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The prisoner's cinema: film culture in the penal press before 1960

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The Prisoner’s Cinema: Film Culture in the Penal Press Before 1960

Joshua Anthony Mitchell

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL

In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

August 2019

Acknowledgments 1

Introduction 4
The Prisoner’s Cinema

Chapter 1 30
Mary Pickford’s Mugshot:
Advertising Film in the Penal Press

Chapter 2 79
Moving Pictures in Suspended Animation:
The Origins of Prison Film Exhibition

Chapter 3 115
Blood, Bonds, and 16mm:
Film and Prisoners’ Wartime Labor

Chapter 4 148
“All Those Little Spools and Lights”:
Labor and the Moving Image at Angola Prison

Chapter 5 186
The Innovated Cage:
Television and Widescreen in the Midcentury Prison

Conclusion 218
Abolishing the Prison:
A Lesson from Defunct Technologies

Sources 224

1
Acknowledgments

This dissertation is possible because it was supported by a skilled team of people. My
committee, in particular, deserves praise for their attention and care throughout my dissertation
writing. I so much admire my advisor Kara Keeling’s teaching, writing, and thinking. She is a
model of what it means to be an exemplary scholar, and there’s no one I would have rather had
as my dissertation advisor. I am grateful for (and embarrassed by) the number of drafts of this
project that she has read. Laura Isabel Serna has been a careful reader of my work. I am grateful
for the detail of her feedback and the clarity her advice has offered to my project. Nayan Shah
has been a supportive voice who has guided my thinking down new and exciting paths. I have
learned so much from conversations with him, and I thank him for the opportunities he has
provided me.
While at USC, I have benefitted greatly from courses, meetings, and conversations with
faculty members Macarena Gómez-Barris, Jennifer Greenhill, Sarah Gualtieri, Dorinne Kondo,
and Shana Redmond. In the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity, Kitty Lai, Jujuana
Preston, and Sonia Rodriguez made it all happen, and I’m immensely thankful for their work. As
an undergraduate at University of Iowa, I benefitted from an auspicious convergence of classes
taught by Dawn Rae Davis and Adrienne Carey Hurley on the topics of feminist philosophy,
international anarchist movements, and prison abolition. My thinking is still guided by the voices
I encountered in those classes. At University of California–Riverside, Dylan Rodriguez provided
the first laboratory for my graduate writing, and has continued to be generous with his support.
Conference interlocutors, chapter readers, and other kind voices have taken the shape of Alison
Griffiths, Sarah Haley, Regina Kunzel, and Haidee Wasson. I completed this dissertation with
the help of many librarians at state libraries and historical societies, but especially Marianne
2
Fisher-Giorlando at the Angola Museum, Marc Wellman at the State Library of Louisiana, and
James Danky for the periodical collection he curated at the Wisconsin Historical Society.
ASE is a department of incredible minds who challenged and bolstered my own research
and writing through their own scholarly integrity. Thank you to Sophia Azeb, Crystal Baik,
Sarah Fong, Huan He, Sabrina Howard, Celeste Menchaca, Bekah Park, Nic John Ramos,
Anthony Rodriguez, Rosanne Sia, Stephanie Sparling Williams, and Shannon Zhao. Outside of
my home department, my past decade of thinking and writing has been supported by fellow
students Ren-yo Hwang, Viola Lasmana, Kenneth LeBlue, Luci Marzola, Sonia Misra, Roxanne
Samer, Kehaulani Vaughn, and Nicole Vines. Thank you especially to my friends and their
patient partners who hosted me in their homes during my cross-continent travels. I could not
have done it without Nadya Bair in Reno, Conrad Carlozzi in Minneapolis, Sony Coráñez-Bolton
in Ann Arbor, and Ashley Fortier in Montreal.
Here are some special mentions. Umayyah Cable is a passionate role model, well-timed
comic, and daddy style icon. Chris Chien is a dependable friend who happens to share the same
taste in television as me. Thank you for reading every text in the group chat. Patrice Douglass is
a supreme model for everything ever. I miss her being closer because friendship comes so
naturally with her. Jenny Hoang gives me a perspective on humanity that could only come from
an inquisitive extraterrestrial. That New York Times love quiz was right! Michael Kessler, Mike
Jorgensen, and others kept my imagination active in long-running Dungeons and Dragons
campaigns. I admire Ding Kong’s many handy talents and irreverent wildness. Ding is a
hilarious menace, but I find it enjoyable. Trung Nguyen has given me valuable advice on
everything from academic publishing to weightlifting. I can’t wait to visit his pie shop. Gabriel
Perez and Lillian Hu are dream roommates, and I’m looking forward to more nights of board
3
games and whisky gingers. Emily Raymundo is the person whose advice I consult and trust
most, and I would watch literally any movie with her. Angela Robinson is a fiercely loyal friend,
superstar brainiac, and diva inspiration. I promise to always share my gossip with her. Megan
Thornton is my oldest and dearest friend. Who could have seen those two theater teenagers and
known that almost twenty years later we’d still be so dedicated to sharing our daydreams with
each other?
I give my love to my grandparents Myrna, Allen, Reta, and the late Bruce. This
dissertation is dedicated with endless love and respect to my mother, Lana. No other person has
gone to greater lengths to support me. I have known my entire life that you would always be my
greatest champion. Lastly, I write in the memory of my late father, Mark. For almost two
decades, I have had countless dreams in which you were secretly still alive.

4
Introduction
The Prisoner’s Cinema

At first generally, a dark background. Occasionally against the dark background, bright
dots which come and go, rise and fall, slowly and sedately. More often, spots of a
thousand colors, sometimes dull but at other times and with certain people of an
extraordinary brilliance which reality could never match. These spots expand and
contract, change their shape and colors, constantly displace one another. Sometimes the
change is slow and gradual but sometimes it is a whirlwind of bewildering swiftness.
-Henri Bergson, The World of Dreams
1

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, watching films has been among the most
popular prison pastimes. Cinema has offered an abundance of sensory experiences to people who
otherwise endure the conditions of physical and mental monotony that are endemic to
confinement [Image 0.1]. Recent histories of film spectatorship have paid special attention to
audiences watching movies in spaces not primarily built for commercial film exhibition,
including schools, churches, museums, and most recently, prisons. At the same time, histories of
sports and entertainment inside prisons have demonstrated that recreation has played a central
role in disciplining the bodies, minds, and labors of imprisoned people. Despite the importance
that cinema plays in many prisoners’ stories of their incarceration, however, the history of film
exhibition in prisons has not yet been analyzed through one of the twentieth century’s most
vibrant systems of information exchange: the hundreds of prisoner-edited newspapers and
magazines that were traded between North American prisons through a network called the Penal
Press.
My dissertation, The Prisoner’s Cinema: Film Culture in the Penal Press Before 1960,
provides a history of cinematic exhibition and spectatorship in North American prisons. To
accomplish this, I examine a circuit of twentieth-century newspapers published by imprisoned

1
Henri Bergson, The World of Dreams, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958), 22.
5
men and women at hundreds of institutions across the continent. I draw on this archive to survey
the vast array of Hollywood movies, educational films, and television programs shown to
imprisoned viewers. To study prison audiences, I analyze prisoners’ writings about their
experiences watching films. I argue that imprisoned spectators possessed shrewd evaluations of
the moving images presented to them. In doing so, they used movie screenings as occasions to
critique the institutional settings under which they lived. The Prisoner’s Cinema shows how
recreation and entertainment were used to reinforce prison regimes of corporal punishment,
coercive labor, and punitive racism.
This project contributes to the field of American studies by assembling an archive of
prisoner-edited journalism and using that archive’s contents to reveal how moving image culture
thrived in prisons. It examines how state, provincial, and federal prisons across the United States
and Canada allocated funds to publish newspapers and magazines for an imprisoned readership.
These publications circulated far beyond the walls of individual institutions, and were traded
between editors at distant prisons. Although prison administrations censored Penal Press
publications, they are some of the few sources historians have to access prisoners’ critical
reflections, judgments, and concerns. Using an archive of journalism written and edited by
prisoners, this dissertation expands our understanding of life in the penal system through a
history of noncommercial film exhibition. It surveys the vast array of mainstream American
movies, educational films, and television programs shown to prisoners, from an itinerant
exhibitor in who entered a small Iowa town in 1906 to the explosion of TV screens in prisons in
the 1950s.
Before the prison activism of the 1960s and 1970s, hundreds of imprisoned journalists
organized under a loosely associated network called the Penal Press. State, provincial, and
6
federal prisons across the United States and Canada allocated funds to publish newspapers and
magazines for an imprisoned readership in monthly or weekly installments. Although prison
newspapers date as far back as the nineteenth century as tools for prisoner education and moral
instruction, the post-World War II era saw an explosion of publications that were linked through
their exchange in the Penal Press. Since penal institutions did not keep records about film
screenings or their audiences, the Penal Press is an essential source for understanding what types
of entertainment were scheduled at prisons, what technologies were used to stage this
entertainment, and what imprisoned audiences thought about the material presented to them.
This project advances two major historical inquiries: the history of media reception and
the history of imprisonment in North America. The field of reception studies has emerged within
film history to better understand the contexts in which audiences have experienced moving
images. One of its primary goals has been to emphasize the role that viewers have played in the
history of film. Scholars such as Miriam Hansen and Janet Staiger have enriched the study of
film production and composition by highlighting viewers’ critical assessments of film and
theaters.
2
More recently, studies such as Jacqueline Stewart’s Migrating to the Movies and Laura
Isabel Serna’s Making Cinelandia have emphasized the role that race and gender played in
shaping national and international markets for producing and distributing films in the twentieth
century.
3
Although studies such as Anna Everett’s Returning the Gaze and Richard Abel’s
Menus for Movieland have analyzed film criticism and film advertising in professional

2
See Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1991); and Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception
(New York: New York University Press, 2000).
3
See Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and Laura Isabel Serna, Making Cinelandia: American
Films and Mexican Film Culture Before the Golden Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
7
journalism, little work has studied the place of cinema in amateur journalism.
4
Like other
scholars who write about film reception, my project insists that moving images are not self-
evident, but instead interpreted and debated by viewers through their circulation. Also like this
body of literature, I attend to the meanings of film for people who live and experience their
reality at the margins of society. This is a commitment that I believe provides us with a fuller
picture of how broadly cinema has circulated and how thoroughly it has entered the thoughts and
perceptions of people in the least predictable times and places.
In addition to the attention to audiences and reception within film and media studies,
there has also been a push to better understand how the sites of media exhibition shape the
opinions of viewers. “Whether we view the image outside or in, surrounded by a natural or a
built environment,” writes William Paul, “the space in which we are located frames both our
understanding and our vision because the space invokes connotations and references that exist
independently of the image.”
5
Paul’s description of the theater’s architecture as a contextual
framing device echoes the insights of Anne Friedberg, who has claimed that “the frame of the
moving-image screen marks a separation … between the material surface of the wall and the
view contained within its aperture.”
6
Friedberg argues that the fixity of the audience in relation to
the moving images on the screen of early cinema produces “a virtual mobility for immobile
spectators who witnessed movement confined to a frame.”
7
Because the field of film and media
studies has taken the spaces in which images are viewed as a central concern—from the world’s

