Justice Notes: The Prison Journalism Project
A White-Collar Journal forum for criminal justice, lived experience, and the personal search for redemption
This week, Justice Notes is featuring the work of an incarcerated writer published through the Prison Journalism Project, an organization dedicated to training incarcerated people to become journalists and amplifying reporting from inside America’s prisons.
Most public conversations about incarceration happen without the voices of the people living through it. Prison Journalism Project is working to change that — creating a national network of incarcerated writers who document prison life, examine the criminal legal system from the inside, and contribute firsthand perspectives that are too often absent from public debate.
The essay below, by John Lennon, reflects something readers rarely encounter: thoughtful, disciplined writing emerging from within prison walls. It is not simply commentary about incarceration. It is evidence that intellectual life, personal growth, and civic engagement continue even inside institutions designed around punishment and separation.
At Justice Notes, we believe meaningful reform requires listening to people closest to the system itself. We’re honored to share this work with our readers.
Reprinted with permission from The Prison Journalism Project.
Guest Essay by John Lennon: Writing Well From Inside Prison
I had just finished a deep-dive interview and was daydreaming in my cell, listening to Halsey on my tablet through Audio Technica headphones. I was pacing and thinking about the material. I tend to get emotional when I think about my subjects because I often relate to their struggle — externally, internally — to overcome the complications of this prison life.
That’s empathy. That’s what journalism has taught me.
I imagine what the story will look like in the slicks (glossy magazines), how the illustration or photography will pop in the well — the splashy two-page spreads in the back of magazines. I see “the deck,” the few lines that tease the story. Those are feature stories, the pinnacle of print journalism. That’s what I do. From my cell.
I’ve been locked up nearly 19 years now. Back in 2010, I started learning how to write in an Attica creative writing workshop taught by Doran Larson, a volunteer English professor. A handful of prisoners attended once a month. Spotting a great opportunity is like seeing a great story — you’re not going to have a voice whispering in your ear telling you “this is it.”
I was cocky, hardly Larson’s favorite, but I hung on to his every word and never missed a class. The workshop was geared toward published work, and a few of my first essays were rigorously critiqued in class before I mailed them to magazines, and they were published. I developed my signature style: journalism meshed with memoir.
Today I’m a contributing editor for Esquire and a contributing writer for The Marshall Project. Recently I was asked to be an advisor for the Prison Journalism Project.
In this essay I’ll describe my writing process and how I consider story. I’m writing mostly to the aspiring prison writer and journalist. We’ve partnered with several publications with the hope that this piece will find its way inside.
As a feature magazine writer, I substitute the who, what, where, when and why that a traditional reporter uses in a news story with character, theme, plot, scenes, chronology and motive. In “This Place is Crazy,” a story that appeared in the 2018 summer issue of Esquire, I wrote about Joe Cardo, who suffered from schizoaffective disorder and used to pick up cigarette clips in the Attica yard. I observed him and nestled next to him.
When he told me his story, it reminded me of my brother Eugene’s struggle with mental illness, and so I wove those memories through the story. The piece wound up having three narratives — Joe’s, Eugene’s and mine. It took two years of restructuring and rewriting, with help from a great editor. The story’s peg, which is journalism lingo for a topic that is relevant in society, was this: Ten out of every eleven psychiatric patients housed by the government are incarcerated. Ground the specific in the general. That’s the key.
According to Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair’s former editor in chief, the best magazine stories have these elements: access, narrative, disclosure, and — always — conflict. When you think about it, who’s got better access to story than the prisoner? I mean, we live among some of society’s most colorful characters.
Other journalists parachute into prisons, conduct interviews, and then leave. They can’t truly know the characters they interview or the prison culture. They don’t breathe the air, eat the food, feel the tension. They aren’t affected by prison politics and violence and monotony. The scenes they write are almost all reconstructed instead of witnessed firsthand, which produces some of the best writing. My access has been my edge.
Narrative is simply how you set up the chronology of events. Thing is, there’s nothing simple about it. Knowing where to put scenes and how to keep the tension and when to break for digressions is tricky.
If you want to learn how to spin a yarn, I’d say you have to always analyze the stories you consume — a movie, an NPR segment, a magazine article. Structurally, feature pieces in magazines have a lot going on. I reverse engineer them. I underline, write in the margins, bracket the opening hooks, the nut grafs (the core premise of the article), the exposition on history of the issue to which the stories are pegged, the backstories on the protagonist, then back to the rising action scenes.
Not every story has all these elements. The legendary writer John McPhee says that structure is not a template. I read the pieces front to back, back to front. “The art exists purely in the arrangement of the words,” says Philip Gerard, a writer and professor at University of North Carolina Wilmington.
A bit about disclosure and conflict. “This Place is Crazy” was a personal story with characters, scenes and action. After the opening scene in the yard, where I introduce Joe Cardo and explain his situation, I digress and blend in important information on the history: “By locking up people with psychiatric diagnoses, we’ve boomeranged back to the way things were done in antebellum America.” Then I go on for a bit about the history. That’s disclosure: teaching the reader. Most people prefer to learn while being told a good story. Magazines do that well.
There’s a measure of conflict every time an incarcerated person (especially one like me, convicted of murder) publishes in a national magazine. But I’m a big believer in telling the reader why you’re in prison, even if it has nothing to do with the story. Guys that write stories for, say, San Quentin News don’t necessarily need to confront this, because it’s a prison newspaper and readers know the context.
Read the full article here: Writing Well From Inside Prison
If this piece resonated with you, consider sharing it or leaving a comment. To support this work and help spread awareness about justice reform for white-collar defendants, subscribe to White-Collar Journal and stay connected. John DiMenna is a member of the White Collar Support Group.
To leave a comment, Substack may ask you to verify your email address (a one-time step to prevent spam). You don’t need to subscribe or create an account. Just check your inbox for a one-time link.