relief? E-D-U-C-A-T-I-O-N! Well, brothers of Stateville, let me hear you! Positive views and negative views are welcome . . . THIS IS OUR NEWSPAPER!”

“ I was freshly off death row,” Hudson told me. “I was a bit naïve and heartbroken. I was like, ‘It’s going to be so much easier now that we’re no longer on death row. We won’t be scrutinized in the way that they scrutinized us on death row.’” He was among the general population at Stateville, and yet there was little programming offered beyond basic GED classes. Hudson started talking to his friend Bill Ryan, who he’d met on death row, about publishing a newspaper.

R aised in Kentucky, Bill Ryan came to Chicago in the 1990s to work with juveniles caught up in the system. He worked for the Jane Addams Hull House Foundation. He had a passion for the downtrodden. Visiting several men on death row, he soon met Hudson. He became a leader in the Illinois Campaign Against the Death Penalty, which in 2003 convinced Republican governor George Ryan to announce a moratorium on executions. He then turned to the idea of a prison publication.

“In the very beginning, it was Renaldo Hudson and I talking,” Bill Ryan remembered. “We thought we ought to have a voice for people inside.”

“One thing that Bill Ryan did,” Hudson said, “is he’ll get on that phone and call anybody.” Hudson would come up with ideas, and Ryan would execute them.

“I would throw this stu into Bill’s hands, and he would run with it,” Hudson said. “It’s like being a quarterback and having your receiver know how to get to the goal. I was the quarterback, and he was the receiver.”

Unauthorized material

Stateville Speaks was met with resistance from the beginning. When first approached with the idea, prison authorities expressed concern over the cost of publishing. Bill Ryan convinced CNN to donate computers and journalists to train the inside writers. Next, the prison claimed they could not afford to provide guards to watch the three editors as they worked on Stateville Speaks outside of their cells.

U ndeterred, Ryan solicited individual donations from people on the outside and pressed up 200 copies of Stateville Speaks. His daughter Katy Ryan helped with copy editing in the early years. Along the way, Ryan notified prison officials of his intentions. In March 2004, Ryan mailed copies of Stateville Speaks to four people inside Stateville prison. The newspapers were returned to Ryan marked “unauthorized material.”

Ryan recalled the IDOC objected to one article that included mention of “the caliber of the gun used to shoot at people from the guard towers.”

Indeed, Vincent Galloway, in his essay, “How