What is the Prison Journalism Project?

In June 2024, Poetic Justice partnered with the national nonprofit Prison Journalism Project to bring journalism workshops to Eddie Warrior and Mabel Bassett Correctional Centers in Oklahoma. Participants spent 11 weeks receiving training and support as they created community newspapers to be published at each facility.

“Poetic Justice focuses on the healing of the individual and on the expression of finding and empowering yourself,” Michelle McCutchan, Poetic Justice facilitator, advisory board member and now an editor of The Warrior Standard newspaper, told the Tulsa World in a recent story on the project.

“But what the newspaper does is it brings everybody else in the community into that,” McCutchan said. “So where one (Poetic Justice) is almost like a self-focus and gives you that confidence while providing healing, the other (the newspaper) lets those same people create a community, so they can feel like they’re part of it. It takes the shame away from being in prison, and the newspaper changes the paradigm and the narrative.”

The hope is that this pilot cohort will provide a national model to start newspapers at other facilities. We gratefully acknowledge the generous contributions of donors from Poetic Justice and the Prison Journalism Project who helped make this project a reality.