4
See Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949 (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2001); and Richard Abel, Menus for Movieland: Newspapers and the Emergence
of American Film Culture, 1913-1916 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
5
William Paul, When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of American
Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 3.
6
Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 5.
7
Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 5.
8
fair exhibitions of the early twentieth century to today’s in-flight entertainment—I contend that
the world of images inside prisons is of special concern.
8
In carceral spaces, both prison
administrators and imprisoned people themselves have long articulated how images hold special
importance for their depiction of the world outside the confines of a prison.
As a contribution to prison studies, this project provides a cultural history of an
institution that is too often understood in the popular imagination to be devoid of culture. As a
body of scholarly inquiry that addresses the urgent contemporary concerns of mass incarceration,
the most widely read texts in the field of prison studies have largely concentrated on the political
and economic policies that generated a massive expansion of state and federal prisons beginning
in the 1980s.
9
When historians within this field have explored past permutations of the North
American prison, such as work by Marie Gottschalk, Elizabeth Hinton, and Kelly Lytle
Hernández, it has been instructive for comprehending the contemporary issues of prison
privatization, prison expansion, and prison reform movements.
10
In particular, many studies have
investigated the era of convict leasing following the Civil War, in which the labor of primarily
black prisoners was leased to private companies, accompanied by widespread corporal
punishment. These studies have been valuable in interpreting the present realties in sentencing
disparity between white, black, and Latino prisoners, which is significant because, as Lisa Marie

8
See Tom Gunning, “The World as Object Lesson: Cinema Audiences, Visual Culture, and the St. Louis
World’s Fair, 1904,” Film History 6, no. 4 (1994): 422-444; and Stephen Groening, “‘No One Likes to Be
a Captive Audience”: Headphones and In-Flight Entertainment,” Film History 28, no. 3 (2016): 114-138.
9
See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New
York: New Press, 2012); and Loïc Wacquant, Prisons of Poverty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2009).
10
See Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest,
Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2017); and Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: Race and
Federal Policy in American Cities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
9
Cacho has argued, “human value is made intelligible through racialized, sexualized, spatialized,
and state-sanctioned violences.”
11
My examination of prisoners’ writings allows me to chart the
transformations in prison policy across the twentieth century, as well as index the types of
critical responses and objections that imprisoned people made in response to these changes. This
citational practice presents the opinions of imprisoned people —even if written by a rarified and
relatively privileged group within the prison —which prison studies scholarship strives to
prioritize in its research.

The Prisoner’s Cinema

This dissertation takes its title from a colloquial name for a perceptual phenomenon
called phosphenes. Phosphenes are bursts of vision that erupt in the absence of a visual stimulus.
As biophysicist Gerald Oster explained in a 1970 article in Scientific American, they can be
manufactured by innocuously rubbing one’s eyes, but they also appear in the more strained
physical circumstances of migraine headaches, brain tumors, electrical stimulation, and the
ingestion of hallucinogenic drugs.
12
Vision produced without light entering the eye’s cornea is
called entoptic, and entoptic forms of vision give powerful insights into the body’s perceptual
capacities. As entoptic phenomena, phosphenes regularly inhabit the visual field of sensory
deprived subjects: those who are restricted from visual processes that require a light source and
those who experience prolonged visual monotony. Because phosphenes are expressed in
conditions of sensory deprivation, their perceptual effects are sometimes called the “prisoner’s

11
Lisa Marie Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected
(New York: New York University Press, 2012), 4. For more on race and criminalization in texts not cited
elsewhere in this dissertation, see Luana Ross, Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native
American Criminality (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); and Micol Seigel, “‘Convict Race’:
Racialization in the Era of Hyperincarceration,” Social Justice 39, no. 4 (2014): 31-51.
12
See Gerald Oster, “Phosphenes,” Scientific American 222, no. 2 (1970): 83-87.
10
cinema,” a term that underscores the isolation from sensorial stimuli that imprisoned people
endure.
13
As it appears in the work of neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, the “prisoner’s cinema” is a
hallucinatory vision in which someone living under conditions of darkness can experience
flashing lights, abstract designs, or animated figures.
14
Employing carceral language to describe
the function of this perceptual phenomenon, Sacks calls the “prisoner’s cinema” a “fugitive
hallucination.”
15
As described in scientific writing by the likes of Oster and Sacks, the prisoner’s
cinema is a valuable metaphor for this project because it expresses how the perception of moving
images can erupt into the senses of people in prison who are otherwise subjected to a dull
uniformity of sonic and visual stimuli.
This dissertation traces the histories and afterlives of two technologies—prison and
cinema—as they innovate, evolve, and perhaps one day vanish. Scholarship on the associations
between cinema and prison has primarily concentrated on the representation of prisons and
imprisonment within TV and movies. This literature addresses the incredibly popular genre of
“prison films” (which includes comedies, crime dramas, documentaries, and so on), but it has
done less to understand spectatorship and production as tools that fasten “film” to “prison” in the
complex systems of capital and nation-state formation. Mostly departing from an evaluation of
these representations of prison and imprisonment, I am concerned with cinematic exhibition and
reception in the institutional purview of the U.S. prison, which is disturbed by its institutional
emergence within routines of anti-black capture. To discuss cinema and imprisonment in excess

13
Although the term “prisoner’s cinema” describes the expression of phosphenes in the absence of light,
carceral tactics of sensory deprivation are not limited to restriction from light. In fact, from the
interminable artificial lighting in many contemporary prisons to the illumination of prisoners’ cells in
Jeremy Bentham’s proposed panopticon, unending light has become a topic of protest as much as
darkness. See Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings (New York: Verso, 1995).
14
See Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations, (New York: Knopf, 2012), especially Chapter 2, “The Prisoner’s
Cinema: Sensory Deprivation,” 34-44.
15
Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations, (New York: Knopf, 2012), 40.
11
of the representational, I examine the economies of film and television exhibition inside U.S.
prisons throughout the first half of the twentieth century, particularly at moments of significant
transformations in carceral institutions. The prisoner’s cinema is a description of how a prison
sentence can leave its trace in the perceiving faculties of imprisoned people. It is a concept that
attends both to the temporal and perceptual nature of imprisonment since it emerges as the
perceptual effect of prolonged captivity.
This focus on the trace left in an individual’s body is not to suggest that there are not also
social components to the prisoners’ cinema that extend beyond the walls of the prison. In “Prison
Time,” for instance, Michael Hardt insists that “prison time” is universalized in contemporary
political economies, where even the unincarcerated populace experiences time as “abstracted”
and “emptied” through routine labor.
16
“When you get close to prison,” Hardt writes, “… you
realize that it is not really a site of exclusion, separate from society, but rather a focal point, the
site of the highest concentration of a logic of power that is generally diffused throughout the
world.”
17
For Hardt, the prison’s ability to siphon off meaningful expressions of time is an
indicator of a broader social organization of labor. It is certainly necessary to examine the
rippling effects of mass imprisonment across all forms of social affiliation in a society that
reproduces itself so significantly through the incarceration of millions, but there might also be a
way to refuse Hardt’s impulse toward universalizing the specific conditions of restraint that
sustain prisoners’ experiences of time. In other words, carceral temporality as simultaneously
generalizable to a broad social landscape manufactured through surveillance and detention, as
well as deeply specific to the perceptual experiences of the racialized communities who
experience disproportionate vulnerability to state capture.

16
Michael Hardt, “Prison Time,” Yale French Studies 91 (1997), 64.
17
Michael Hardt, “Prison Time,” Yale French Studies 91 (1997), 66.
12
As has been remarked emphatically in the writing and thinking of imprisoned people, the
duration of a prison sentence creates fatigue in the human senses. As in any situation in which
deprivation or monotony cloud perceptual faculties, the senses invent theatricalized responses to
fill up the passage of time. The prisoner’s cinema is a reminder that the prison sentence is a time-
based punishment. As Michel Foucault has contemplated in his germinal study Discipline and
Punish, the sentence is time, measured precisely to serve as corollary to a criminalized action,
albeit using arbitrary metrics for the calculation of its length.
18
If the temporal duration of a
prison sentence shares only a superficial connection to behavior, then, the prisoner’s cinema
announces its political and ethical concerns around the management of time for those
populations most exposed to the perceptual effects of waiting in suspense. In the United States, it
has been comprehensively well documented that race and class positions accumulate vastly
different vulnerabilities to arrest, likelihoods of conviction, and lengths of sentencing for the
same behaviors. If the temporal duration of a prison sentence shares only a superficial
connection to behavior, then, the prisoner’s cinema announces its political and ethical concerns
around the management of time for those populations most exposed to the perceptual effects of
waiting in suspense.
If time is a central component in the criminological decisions made in sentencing
procedures and programs for release from prison, it has also appeared around questions of a
moving image’s ontological status. Time, in these analyses, is posited as having a relation to

18
“The correct duration of the penalty must be calculated … not only according the particular crime and
its circumstances, but also according to the penalty itself as it takes place in actual fact. This amounts to
saying that, although the penalty must be individualized, it is so not on the basis of the individual-
offender, the juridical subject of his act, the responsible author of the offence, but on the basis of the
individual punished, the object of a supervised transformation, the individual in detention inserted in the
prison apparatus, modified by it or reacting to it.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of
the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 244-245.
13
movement, which is the unique feature of the cinematic image in relation to other photographic
images. Henri Bergson’s concept of durée (duration) has been influential in the study of moving
images—despite the philosopher’s own ambivalence around film—through its adoption into the
writing of Gilles Deleuze and others.
19
Bergson is famous for his skepticism that time might be
divided into numerical units, and instead posits a “pure duration” in which the ego “refrains from
separating its present state from its former states.”
20
In short, Bergson insists that time is not
separable into discrete pieces. This claim has been adopted within the study of cinema to
understand motion—the motion of a motion picture, for example—as continuous and indivisible.
For many imprisoned people, time operates under the weight of numeracy via its measurement in
days, months, and years, but is nonetheless experienced as undifferentiated, in an unprogressive
continuation that resembles Bergson’s durée. Within prison time, however, the undifferentiation
of time is calamitous, sharing none of the positive expressive characteristic of Bergson’s “pure
duration.” That is, prison time weaponizes the Bergsonian durée.
Durative practices of time, perception, and consciousness converge in the prisoner’s
cinema. Lisa Guenther’s Solitary Confinement engages the phenomenological tradition within
European philosophy to insists that time and perception are co-constituted in carceral
architectures that stretch temporal durations to astounding feats of elasticity, creating in
imprisoned people a protracted rupture from their loved ones and other social connections.
Guenther’s work explains how the temporal punishment of imprisonment can alter the perceptual
faculties of imprisoned people. To better understand the character of carceral time, Guenther
works through Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, in which death becomes futurity’s boundary,

