NEWS & POLITICS

to Survive a Day in Prison,” warned others to watch for guards who would shoot from towers to break up fights. They aimed at the men with a “mini-14 high-powered rifle that shoots .223.”

From his cell in Pontiac prison, where he is now held, Galloway wrote to me, “I was very surprised it led to censorship. Bill had to take IDOC to court.”

A lan Mills from the Uptown People’s Law Center, intellectual property attorney Samuel Fifer, and lawyers at Loevy & Loevy filed a lawsuit that provided many of the details for this early history. IDOC settled the suit after two years in court. Mills remembered, “Basically it said they had to set up a procedure and establish time frames for censorship.”

The agreement also established that Stateville Speaks would be circulated at all Illinois prisons. “Ironically,” Mills said, “they said you can’t just send it to one institution. So we said, ‘We’ll send it to everybody, give everyone the same opportunity to read the newspaper.’” As a result, Stateville Speaks is today distributed throughout the entire Illinois prison system.

Something to be proud of

I n March 2005, Deirdre “Dee” Battaglia was appointed warden at Stateville, the first woman to head an all-male maximum-security prison in Illinois. She quickly became known as the “good warden” after a news story appeared in the Chicago Tribune touting her reputation for fairness among the guys inside. Battaglia told me she remembered when Bill Ryan came to her to talk about Stateville Speaks:

“The first couple weeks I was there, this guy came in, he looked real gru , he had a beard, he had shorts on that were hanging o him. The secretary told him we don’t talk to the public. I got up and said, ‘Who is this?’ Turns out, it’s Bill Ryan. ‘You don’t want to talk to this guy,’ the secretary said. I said, ‘We are public servants, we are the public.’ I talked to him; he’s running a mile a minute. He says, ‘We have this paper, Stateville Speaks.’”

Battaglia had been transferred from Dwight women’s prison where she was assistant warden of programs. She recalled that the women at Dwight had their own newspaper they ran from inside the prison, so she was open to Ryan’s idea. The previous warden at Stateville, Kevin Briley, was adamantly against it. Batta- glia recalled that her predecessor believed if the newspaper were permitted, “Gangs would use it to talk to one another.” Battaglia felt that Stateville Speaks would be a good thing.

“I thought it was a communication tool that o enders could contribute to that would boost their self-esteem,” Battaglia said. “It was something they could be proud of. Most times, it was artistic in nature, with poems.”

The growth was amazing

Although there was pending litigation, Ryan got approval to send a second issue inside, which was printed in March 2005 on the first anniversary of the newspaper. Hudson had been transferred out of Stateville, and Vincent Galloway and Donald McDonald took over as editors.

Stateville Speaks served as an independent news source for those inside Illinois prisons as the population grew to its height of 49,000 people in 2011 (today, the number has dropped to around 29,000). There were 2,500 copies of the newspapers printed, with 2,000 of them going inside. “The growth of it was amazing,” Ryan recalled.

Funding for Stateville Speaks comes from private donations and $10 subscriptions from those incarcerated, but free copies are available to any incarcerated person if they write to us.

The IDOC has never provided funding for the publication. Taxpayer money went instead to paying for the IDOC to defend itself against lawsuits for censoring Stateville Speaks.

The April 2008 issue featured the Tamms Year Ten campaign, which sought to close the prison at the far southern tip of Illinois. As the cover story reported, since Tamms prison had opened, the men there had “endured a decade of uninterrupted solitary confinement.” The campaign was bitterly opposed by the prison guards’ union. The Tamms issue never made it through the prison mailrooms.

A second lawsuit was filed against the IDOC by Alan Mills and Russell Ainsworth of Loevy & Loevy. It alleged that IDOC’s censorship of the April 2008 issue of Stateville Speaks violated the “First Amendment right to communicate with prisoners housed in the prisons operated by the Department.”

There was a constant struggle over content of the newspaper throughout its history that did not always result in lawsuits. If it didn’t come from the authorities, it came from self-censorship. “A lot of my essays never made it into Stateville Speaks ,” Galloway told me, “because I was telling it like it is uncut—raw!”

In search of a home

A round this time, Stateville Speaks was looking for a permanent home. Cynthia Kobel, a rock ’n’ roll journalist, got involved with the newspaper. She had been a board member of the John Howard Association and participated in the campaign to shut down Tamms. In 2007, her family’s foundation, the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Foundation, began financing the newspaper. In 2008, Kobel was listed as publisher, and she was named as a plainti in the recent lawsuit.

“Stateville Speaks was being done by di erent groups,” Kobel remembered. “Loyola University put out an issue. Then we ended up at Northeastern. That seemed to work out well. It was an easy place to donate the money.”

Indeed, students at Loyola helped produce a special edition in January 2009 despite censorship of the previous issue. In August 2009, Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) put out its own edition.

N ortheastern agreed to house Stateville Speaks in the justice studies department.

Professor Kingsley Clarke taught a class and recruited students to work on the paper. “If it wouldn’t have been for Kingsley Clarke,” Bill

Ryan said, “I don’t know what we would have done.”

A NEIU graduate student in justice studies, Gayle Tulipano, took over as editor in 2010. Students responded to letters from people in prison. For the next ten years, Tulipano worked tirelessly as editor and kept the publication going. She recently stepped down to pursue other career opportunities. In 2018, the Montgomery Foundation ended their support. But thanks to NEIU’s justice studies department, Stateville Speaks still has a home.

“At a time when so many publications exist only online, a lot of news is inaccessible to people who are incarcerated,” said Maya Schenwar, who recently got involved in the publication. “Not only is it a print publication directly for incarcerated readers, but it also centrally publishes incarcerated writers. As a journalist, editor, and writer who has covered prisons throughout my career—and as the bereaved sibling of a long-incarcerated person who loved writing—this publication holds deep meaning for me. The world is very lucky that it’s still around after all these years.”

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