19
See Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
20
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.L.
Pogson (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001), 100.
14
but then asks, “[W]hat if one’s Being-in-the-world has been reduced to four concrete walls and a
mesh door? … Are there not certain situations of extreme domination that can rob one of a
meaningful relation to one’s own death?”
21
Guenther also responds to the perceptual aspects of
prisoner’s cinema with an explicit meditation on hallucination: “The hallucinations that often
emerge in solitary confinement are not just signs of mental illness but also ontological
derangements of time and reality.”
22
Philosophical engagements such as Guenther’s reveal how
the duration of the prison sentence re-circuits the perceptual faculties of captured people.
My use of the prisoner’s cinema in the title of this dissertation gestures toward the
problems and possibilities of perception and viewing in disciplinary settings, structured as they
are by the temporal delay placed on people who are suspended in confinement for outrageous
periods of time. Imprisoned peoples’ perceptions are a technology, an invention, a discovery of
insights made possible through reflective duration. Although I do not create an empirical study
of imprisonment’s somatic or psychological effects, I nonetheless maintain that the temporal
duration of imprisonment can activate and deactivate embodied capacities of touch, vision,
hearing, balance, and a cacophony of unnamed senses. The imprisoned person’s anticipation of
sensorial interaction and demand for temporal acceleration rearrange the human sensorium, and
they uncover how economies of time and perception can materialize into physical artifacts other
than the human body, such as a film.
The attention to sensation, corporeality, and labor that define the prisoner’s cinema find
their way into this dissertation through multiple and sometimes overlapping routes. In the first
chapter on prisoner-edited print culture, the prisoner’s cinema can be found in the practice of

21
Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2013), 202.
22
Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2013), 198.
15
writing and editing, which expended imprisoned writers’ bodily resources to produce texts that
could be shared through networks of affiliation. In the second chapter, which focuses on cinema
in early prisons, the prisoner’s cinema manifests itself in the pre-cinematic live performances and
itinerant exhibition practices that offered reminders of the outside to those confined to cages; it
also operated in the racist images that produced in viewers subjectively different feelings of
belonging and humanity. In the third and fourth chapters, the prisoner’s cinema was an engine
that sparked imprisoned peoples’ labor, invigorating them to produce and reproduce life and
death within their institutions. In the final chapter and conclusion, the prisoner’s cinema
transgressed media to possess the television and digital technologies, opening new avenues for
experiencing and sensing moving images.

The Archive of the Penal Press
As I will explore more deeply in the first chapter of this dissertation, the Penal Press was
a spirited exchange of prison newspapers and magazines across North America that peaked from
the 1930s to the 1950s. Typically using money that was provided by the prison administration
and supplemented by a subscription-based income, imprisoned men and women took control
over all aspects of the publication process, including writing, editing, illustrating, and printing
Penal Press papers. Although newspapers were published in select prisons as early as the
nineteenth century, the distinguishing feature of the Penal Press in the mid-twentieth century was
not only the enormous scale it reached, but also the robust trade of its publications by mail
between the editors at institutions that were sometimes thousands of miles apart. In other words,
although prison journalism both preceded and followed the Penal Press, the Penal Press itself
was chiefly characterized by the widespread exchange of prison journalism across the majority
of U.S. and Canadian institutions. The Penal Press created new forms of comradely bonding and
16
awareness between imprisoned people that would have otherwise been made impossible by
distance and prison regulation.
Considering that today imprisoned people often require special permission to correspond
with prisoners at other institutions, the Penal Press is a historically unique communication
method at a scale unseen in today’s prisons. In spite of the administrative oversight that
delimited the types of stories that could be published, the Penal Press was a means of
communication between prisoners at distant prisons. Those who participated most directly in this
inter-institutional communication were Penal Press editors and other journalists themselves,
making this type of communication a somewhat rarified experience. Nevertheless, readers across
North America’s numerous carceral institutions could join this communication as the engaged
readers of Penal Press papers. It should be noted, however, that a key feature of the Penal Press
circuit was its routine exclusion and marginalization of women and writers of color, which I
explore more thoroughly in Chapter 1. These exclusions in the Penal Press created editorial
struggles within prison journalism, some of which have become central subjects in my
dissertation’s cultural history of entertainment in prison. For all the potential that the Penal Press
held in uniting a reading public across the continent’s prisons and reformatories—and for all of
its uses as an archive of cinema’s history in the carceral sphere—it also frequently published
columns and images that laid bare the troubling divisions that separated prison editors from
many of their imprisoned readers.
Despite its incredible reach across the continent, historians of imprisonment have limited
their studies to include individual prison papers, but not the broader Penal Press itself. Only two
book-length works have been written about the Penal Press—Russell N. Baird’s The Penal Press
and James McGrath Morris’s Jailhouse Journalism—both of them written by journalists and
17
neither of them published in the last twenty years.
23
Historians of imprisonment may study one
or two Penal Press publications when writing about a specific institution, but none have yet
examined the circuit as a whole. Even when these publications have been emblematic of penal
publishing, they have been estranged from the networks of exchange that allowed them to travel
far beyond the prison of their origin. Historians of prison recreation and leisure have found the
Penal Press especially useful. Nevertheless, a comparative study of Penal Press newspapers and
their circulation has not been completed within the field of prison studies. In an effort to correct
this, I use the texts at my disposal to examine the Penal Press in its entirety, which includes
taking into account publications from different regions of the United States and Canada, the
different types of institutions at which they were published (reformatories, state prisons, federal
penitentiaries), and the different printing technologies used to reproduce these papers. Most
importantly, I highlight the papers’ circulation and interactions with one another, including
citation, republication, and plagiarism. Understanding the Penal Press in this comparative way
offers a fuller perspective on midcentury prison policies and beliefs, particularly in the realm of
prisoners’ leisure habits, aesthetic tastes, and cultural demands.
Cultural histories of the prison have established that film and other media delighted
imprisoned audiences and stirred the imaginations of administrators undertaking prison reform
projects. In her examination of cinematic exhibition at New York’s Sing Sing Prison under the
leadership of penal reformers such as Thomas Mott Osborne and Lewis E. Lawes, Alison
Griffiths has shown the vigor with which prison administrations presented films to a new

23
Russell N. Baird, The Penal Press (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967); James
McGrath Morris, Jailhouse Journalism: The Fourth Estate Behind Bars (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 2002).
18
population of spectators.
24
In a reform effort at California’s San Quentin Prison, Eric Smoodin
has identified the rehabilitative impulse that inspired Warden Clinton T. Duffy to screen It’s a
Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946) and ask prisoners to express their thoughts on its moral
lessons in handwritten letters.
25
In his examination of the prison radio programs San Quentin on
the Air at San Quentin and Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls at Texas State Prison, Ethan Blue
has cast prison media as part of the “popular culture of punishment.”
26
In each of these cases,
scholars have found prison newspapers—Sing Sing’s Star of Hope, San Quentin’s News, and
Texas State Prison’s Echo—to be indispensable in gauging imprisoned peoples’ responses to the
media programs staged in prisons.
These texts contribute to a broader field of nontheatrical film studies, which explores the
undervalued impact of filmmaking intended for exhibition outside of theaters in places such as
schools, churches, museums, and military bases.
27
Some scholars have taken to calling these
films “useful cinema” in recognition of their pedagogic utility within the institutions that have
employed them.
28
Although a wide array of educational and instructional films circulated within
midcentury prisons, the majority of the films advertised and reviewed in prison newspapers were
Hollywood movies designed to have theatrical releases. Because the prison was a nontheatrical
exhibition site that staged theatrical films outside of their commercial distribution circuits, the

24
Alison Griffiths, Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and the Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
25
Chapter 5 of Eric Smoodin, Regarding Frank Capra: Audience, Celebrity, and American Film Studies,
1930-1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 160-202.
26
Chapter 5 of Ethan Blue, Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons
(New York: New York University Press, 2012), 135-188.
27
See Dan Streible, Martina Roepke, and Anke Mebold, eds., “Nontheatrical Film,” special issue of Film
History 19, no. 4 (2007); Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible, eds. Learning with the
Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and
Haidee Wasson and Lee Grieveson, eds., Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex (Oakland: University of
California Press, 2018).
28
Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson, eds., Useful Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2011).
19
study of its practices and technologies can expand the boundaries of which films might count as
“nontheatrical” or even “useful.” Examining prison film exhibition also helps us better
understand the links between nontheatrical film and race, which is of special importance to a
genre of media that permeated many of the institutions that most significantly impacted black,
indigenous, and immigrant communities through bureaucratic surveillance, discipline, and
abandonment.
29
In fact, because the punishment practices of American carceral institutions were
an outgrowth of white supremacist attitudes about the criminality of African Americans and
other people of color, an analysis of race is necessary to properly understand its nontheatrical
exhibition practices.
One of the reason Penal Press papers are so astonishingly understudied is because there is
no central depository in which they are archived. Instead, prisoner-edited newspapers and
magazines are dispersed across the country in state libraries and state universities. For this
reason, I have traveled to thirteen states and Canada to gain access to publications from over
thirty prisons and reformatories across North America [Image 0.2]. I have focused on
publications that reached wide readerships beyond their home institutions, such as the San
Quentin News (San Quentin Prison, California) and the Presidio (Iowa State Penitentiary). I have
also prioritized the relatively rare publications from women’s institutions, such as the Clarion
(California Institution for Woman) and the Reflector (Minnesota Reformatory for Women), since
they provide journalistic first-person accounts of women prisoners, thereby giving a fuller
picture of the multiple experiences of imprisonment. Moreover, these publications from
women’s institutions were particularly instructive for understanding how televisions were
introduced into prisons in the midcentury, which the subject of this dissertation’s final chapter.

29
See Allyson Nadia Field and Marsha Gordon, eds., Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2019).
20
The Penal Press began as a reform tool to educate a largely illiterate and semi-illiterate
population at institutions such as the Elmira Reformatory in New York, which inaugurated the
Summary in 1883 under the direction of prison reformer Zebulon Reed Brockway.
30
The
publication of such papers accompanied a broader reformatory movement that spread across the
United Kingdom and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This
movement touted a “new penology” that included the tenants of moral instruction, physical
labor, and mental stimulation. This stood in contrast the to the idleness and isolation that
characterized much of prison life at the time.
31

The educational lessons published in prison papers such as the Summary included world
news, scientific lectures, religious sermons, and reports on current penological debates and
studies. Reformatory papers sometimes published news related to cinema, as well, such as when
the paper of the Iowa Men’s Reformatory in Anamosa reported in 1906, “Among the attractions
at the Anamosa street carnival this week was a moving picture machine with views of the San
Francisco disaster” (I explore this more in depth in Chapter 2 of this dissertation).
32
In some
cases, the reformatory papers seemed to include instruction for instruction’s sake. In 1907, for
example, the Anamosa Prison Press (Iowa State Reformatory) reprinted a series of Esperanto
grammar lessons from the prominent literary journal North American Review.
33
The penological

30
James McGrath Morris, Jailhouse Journalism: The Fourth Estate Behind Bars (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers, 2002), Chapter 3, pp. 37-45.
31
See Alexander W. Pisciotta, Benevolent Repression: Social Control and the American Reformatory-
Prison Movement (New York: New York University Press, 1994).
32
P. P. Man, “Colony Notes,” Anamosa Prison Press (Iowa Men’s Reformatory), June 30, 1906, p. 10.
The writer continues poetically, “If it were ever possible to picture man from the cradle to the grave, some
of the detained could see themselves as others see them.” It’s unclear if Iowa’s prisoners were released
from the reformatory to attend the 1906 town carnival and view footage of the 1906 San Francisco
earthquake, or if the writer was only reporting news of the film that was relayed to him by prison
administrators or guards.
33
For example, see “Esperanto—The New Universal Language V,” reprinted from The North American
Review in The Anamosa Prison Press (Iowa Men’s Reformatory), April 6, 1907, p. 5. This lesson taught
Esperanto learners how to construct sentences in both active and passive voice in the language.
21
pedagogy of prison journalism was that regular reading would prevent the mind from wandering
to “criminal” thoughts. Unlike the later papers of the Penal Press, there was no expectation that
reformatory papers would be traded between institutions, and imprisoned people would have
been less likely to read the content produced at other reformatories. Although reformatory papers
were composed primarily of instructional guides and religious parables, administrators believed
that such exchange of print material would be detrimental to prisoners’ rehabilitation. One penal
reformer even proclaimed that writings published at other prisons were “not the best matters with
which to occupy the minds of our population,” which reveals that the subject of exchanging
reformatory papers was at least discussed at the administrative level.
34
The shift that would
launch the Penal Press came in the 1930s, when administrators relaxed their impositions on
trading print material between institutions, and imprisoned journalists were free to trade their
publications with others across the continent. From there, the Penal Press grew to include the
majority of prisons in the United States and Canada, and journalists began imitating the national
newspapers and magazines that circulated more widely, as well as imitating each other.

Methodology
The archive of carceral violences is breathtaking, stretching from Bedford to Angola to
Kingston, across institutions and epochs and subjectivities and methods of torture. There is no
settling how unsettling this archive can be. The stuff that a researcher finds in this archive is
horrific, and that horror is the irrepressible backdrop for a historical rendering of culture and
amusement in the prison. Recreation was emphatically not a reprieve from these tortures and
indignities, despite the fact that imprisoned people in the archive remark again and again how

34
“Officers’ Quarterly Supplement,” Our Paper (Massachusetts Reformatory), quoted in James McGrath
Morris, Jailhouse Journalism: The Fourth Estate Behind Bars (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, 2002), p. 50.
22
much they cherished their movies, radios, TVs, plays, musical performances, and athletic
competitions. Neither, however, was recreation simply a method of carceral control, although it
certainly served that purpose. More problematically that even that fact, however, was that
recreation often just coexisted with the terror, and made up part of the same world that beat and
maimed and killed the people deemed to be extraneous to civil society.
Like films themselves, journals, magazines, zines, newsletters, and pamphlets have
material histories of circulation inside prisons. Print matter can be an excellent source to learn
the types of media that inhabit carceral spaces. Added to this is the fact that writing is often one
of few expressive mediums that are sanctioned within the confines of the prison (viewing film
and television are another, as this project should make clear). To answer questions about the
experience of time’s movement in states of “correctional” confinement and spectatorial rapture,
as well as the juncture between those two conditions, I examine archival documents alongside
theoretical texts on punishment practices and moving images. Creating a history of film
exhibition in North American prisons has required reading an expansive archive of
administrative documents, personal papers of prison wardens, prisoners’ testimonies, journalism,
autobiography, and epistolary exchange.
Even though writing experiments are not unique to imprisoned peoples’ poetry,
journalism, autobiography, and correspondence, experimentation nonetheless flourishes
throughout prisoners’ writing. Consider, for instance, the tally mark on the prison wall, which
has appeared across an array of cinematic depictions of imprisonment [Image 0.3]. The tally
mark is a mode of writing that measures time by visually representing days as they pass in easily
countable multiples of five. Like the celluloid film strip, which divides the image into numerical
units that progress through time as the image appears to have motion, the tally mark represents
23
the progression of time. The day is its unit of measure, and it is literally inscribed onto the prison
apparatus itself. This mark is notable since it can be inscribed onto the wall of the prison itself,
an instance in which writing can literally transform the architecture of the penal institution, albeit
a modest renovation. The tally mark shows how writing itself is a measurement of time, and how
time is central to the thought and contemplation required for writing.
Experimentation in writing appears powerfully in the prison autobiography, as well. Political
prisoners such as Assata Shakur and George Jackson demonstrate unique and experimental
orthographies in their writing. In her autobiography, Shakur chooses not to capitalize the
personal pronoun “i.” The reader first encounters this orthography in an introductory poem, and
then again in the autobiography’s recitation of the 1973 events that led to Shakur’s arrest and
injury by New Jersey State Troopers: “In the background i could hear what sounded like gunfire.
But i was fading and dreaming.”
35
Because she narrates her life as intimately linked to those of
other women of color whom she meets during her incarceration, this writing technique is
passionately motivated by an interest in de-emphasizing the self-referentialism of a first-person
account. That is, Shakur creates an orthographic code that struggles against individuation (even
in autobiography) and attempts to replace it with collectivism. Some of my approach to
analyzing the Penal Press comes from work that has been done into the importance of epistolary
exchange among imprisoned people, who report that they can alleviate feelings of isolation
through exchanging their thoughts in writing with others. In The Life of Paper: Letters and a
Poetics of Living Beyond Captivity, for instance, Sharon Luk makes the “obvious, almost too

35
Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1987), 3.
24
obvious” claim that “letters can mean the world to the people attached to them, and distinctively
so for communities ripped apart by incarceration.”
36

As Dylan Rodríguez argues in Forced Passages, the formalization of prisoners’ writing
into a “prison genre” builds upon liberal discourses of rehabilitation for imprisoned people
without fundamentally critiquing the historical and economic forces that have made poor
communities of color as the most heavily policed in cities across the United States. In defiance of
this “genre,” Rodríguez asks, “What are the conditions of possibility for these carceral texts?
What are the contexts—emphasis on the plural—of their production in U.S. prisons, jails, and
detention centers? What kind(s) of political practice(s) do these texts signify, transform, and
create?”
37
Guided by these questions, I agree that prisoners’ diverse and discordant writings
cannot be grouped as a genre, particularly when such a grouping occludes the race, class, and
gender hierarchies inherent within U.S. imprisonment. Moreover, as I argue above, prison
writing is characterized more by unruly experimentation than a set of generic conventions
expressed by all imprisoned people. Nonetheless, those who wrote for the Penal Press
understood themselves to be in journalistic communion with one another. For that reason, I
analyze their writings, and particularly their engagement with moving image culture, as a
relatively coherent body of work.
It is here that I would also like to make a note on the language I employ in this study.
Whenever possible, I use the adjective imprisoned to refer to the many people who experienced
incarceration in this history of prison media and entertainment. When I have found it
grammatically necessary or expedient to use a noun, I have chosen to use the relatively value-

36
Sharon Luk, The Life of Paper: Letters and Poetics of Living Beyond Captivity (Oakland: University of
California Press, 2018), 1.
37
Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Racial Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 82.
25
neutral (although still not entirely adequate) word prisoner. Unless I am citing another source, I
do use convict, inmate, or criminal. These words move the transitory experience of incarceration
into an ontological identity in a manner that I find to be problematic, and I believe they can be
uniquely dehumanizing words in their prioritization of a person’s incarceration status over other
aspects of their humanity. This tradition of prioritizing adjectives over nouns began in studies of
racial chattel slavery to recognize the humanity of enslaved people in the face of a word like
slave, and critical prison studies scholarship regularly prioritizes this word choice too. To do so
recognizes that imprisoned people experience, desire, and inhabit multitudes of subjectivities, but
language has not yet caught up to this reality.

Chapter Outline
This dissertation’s five chapters unfold in roughly chronological order to examine the
modes of moving image exhibition, promotion, and reception that flourished within American
prisons beginning in the first decade of the 1900s. Chapter 1 analyzes dozens of prison
publications to view how prisoners promoted and appraised the films shown at their institutions,
arguing that these journalists were instrumental in fostering the cultures of film spectatorship that
thrived in North American prisons. Chapter 2 contributes to film history by exploring the earliest
introduction of films into prisons in the 1900s and 1910s, focusing on how cinema coexisted
with anti-black live performances in the form of blackface minstrelsy. Chapter 3 examines
prisoners' wartime labor during World War II, arguing that films depicting the war were crucial
in managing prisoners' labor toward the war through discourses of American nationalism. Also
focusing on labor, Chapter 4 analyzes how cinema was integral in regimenting the work of
prisoners who served as field hands and manufacturers and Louisiana State Penitentiary during a
26
period of reform in the 1950s. Finally, Chapter 5 documents the introduction of television and
widescreen films in U.S. and Canadian prisons in the 1950s, observing that administrations
rhetorically narrated prisons as more habitable as a result of these improvements, despite this
being a period of prison expansion.

27

Image 0.1. Imprisoned spectators at the Iowa State Reformatory, ca. early 1950s.

28

Image 0.2. Locations of state libraries and state archives I have visited as part of the research for
this project. In certain circumstances, I was able to obtain issues of newspapers from states
whose state libraries I did not visit.
29

Image 0.3. Tally marks on a prison wall mark the passing of days in Jim Jarmusch’s Down by
Law (1986).
30
Chapter 1
Mary Pickford’s Mugshot: Advertising Film in the Penal Press

The same year that gossip columnist Hedda Hopper began her popular syndicated column
“Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood” in the Los Angeles Times, a humbler but no less devoted celebrity
rumor bulletin was launched at a Midwestern prison. Far away from the glitzy coastal film
industry that served as its referent, “Stars in the Street” was a short-lived Hollywood gossip page
published in the Marquette Inmate, which was a monthly magazine written, edited, and
mimeographed by imprisoned journalists at the Michigan State House of Correction and Branch
Prison in Marquette. Written by the pseudonymous Hollie Wood, “Stars in the Street” included
production notes about film studios’ upcoming film features and personal tidbits about stars’
lives. Its first appearance in March 1938 provided information about the careers of Frank Capra,
Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Bette Davis, and others.
1

Despite having a more modest readership than his nationally syndicated counterparts
such as Hopper and Louella Parsons, Hollie was just as capable of hurling insults at
entertainment personalities. For example, when commenting on Joan Crawford’s divorce from
fellow actor Franchot Tone, the Marquette Inmate columnist used the breakup as an opportunity
to disparage Crawford’s professional reputation, writing, “The Crawford popularity is on the
wane, and has been for the past year as the result of some really bad pictures.”
2
Complaining
about what he believed to be Twentieth Century Fox’s overuse of actor Don Ameche, Hollie
Wood advised the company, “Give the fella a rest before the movie-going public decides to do it

1
Hollie Wood, “Stars in the Street,” Marquette Inmate (Michigan State House of Correction and Branch
Prison), March 1938: 20-21.
2
Hollie Wood, “Stars in the Street,” Marquette Inmate (Michigan State House of Correction and Branch
Prison), August 1938: 36.
31
for you. Don is too good to be killed off by appearing him too often.”
3
More than just a frivolous
platform for petty criticism, however, “Stars in the Street” was representative of a substantial
convergence between filmgoing and the press within North American prisons. This chapter
examines this convergence to argue that cinema’s promotion in penal journalism strengthened a
collective understanding among imprisoned people that entertainment could be a site of both
enjoyment and contestation. This collective understanding was formed through the shared
cultural experiences of watching movies and reading prison newspapers.
“Stars in the Street” first appeared in March 1938. By October of the same year it had
disappeared from the pages of the Marquette Inmate. Despite its brief life, the column was part
of a massive circulation of prisoner-edited journalism within and between North American
prisons in which imprisoned editors loosely organized themselves into a franchise they called the
Penal Press. Like other publications in the circuit, Marquette Inmate’s full page (and sometime
two-page) spread of celebrity praise and scorn was illustrated with caricatures of famous actors
against a star background, drawn by one of the paper’s imprisoned artists. In its first appearance
in March 1938, the names of celebrities were italicized to make it easy for readers to scan the
page for news concerning their favorite stars. Celebrity gossip was evocative to the paper’s
largely incarcerated readership because, as Hollie Wood insisted, “The greatest dramas aren’t
reflected on Hollywood’s screens; they are coming from the lives of its players.”
4
Meanwhile,
journalists writing in prison press offices across North America would spend the next several
decades producing their own dramas for consumption by a mixed readership of free and
imprisoned people.

3
Hollie Wood, “Stars in the Street,” Marquette Inmate (Michigan State House of Correction and Branch
Prison), April 1938: 19.
4
Hollie Wood, “Stars in the Street,” Marquette Inmate (Michigan State House of Correction and Branch
Prison), July 1938: 37.
32
Although the pseudonym Hollie Wood conceals the author’s identity to contemporary
readers, it is likely that he would have been well known among his imprisoned readers. Hollie’s
audience would have included not only the men imprisoned at Marquette, but also unimprisoned
readers and prisoners incarcerated at other institutions across North America. Like the movies
that lighted up screens in the majority of prisons and reformatories in the mid-twentieth century,
the prison newspaper was a popular medium to divert attention away from the prison’s daily
tedium. Also like cinema, it served as a collective experience among a prison’s captives, who
could share conversations about the paper’s latest editorials, news items, or cover art as easily as
they might discuss the prison’s latest comedy or adventure film.
It might seem extraordinary that a prison newspaper would devote its energy to
disseminating film production information, since imprisoned spectators rarely chose their own
film fare. However, as Hank Lewenkron, writer of the column “Here’s Hollywood” in the
Monocle (Nebraska State Reformatory), explained in justifying his own article’s existence,
“Though we realize that the men here don’t have a complete choice of their movies, we also
realize that many men are interested in the movies and will see the picture after they leave this
institution, which we hope will be soon.”
5
For Lewenkron, providing movie production notes for
imprisoned readers would make them more informed as movie patrons when they were released
from the Nebraska reformatory, signaling both the promise of release from imprisonment and its
attendant promise of consumer identity within cultural markets. Nonetheless, the film culture
documented in the Penal Press operated within a largely noncommercial circuit, transforming our
understanding of film advertising and consumption in nontheatrical spaces.

5
Hank Lewenkron, “Here’s Hollywood,” Monocle (Nebraska State Reformatory), March 1962: 13.
33
From entertainment columns such as those published in the Marquette Inmate and the
Monocle, we learn the extent to which prison publications generated interest in the public world
of Hollywood production and the private lives of its most famous participants. The Penal Press
was prolific in its output of journalistic reporting, and the circulation of publications between
institutions was crucial in fostering a culture around film spectatorship in prisons. In particular,
film promotion in the Penal Press served as a vehicle for prison administrations to encourage
regular and orderly film spectatorship through the publication of reviews, announcements, and
celebrity gossip columns. This spectatorship served administrations’ goals of instilling discipline
and passivity among prison populations, but also opened up possibilities for imprisoned people
to experience unexpected responses to the films they were shown, and even to organize to
demand new sensory experiences. Moreover, an analysis of film promotion in the Penal Press
gives us a better understanding of how cultural forms moved across distant penal sites at
midcentury. In fact, the Penal Press is one of the few places scholars can learn about film
spectatorship in prisons, since prison administrations did not typically deem it valuable to
document the film screenings and live performances in the annual or biennial reports that have
provided so much demographic information to historians of imprisonment.
A better understanding of film promotion in prison newspapers refreshes longstanding
historical conceptualizations of cinema, imprisonment, and journalism. To the interest of film
historians, the Penal Press exemplifies how movie distribution had active film promoters even in
locales where such advertising was not being created for the purpose of commercial
remuneration. In this way, we can see the impact of film in people’s lives through the labor they
invested into advertising even in the absence of profit. For historians of imprisonment, the Penal
Press documents a relatively understudied time period in American incarceration; in particular, it
34
highlights the cultures that prisoners shared around media, which is a history difficult to glean
from other sources. This history suggests a connection between prison labor regimes and the
introduction of recreational activities such as film screenings. We also learn how an alternative
press imitated and innovated journalism during the Depression and postwar period—from news
reporting to celebrity gossip—and set that writing into motion within a vigorous circuit of
prisoner-published print culture. More broadly for the humanities, the Penal Press reminds us
that imprisoned people have long been capable and inventive authors of their own lives.
This chapter begins by explaining the major qualities, objectives, and personalities of the
Penal Press. It continues by examining the impact of the Penal Press in reforming entertainment
practices at select prisons. As we will see, the Penal Press could be used as a platform to put
pressure on prison administrations to change their recreation programs. In particular, the pages of
the Penal Press served as a forum to request different types of movies or improvements in
cinema technologies and screening environments. These were no trivial pleas for entertainment;
instead, they were demands to ameliorate the everyday inequities and indignations characteristic
of imprisonment. Nevertheless, Penal Press papers could have the opposite effect of upholding
recreational standards in need of change, and were often responsible for reinforcing unsavory
exhibition methods in prisons, particularly racial segregation. Cinematic exhibition in prisons
operated within a world of strict carceral hierarchies that were ordered through race, gender, and
labor. These power arrangements undergirded the journalism that sprang from prison editors’
desks across the continent as well. At stake in this ambivalence of the Penal Press is a
reconsideration of the so-called “prisoner’s voice,” which prison studies scholars have attempted
to prioritize in their analyses. For this reason, the chapter closes with a reassessment of this
“voice” in the pages of the Penal Press. Although the Penal Press offers one way to center the
35
critical output of imprisoned people, it also reveals how the perspectives of imprisoned people
are not monolithically resistant to uneven power relations, as the field sometimes imagines.

The History of the Penal Press
In his 1967 study of the Penal Press, Russell N. Baird found that over half of all prisons
and reformatories in the U.S. hosted papers published by prisoners, and concluded that 65.5% of
prisoners were able to read publications from their own institution.
6
Baird also reported that the
circulation of Penal Press papers was approximately 240,036, with 80,416 of these delivered to
non-imprisoned readers.
7
However, Baird was writing in a decade in which the Penal Press was
already fading; it is likely that if he had written his study ten years earlier, he would have
discovered an even greater number of prisons that traded their papers in the Penal Press. The
Ohio Penitentiary News (Ohio State Penitentiary) boasted in 1955 that the Penal Press had
reached a circulation of one million readers for its approximately 200 titles, adding “each one
speaks for the prison inmate and occasionally for the administration.”
8
A 1952 map of the Penal
Press published in the Reflector (Indiana State Reformatory) listed 113 different publications on
a map of the United States.
9
It was not simply the number of prison publications or the number
of readers that indicate the historical significance of the Penal Press, however. Its historical
impact is also evidenced by the types of reading publics that were created through the spread of
this journalism.
Although there was substantial variation, a typical Penal Press publication would include
an editorial, national and international news items, short fiction, columns reprinted from other

6
Russell N. Baird, The Penal Press (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. 11.
7
Russell N. Baird, The Penal Press (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. 12.
8
“Penal Press Has Million Readers,” Ohio Penitentiary News (Ohio State Penitentiary), January 15,
1955: 1.
9
“Penal Press Map,” Reflector (Indiana State Reformatory), June 27, 1952: 8.
36
Penal Press papers, wardens’ and chaplain’s columns, sports pages, humor columns, quizzes,
crossword puzzles, poetry, and cartoons. Editorials were written by a newspaper’s imprisoned
editor, and often covered topics related to prison management or reform. Another common topic
for Penal Press editorials was justifying the existence of prison journalism itself, characterizing it
as a useful component of prisoners’ rehabilitation programs. News sections were diverse in their
scope, and could draw attention to either local or international news. One common theme of
Penal Press news sections was a focus on news from other prisons at legislative or administrative
levels. Surprisingly, some papers ran paid advertisements from local businesses. For example,
one issue of the Rainbow (Nevada State Prison) featured ads from the Monarch Cafe and
Armanko Stationary Company in Reno, New Holland Butter in Minden, and Anderson Electric
Company in Carson City.
10

The robust arrangement of Penal Press exchange allowed imprisoned journalists to read,
cite, republish, and plagiarize each other’s stories, forming a rich dialogue far beyond the borders
of a single carceral site. Journalists writing for the Candle at Wisconsin State Prison, for
instance, read and commented on articles published in the Cactus Blossom (Arizona State
Prison), the Atlantian (U.S. Penitentiary, Georgia), and Paahao Press (Oahu Prison, Hawaii).
This vast circulation of printed matter through the Penal Press contributed to the dissemination of
news culture between disparate locations, including announcements for films screened in
prisons, movie reviews, and gossip about celebrities working in the radio, film, and television
industries. The Penal Press became an intricate, transnational project for rejecting carceral spaces
as “home,” insisting that these places were not designed for human belonging. The exchange
allowed immobile prisoners to circumvent the physical boundaries of the prison and create

10
Rainbow (Nevada State Prison), July 1935: 3, 5.
37
communion with other imprisoned people thousands of miles away. Their publications circulated
far beyond the walls of individual institutions, and were traded between editors at distant prisons.
In addition to being traded through the mail, and they were often passed around secondhand
between prisoners in a single institution.
In addition to imprisoned readers at other institutions, Penal Press papers were also read
by prison wardens and staff, as well as state governors and other politicians. In my travels to
state libraries and historical societies to collect the archive of the Penal Press, I found that several
of these libraries possessed copies of prison newspapers that were submitted to the library
directly by newspaper editors at the time of the paper’s original publication. Some wardens, such
as San Quentin Prison’s Clinton T. Duffy, even maintained columns in the papers addressed to
the imprisoned readership. Although prisoner’s families were typically able to receive Penal
Press publications—in fact, the practice often provided necessary funds to support these
publications—there were also exceptions to this rule. Inside World (Mississippi State
Penitentiary) announced in 1951 that it would not be able to send copies of their paper to
individuals outside of prisons because their printing machinery would not be able to handle such
a high demand, and consoled readers by writing, “We are glad to say that we are putting out
enough copies so that each and every one of you will have the opportunity to read it yourself.”
11

We learn quite a bit about the material journeys of the Penal Press through its current
status in the archive. In many cases, issues of these publications held in state libraries across the
United States are missing columns or images that have been clipped out, probably to become
artwork on cell walls or to begin a secondary circulation free from the remainder of the
periodical. Many copies of the Presidio (Iowa State Prison), for instance, preserved and bound at

11
Louis B. Weekley, “Notice to Inmates,” Inside World (Mississippi State Penitentiary), July 1951: 34.
38
the Iowa State Library are missing their covers, presumably because prisoners used the covers as
artwork to decorate their empty cells. As Laura Isabel Serna shows in her investigation of the
press influencing attitudes about film among the working class in Mexico, a population that was
not widely literate in the 1920s, “photographic images and advertisements related to the cinema
constituted part of a visual landscape shared across social groups.”
12
It may be that the skillfully
illustrated covers were meaningful to an imprisoned population that held varying degrees of
literacy in the midcentury. Artwork was by no means the only part cut out of papers, however.
For example, as early as 1908, an issue of the Ohio Penitentiary News shows cut out columns.
13

In addition to missing covers or cut out columns, some archived issues of Penal Press
papers are decorated with marginalia written by their original readers. The microfilmed copies of
the Reformatory Pillar held at the Minnesota Historical Society, for instance, are marked with
margin notes from a particularly opinionated reader. One of these markings appears on an
opinion column “As I See It” by Lee Holman, which features a sketch of an eye to accompany
the article. The anonymous reader, who presumably disagreed with the column’s author and may
have known him personally or by reputation, wrote in capital letters: “A BIG MOUTH WOULD
FIT HIM BETTER!” [Image 1.1].
14
Because reading materials were shared between prisoners,
however, written comments in books and periodicals were not always welcome. In an article
titled “Stop the Vandalism,” a writer for Canada’s Telescope (Kingston Penitentiary, Ontario)
complained about his prison’s “literary censor” who “scribbles away to his heart’s content,

12
Laura Isabel Serna, Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture Before the Golden
Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 90-91.
13
Ohio Penitentiary News (Ohio State Penitentiary), July 4, 1908. Microfilmed copy at the Wisconsin
Historical Society, Madison, WI.
14
Lee Holman, “As I See It,” Reformatory Pillar (Minnesota State Reformatory), August 2, 1950: 7.
Microfilmed copy at the Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN.
39
having little regard that he is defacing the book.”
15
He also criticized those who “clip from
magazines any pictures with which [they] may wish to adorn [their] cell walls.”
16

Marginalia could be especially vigorous in entertainment columns, where readers were
given an opportunity express their individual tastes. On one entertainment page in the Reflector
(Indiana State Reformatory), a reader rated the various news items by scrawling “OK,” “Good,”
“Very Good,” or “Excellent” across each column [Image 1.2].
17
Across the top of the page, the
reviewer hand-wrote the suggestion, “Why not change time schedule to C.S.T. [Central Standard
Time]? This is a splendid and informative page. Wonderful balance and layout.”
18
It is unclear if
the writer of this marginalia expected it to find a reader who might have the power to respond to
his feedback, or if he was simply reviewing the page to engage in his own private dialogue with
the paper. Regardless, it is certain that Penal Press papers inspired a diverse range of reactions
from an opinionated readership.

Print Culture and Prisons
The Penal Press shared a number of features with other genres of amateur publishing that
spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the ambitious endeavors of science
fiction and horror writers, hobbyists, cartoonists, and zine makers. In her study of young writers
using toy presses to produce amateur journalism in the 1870s, Jessica Isaac argues that teenaged
journalists “were engaged in a project of world-making, and even self-making,” that responded

15
Peter Norman, “Stop the Vandalism,” Telescope (Kingston Penitentiary, ON), November 1951: 6.
16
Peter Norman, “Stop the Vandalism,” Telescope (Kingston Penitentiary, ON), November 1951: 6.
17
Reflector (Indiana State Reformatory), January 5, 1951: 8. Microfilmed copy at the Indiana State
Library, Indianapolis, IN.
18
Reflector (Indiana State Reformatory), January 5, 1951: 8. Microfilmed copy at the Indiana State
Library, Indianapolis, IN. The state of Indiana used Central Standard Time in the 1950s, and did not begin
switching to Eastern Standard Time until the 1960s.
40
to and transformed post-Civil War conceptions of adolescence.
19
Truman J. Spencer contended
that these adolescents wrote out of “[a] desire for fun, glory, self-expression, [and]
achievement,” rather than “financial gain,” thereby defining their status as amateurs.
20
Although
inhabiting markedly different subjectivities than the adolescent journalists of the late nineteenth
century, the imprisoned editors and reporters of the Penal Press shared with them a familiar
amateur ethos that prioritized the production and dissemination of a complex prisoner identity
that could be consumed both my imprisoned peoples and their advocates on the outside.
Although the Penal Press operated similarly to other amateur setups, it did not stop prison
journalists from taking pride in the professionalism of their papers. Despite the fact that editors
traded their papers by mail rather than receiving news by electric telegraphs, the Penal Press was
sometimes imagined as a wire service that spread news across an archipelago of otherwise
isolated institutions. Editors used the moniker Penal Press (sometimes abbreviated as PP in
affiliated papers) to mimic wire services such as the Associated Press (AP). For example, the
abbreviation PP was sometimes used when reprinting news from another Penal Press paper, just
as one would when reprinting reporting or photos from the Associated Press. Zeynep Devrim
Gürsel writes that wire services “disseminate the majority of international information broadcast
in the world every day by serving as wholesalers of news for their subscriber base of worldwide
news publications.”
21
This “wholesaler” attitude toward publishing was true of the Penal Press,
as well, since the republication of editorials in other papers was common and encouraged.
Nevertheless, news articles and editorials originating in the Penal Press made manifest a

19
Jessica Isaac, “Youthful Enterprises: Amateur Newspapers and the Pre-History of Adolescence, 1867-
1883,” American Periodicals 22, no. 2 (2012): 175.
20
Truman J. Spencer, The History of Amateur Journalism (New York: Fossils, 1957), 6.
21
Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, “A Short History of Wire Service Photography,” in Getting the Picture: The
Visual Culture of the News, eds. Jason E. Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz (New York: Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2015), 206.
41
strikingly different temporality than the news agencies they parodied, which relied on telegraphic
services to receive information quickly and efficiently for the purpose of dissemination.
Meanwhile, the Penal Press relied on the postal service to receive word from editors at other
institutions, which created delays of weeks or months. This delay nonetheless fostered fraternal
association among the mostly male editors of the Penal Press, who frequently complimented and
teased one another in their respective papers. The vast circulation of printed matter through the
Penal Press contributed to the dissemination of news culture between disparate locations, thereby
altering the popular view of prisons as hermetically sealed and devoid of social interactivity.
The Penal Press modeled itself on news agencies like the Associated Press in ways
beyond the parodied wire service model, as well. Journalists understood themselves to be up-to-
date with publishing standards of the time, including a commitment to representing editorials as
objective and rational. The principle that Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison call the “morality of
self-restraint” ruled the Penal Press, at least in ambition if not in practice, insofar as editors
regularly remarked that their words were value neutral, and not affected by the authors’
incarceration status.
22
Although most of the men and women writing in the circuit were amateurs
when they began their craft, some Penal Press journalists such as Tom Runyon and William
Sadler (discussed below) would go on to work for “free-world” newspapers. In at least one
instance, an individual with an authorial reputation prior his imprisonment took a role in the
Penal Press, as is the case with professional journalist and fiction writer Seven Anderton, who
produced editorials for Nebraska State Prison’s Forum newspaper during his incarceration there.
Although these papers had limited resources, particularly in relation to international news
agencies, they nonetheless possessed an astounding ability to influence readers both inside and

22
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40 (1992), 117.
42
beyond the prison. While editors would sometimes brag that they were uncensored by their
prisons’ administrators, the official selection of editors directed the types of material that would
be printable in Penal Press papers. For this reason, it is fitting to understand these papers as
operating within disciplined and institutionalized contexts, in addition to being an overall
amateur enterprise.
The Penal Press owed at least some of its popularity to the cult of personality that sprung
up around its editors, some of whom were well known throughout the entire circuit. Two of these
were Tom Runyon at the Presidio (Iowa State Prison) and William “Old Wooden Ear” Sadler at
the Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary). Runyon wrote the very popular “Leaves from a
Lifer’s Notebook,” which was reprinted in countless other papers throughout the Penal Press.
Runyon wrote of his experience in his autobiography, In for Life: A Convict’s Story, “Now I was
working for convicts, not for the hated State; now I had a chance to give a few outsiders the truth
about prisons, explaining some of the troubles and injustices that beset them.”
23
For his part,
“Old Wooden Ear” was an immensely prolific journalist, editing two different newspapers (the
Angola Argus and the Angolite) at the Louisiana State Penitentiary and co-founding a third (This
Is It) at the Tennessee State Prison across three different prison sentences at the two prisons. He
also worked on a series of exposés titled “Hell on Angola” for the New Orleans city newspaper
the Item.
24
These editors were well known to each other, and would regularly use their papers to
correspond with one another. Louis B. Weekley, editor of Inside World at Mississippi State
Penitentiary (colloquially known as Parchman Farm), wrote to Sadler during his tenure at This Is
It to express his regard for the editor ever since his earlier writing in the Angola Argus. Weekley

23
Tom Runyon, In for Life: A Convict’s Story (New York: W. W. Norton, 1953), 166.
24
Accessed at the Angola Museum’s website: http://www.angolamuseum.org/history/archived-
articles/hell-on-angola-the-wooden-ear-series/.
43
even claimed to have conveyed his admiration for Sadler and Runyon by naming his two pet
turtles after the two Penal Press editors. “Two small turtles swim in a bowl on my desk,” wrote
Weekley, “Having added appropriate stripes to their shells, I have named them Sadler and
Runyon. Whether they are pleased about this or not I cannot say.”
25

This light-hearted (and possibly fictionalized) letter from Weekley to Sadler was
published in a portion of Penal Press publications called the exchange page. These so-called
exchange pages were one of the most common features of papers in the circuit. Editors would
use the exchange page to comment on the editorials, artwork, and composition of other papers
with whom they traded. For example, this letter from Rudy Cruz in the Outlook (Federal
Correctional Institution, Oklahoma) to the Barometer (Federal Correctional Institution,
Kentucky), is a representative of how exchanges commonly read:
Congratulations to new editor, Donald C. Cheshier. Attractive, colorful cover. Cusin
Aber’s letter to Jake, a master’s piece [sic], and just plain great. “I Never Drink” by
Drunk Mr. Anonymouse, good for a thousand laughs. May reprint it in our next issue…
26

As was characteristic of exchange pages, Cruz compliments Cheshier on his paper’s cover art
and articles, and expresses consideration of reprinting material from the Barometer, which was
typically permitted as long as reprints were properly attributed to their originator. In this same
exchange page, Cruz wrote similar notes to editors of papers from U.S. and Canadian prisons as
distant as the Clock (Idaho State Penitentiary), the Spokesman (Georgia State Prison), the
Pathfinder (Saskatchewan Penitentiary), and the Beacon (Dorchester Prison, New Brunswick).
Not having an exchange page—or not mentioning an exchange page partner’s newspaper—were
causes for criticism in the culture of prison journalism. Although commonly celebratory of other
papers in the Penal Press, the exchange page was also the place where editors would criticize

25
Editor, “X-Changes,” Inside World (Mississippi State Penitentiary), March 1952: 33.
26
Rudy Cruz, “As I See the Exchanges,” Outlook (Federal Penitentiary, Oklahoma), July 1954: 35.
44
each other’s work (either seriously or in jest) and accuse each other of publishing plagiarized
material.
Penal Press editors also exchanged their products with newspapers and newsletters
published at state hospitals, girls’ and boys’ training or industrial schools, and even high school
newspapers. The exchange page of Nebraska’s the Monocle, for example, recognized Omaha
Westside High School’s student newspaper, the Lance. In March 1962, the Monocle’s exchange
editor wrote to the student journalists of the Lance, “A member of our staff has a few copies of
your paper, and we would like to see more of it in the future. We really enjoyed the pictures and
comments on the ‘Westside Twisters.’”
27
Exchange pages were international, as well, and the
North American Penal Press exchanged with prison papers globally such as Superación (Prisión
Nacional, Cuba); Senda (Penitenciario de Montevideo, Uruguay); Tharunka (Geelong Training
Prison, Australia); and Stockade (Pentridge Prison, Australia). This says much about the global
expansion of imprisonment during the mid-twentieth century, as well as the international impulse
of prison reform that would encourage prisoners’ journalism.
In addition to being multinational, the Penal Press was multilingual. For example, Pen-O-
Rama, published at Québec’s St. Vincent de Paul Penitentiary, published each of it articles in
both English and French. This translation must have required an enormous amount of labor, and
shows the importance of bilingualism to the province’s imprisoned population, which would then
be consumed by a primarily English-speaking readership in the rest of the Penal Press circuit.
Some papers in the United States, such as the San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison,
California) had Spanish-language columns, the importance of which I discuss in more depth
below. More modestly, some publications occasionally published phrases in foreign languages

27
Tom Friel, “Penal Press Exchange,” Monocle (Nebraska State Reformatory), March 1962: 10.
45
for the interest of English-speaking prisoners, such as when Paahao Press (Oahu Prison, Hawaii)
published a list of Hawaiian phrases reprinted from a Hawaiian-English dictionary.
28

One result of the exchange was the sharing of the prisons’ entertainment cultures with
each other; some even commented on prisons’ cultural activities in their exchange pages. In a
1939 exchange page from the Hawkeye (Iowa State Reformatory), a prison journalist praised his
fellow journalists working for the Prison Mirror (Minnesota State Prison), writing, “We enjoyed
your Golden Anniversary of Motion Picture [column]. Always we wait for your little paper.”
29

This column, published on the front page of the Prison Mirror two months earlier (note the
temporal delay), gave a brief history of cinema that the Iowa prisoner found illuminating.
30
Penal
Press newspapers and magazines were also active in promoting the entertainment and cultural
events of penal institutions, as well as commenting on the cultural activities and modernizations
across the circuit. This is the reason the Hill Top-ic (Indiana State Farm) used its exchange page
to congratulate the Angola Argus (Louisiana State Penitentiary) on the introduction of a
previously inaccessible technology: “Your good governor is to be congratulated on presenting
your T.B. ward with a radio.”
31
Similarly, in the State Prison of Southern Michigan’s Spectator,
writers commented on the entertainment options of the Wisconsin State Prison, writing, “Acting
Warden John C. Burke has announced that as long as weather permits, the inmate body of his
prison will be permitted to listen to radio programs in the yard during regular weekend talking

28
“Hawaiian Language, from the Book by Henry P. Judd,” Paahao Press (Oahu Prison, Hawaii), January
1955: 21.
29
“Reviewing the Exchanges,” Hawkeye (Iowa State Reformatory), October 1939, p. 18.
30
“The Golden Anniversary of Motion Pictures,” Prison Mirror (Minnesota State Prison), August 24,
1939.
31
“Exchanges,” Hill Top-ic (Indiana State Farm), May 25, 1941: 25.
46
periods. The men are grateful.”
32
This comment shows how the implementation of new
entertainment technologies at one institution could be cause for celebration across the circuit.
Largely dependent on the financial circumstances, available machinery, and
administrative oversight, prison journalism of the era used a number of different printing
techniques. Some prisons had their own print shops in which imprisoned workers were trained to
print official state documents; these prisons were more likely to publish newspapers that utilized
hand set type. Some used Linotype machines to reproduce their papers. The production of
complex and colorful cover art was central to the operations of many Penal Press publications,
and many papers used silk-screening techniques to make such cover art. Some Penal Press
publications with relatively limited circulation, such as the Reflector (Minnesota State
Reformatory for Women), even hand-painted some of their covers [Image 1.3]. This technique
of individual hand-coloring can also be found at a number of girls’ and boys’ training schools,
such as the Tattler, published by imprisoned children at the Iowa Training School for Girls, who
colored each cover with crayons or colored pencils [Image 1.4].
Although Penal Press papers used a variety of reproduction techniques, by far the most
popular of these was the mimeograph. This is due to the relatively affordability of mimeographs,
and also the fact that mimeograph machines required little training to use. All it required was
proficiency in using a typewriter, which was used to create the stencils that would be placed into
the mimeograph machine for textual reproduction. For many of the same reasons of accessibility
and ease of use, mimeography was also the preferred method for reproducing amateur and
pirated publications, which traded in cultural material to create independent reading publics that

32
“Penal Press Bulletins,” Spectator (State Prison of Southern Michigan), November 21, 1938:
2.
47
centered on media.
33
The Michigan prison newspaper the Northlander encouraged others in the
amateur press to use their Chicago copying service, the A. B. Dick Company: “Base your
duplication foundation on a pioneer of over fifty years.”
34
The mimeograph was an especially
common publication technique for Penal Press papers from women’s institutions, since women’s
reformatories lacked the print shops that were sometimes housed in men’s prisons.
Print culture in prisons went well beyond the Penal Press, and a wide array of newspapers
and magazines filtered through North America’s imprisoned reading publics.
35
Especially
important to the present study were the circulation of film fan magazines within prisons, which
show how Penal Press papers circulated within a much broader public of print readership in
general, and film fandom in particular. Gaylyn Studlar has argued that these magazines,
including Photoplay and Motion Picture Magazine, served as “a crucial index of the ideological
and historical dimensions of the cinematic field of the 1920s and a neglected source for assessing
how women were positioned as viewers/readers/consumers within discourses specifically aimed
at influencing women’s reception of Hollywood film.”
36
Given Studlar’s contention that fan

33
See, for instance, Chelsea Jennings, “Pirating Pound: Drafts and Fragments in 1960s Mimeograph
Culture,” Journal of Modern Literature 40, no. 1 (2016): 88-108.
34
Northlander, July 1942, back cover.
35
In Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2014), Lisa Gitelman takes aim at the glib scholarly use of “print culture” to describe an incommensurate
number of reproduction processes and reading practices. For Gitelman, “print culture” is too big in scope
to be researched with any specificity, and is unspecific in the technologies to which it refers. She writes,
“[P]rint culture starts to seem to relate in scale to Western modernity itself and thus to jeopardize
explanation in all the same ways that concept does” (9). Despite these criticisms, I use the term “print
culture” here to describe the Penal Press precisely because it is a formation marked by its raucous and
disorderly forms of reproduction. Like “film culture,” which has entire professional organizations devoted
to parsing its enormous scope and broad array of technologies and uses of those technologies, “print
culture” is not a useless term as a result of the breadth that it encompasses. Print is certainly a
heterogeneous constellation of technological practices, as Gitelman reminds us. The methods of Penal
Press reproduction, circulation, and reading practices exemplify the manifold meanings of print, making
the Penal Press circuit a good candidate for using “print culture” beyond the simplistic formation that
Gitelman criticizes.
36
Gaylyn Studlar, “The Perils of Pleasure? Fan Magazine Discourse as Women’s Commodified Culture
in the 1920s,” Wide Angle 13, no. 1 (1991): 7.
48
magazines are an archive through which we can better access the subjectivities of women
engaged in film spectatorship, it is notable that these magazines circulated in the highly gendered
spaces of the prison, where they would be traded among a readership of imprisoned men.
In 1934, the Presidio (Iowa State Prison) listed Billboard, Hollywood, New Movie,
Picture Play, Screen Romances, and Zit’s Theatrical Newspaper among the magazines available
for prisoners to purchase.
37
Over two decades later, in 1959, the Forum (Nebraska State Prison)
published a list of “magazines that may be ordered from your newsman,” revealing the types of
print material that would have been available to Nebraska prisoners.
38
This list featured a number
of movie magazines and fan publications, including Motion Picture, Move Life, Movie Stars
Parade, Modern Screen, and Photoplay. It also included TV Guide and Radio and TV News. In
the Mirror (Minnesota), prisoners regularly submitted advertisements to the paper to request a
magazine or newspaper swap with another prisoner. In these advertisements, prisoners often
requested to trade film fan magazines, making them a central part of the prison’s print trading
economy. A typical Mirror advertisement looked like this: “[Prisoner] B115 will exchange
Screen Book, McCall[’]s, Hollywood, and Pictorial Review (all four), for Liberty, Collier’s[,]
Rocky Mountain News, Fargo Forum, and Afro-American.”
39
This ad shows not only the
circulation of film fan magazines with prisons, but also the wide variety of materials for which
they could be traded.
This reading and trading of print matter in prisons—as well as the implementation of
prison journalism targeted specifically at imprisoned readers—was central in the formation of
imprisoned peoples’ identities as a collective group. In his foundational Imagined Communities,

37
“List of Periodicals Now Available Thru Store-Order,” Presidio (Iowa State Prison), August 1934: 8
38
“Magazines Available from the Newsman,” Forum (Nebraska State Prison), April 1959: 15.
39
“Mirrorettes,” Prison Mirror (Minnesota State Prison), June 23, 1938: 3.
49
Benedict Anderson assesses the newspaper as integral to the formation of national identities and
the standardization of temporality in capitalism. He notes that the various reports in a newspaper
share a “linkage between them [that] is imagined,” since the news items share a “calendrical
coincidence.”
40
Importantly, however, they also share a readership, whose collective
participation in consuming the news items gives meanings to both the independent events of the
news and to the readers themselves. “At the same time,” Anderson writes, “the newspaper
reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or
residential neighbours, is continually reassured that the imagined world [of the newspaper] is
visibly rooted in everyday life.”
41
It is this identificatory process vis-à-vis print matter that
animates Michael Warner’s consideration of “the kind of public that comes into being only in
relation to texts and their circulation.”
42
Of particular important to the Penal Press is Warner’s
assertation that “a public is a relation among strangers,” since many of the editors, writers, and
readers of Penal Press papers were literally unknown to one another except through the exchange
pages in which they congratulated and criticized each other’s work.
43

Although the Penal Press did not benefit commercially in the same way that a newspaper
would from the publication of film announcements, the prison paper symbiotically cooperated
with cinema, radio, and live performance to entertain prisoners. The Penal Press shows that
prisoners’ “imagined communities” extended beyond the individual institution through the
circulation of penal news throughout the midcentury, as well, and stretched to include a vast
public of international readers, both imprisoned and not. Although the Penal Press was a broad

40
Benedict Anderson, Imaged Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New
York: Verso, 2006), 33.
41
Benedict Anderson, Imaged Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New
York: Verso, 2006), 35-36.
42
Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 50.
43
Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 55.
50
enterprise in its own right, reaching nearly every prison and reformatory in the United States and
Canada at the state, provincial, and federal levels, these prisoner-edited papers were distributed
as part of an even larger circulation of print matter in prisons, which created discerning reading
publics among an increasingly literate prison population. The result was a widespread audience
for “inside” news, including weekly updates about film programs or other entertainment
announcements.

Film Culture in the Penal Press

In November 1924, San Quentin Prison’s Bulletin (precursor to the San Quentin News)
announced that film stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks had visited the prison to visit
with Warden James A. Johnston and Captain K. T. Pietrzak. The international travels of Pickford
and Fairbanks had gained public notoriety since the couple’s 1920 honeymoon in Europe, and
San Quentin’s prison newspaper reported on the stars’ tour of the prison with the same
enthusiasm as the conventional press.
44
“The news [of their arrival] spread like wildfire,” wrote
the San Quentin journalist, “The wonders of the Radio for broadcasting are nothing when
compared to the ‘inside news service’ [of prisoner’s word of mouth] for the effective
dissemination of news.”
45
Warden Johnston reflected on Fairbanks and Pickford’s visit in his
autobiography, recounting that rain had prevented them from touring as much of the prison as
they had expected. “All the men wanted to see Mary,” Johnston wrote, “and she was equally
popular with the women prisoners. She bought hundreds of handkerchiefs and other bits of

44
For more on the Pickford’s celebrity, particularly her famed relationship and business partnership with
Fairbanks, see Scott Eyman, Mary Pickford: America’s Sweetheart (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1990);
Kathleen A. Feeley, Mary Pickford: Hollywood and the New Woman (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
2016); and Robert Windeler, Sweetheart: The Story of Mary Pickford (New York: Praeger Publishers,
1973).
45
B., “Noted Stars Visit Prison,” Bulletin (San Quentin Prison, California), November 1924, n.p. (photo
insert).
51
needlework made by the women, and made sure that no woman was overlooked. She paid them
generously, and won their hearts the way she talked with them about their stitches.”
46

Noting that Fairbanks offered to donate a print of his newly released film The Thief of
Baghdad (Raoul Walsh, 1924) to be screened at San Quentin, the Bulletin author ended his
article with a wish that the two film stars “enjoyed their visit and found it most profitable as
well.”
47
It is unclear if Fairbanks kept this promise since evaluations of The Thief of Baghdad do
not appear among the film reviews in subsequent issues of the paper, but in the March 1925 issue
there appeared a photographic portrait of Pickford in profile, as captured by the “inmate
photographer of San Quentin” Sid Kepford [Image 1.5].
48
Kepford’s photograph of Pickford is
remarkable in its resemblance to professional press photographs that might be used to promote a
celebrity or her cinematic work, despite the fact that the majority of Kepford’s photographs were
likely mugshots of incoming detainees.
Unlike the typical mugshot, however, Kepford’s photograph of Pickford resembles a
studio portrait. It shows the actress with her torso oriented mostly toward the camera with her
face turned slightly toward her right shoulder. Mugshots, on the other hand, were standardly
taken with the face and body aligned, directed either at the camera or in profile, but always with
the face and body in tandem. The Pickford “mugshot,” then, is a rare example of a prisoner using
his camera to capture an image of one of the country’s most famous celebrities; in doing so,
Kepford took creative liberties with the genre of his craft and altered the presumed identity of a
press photographer. His photograph and its publication in San Quentin’s paper show that penal

46
James A. Johnston, Prison Life is Different (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1937), 286.
47
B., “Noted Stars Visit Prison,” Bulletin (San Quentin Prison, California), November 1924, n.p. (photo
insert).
48
“The Nation’s Sweetheart,” Bulletin (San Quentin Prison, California), March 1925: 25.
52
journalism was adept at promoting film and its stars to an imprisoned populace that desired
information related to their favorite celebrities.
By the time her San Quentin portrait was taken in 1924, Pickford was already well into
her immensely popular and lucrative career as an actress and film producer. She had earned the
moniker “America’s Sweetheart,” garnering fame for her roles as young girls and ingenues.
Pickford had continued to perform roles portraying adolescent girls into the 1920s, at which
point she was in her thirties. Not satisfied with these girlish roles, Pickford remarks in her
autobiography that while portraying the eponymous lead in Pollyanna (Paul Powell, 1920), she
“decided the saintly little creature [of her character] was just too good to be true” and “was
appalled by at the prospect of [her] unrelieved goodness.”
49
Having achieved her fame by
embodying young white femininity in roles as a child with long blonde curls, Pickford’s innocent
and juvenile public persona contrasted with the genre of the mugshot and its connotations of
criminality and vice.
50
Kepford’s mugshots of incoming San Quentin prisoners do not appear in
the pages of the News, and indeed such institutional photographs were not deemed fit to be
printed in any Penal Press newspaper that I have found. The apparent juxtaposition in the
Pickford photograph—between the genre of the mugshot and the actor whose career was formed
through narratives of innocent white girlhood—must have made it seem unusual enough to
warrant publication in the prison paper.
Notwithstanding Kepford’s photograph of Mary Pickford, relatively little photography
appeared in the Penal Press. Photography was infrequent in the Penal Press partly because
mimeographs were the predominant method for reproducing the circuit’s papers. Nonetheless,

49
Mary Pickford, Sunshine and Shadow (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 191.
50
For a discussion of staged prison photography in a contemporary context, see Nicole R. Fleetwood,
“Posing in Prison: Family Photographs, Emotional Labor, and Carceral Intimacy,” Public Culture 27, no.
3 (2015): 487-511.
53
imprisoned journalists and illustrators found innovative ways to fill the seats in prisons’
makeshift theaters. In her study of film criticism and advertising in the African American press,
Anna Everett has argued that “the [black] press by and large became a shadow auxiliary of
Hollywood’s promotional machine.”
51
Similarly, the Penal Press assisted in the distribution of
popular films to imprisoned spectators, even when there was no financial incentive to do so,
since prison screenings often charged “good behavior” for tickets, rather than money.
There were three primary methods by which the Penal Press served as this “shadow
auxiliary” to mainstream distribution practices: announcements of upcoming movies that would
show at the prison; reviews of movies that had recently shown at the prison; and celebrity news
columns. Each of these had a different function, but together they played a key role in garnering
enthusiasm for prisons’ film screenings among the imprisoned readership of the Penal Press.
This section will examine each of these three methods in turn, and highlight their role in film
distribution within penal institutions.
Movie announcements appeared frequently in penal publications, as a way to inform the
local readership (if not readers within the wider Penal Press circuit) about upcoming film
screenings at the prison. It may seem perplexing that papers would invest valuable page space
(sometimes quite a lot of it) to advertising movies, considering that prisoners almost never had a
choice in selecting the pictures and were not given a choice between a variety of films in the
same way unimprisoned consumers would have been able chose. However, the once- or twice-
weekly movie nights were extremely popular among those held in prisons across North America,
and many of them preferred to know what films they should expect to see in advance. At those
prisons where attending movies was elective rather than compulsory, the announcements would

51
Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949 (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2001), 193.
54
be an opportunity to decide if their precious leisure time was better spent elsewhere. This
decision would have been aided by the synopses that were sometimes included in Penal Press
movie announcements, presumably provided by the distributors for reprinting in the papers.
Because prisons received film prints largely by donation, much of the press marketing for
prison screenings rested on the labor of prison journalists and illustrators. Film marketing in the
Penal Press mimicked the methods found in city newspapers with larger circulations. Only a
small number of Penal Press publications gained access to Hollywood films’ press photos, and
even fewer had the printing capabilities to reproduce such images, since so many of them used
mimeograph machines. Because of these marketing constraints, some Penal Press newspapers
would task their illustrators with drawing mimeograph stencils to accompany movie
announcements. These illustrators likely had little access to press information other than the
films’ titles, actors, and sometimes short descriptions, but nonetheless created imaginative
illustrations to accompany movie announcements. One example of such creativity was the
announcement of upcoming films created by a prison illustrator Skid Davis of Chiliarch (Federal
Reformatory, Ohio) who used a variety of fonts and graphics to advertise upcoming movies,
including the comedy The Lemon Drop Kid (Damon Runyon, 1951), western Copper Canyon
(John Farrow, 1950), and musical Excuse My Dust (Roy Rowland, 1951) [Image 1.6].
52

Demonstrating the creativity and playfulness that could be employed in advertising films in the
Penal Press, an announcement from the Federal Reformatory for Women in West Virginia
featured marching bunnies in pinstripe pants who held signs on which upcoming movies were
listed [Image 1.7].
53

52
Chiliarch (Federal Reformatory, OH), Fall 1951: 46.
53
“Movies,” Eagle (Federal Reformatory for Women, WV), Spring 1951: 9.
55
The Chiliarch ad encouraged readers to see the upcoming films at their “favorite theater.”
This was a common trope in Penal Press film advertising, in which papers would advertise their
movies by referring to the spaces in which they were shown as “theaters,” despite the fact that
movies were shown in chapels, mess halls, prison camp lobbies, or even outdoors. Imprisoned
journalists devised clever ways to promote film spectatorship even when the upcoming films
were unknown at the time of publication. The Rebel News (Louisiana Correctional and Industrial
School), for instance, regularly reused an illustration of a movie theater to advertise upcoming
film screenings. The illustration included a ticketing booth, a marquee across which upcoming
movie titles could be written, and movie posters where imagined scenes from upcoming movies
might be drawn. Occasionally the Rebel News staff did not know what movie would be shown at
the institution; in response, the staff chose to include the drawing of the theater with “MOVIE –
UNKNOWN” written across the marquee and “IT’S FREE ANYWAY[,] IT WON’T HURT
YOU TO SEE IT AGAIN” written in the space dedicated for movie posters [Image 1.8].
54

Movie reviews would sometimes appear in Penal Press publications after a film had been
screened at a prison. Almost to a fault, these reviews were overwhelmingly positive, sometimes
to the point of gushing over the quality of a film or the suspense that it elicited from the
reviewer. It is likely imprisoned reviewers knew how precarious prisons’ film screenings could
be, and how likely they were to be cancelled at whim by administrations, and chose to write
mostly positive reviews to show appreciation for film screenings. One exception to this came in
the Ohio Penitentiary News (Ohio State Penitentiary) in 1958, when there was a review of
Pickup Alley (John Gilling, 1957) in which the reviewer rated it as “GOOD—meaning its [sic]
lousy,” possibly in comedic recognition of the Penal Press’s inflation of films’ quality in its

54
Rebel News (Louisiana Correctional and Industrial School), September 18, 1964: 12.
56
reviews.
55
Movie reviews might be more informal, as well, such as announcements of
preferences for certain types of narratives. At Mississippi State Penitentiary, after musing on the
excitations of watching “love scenes” in movies, a writer from the women’s camp enthused, “I
love the Western pictures because near the end they always have a LOVE scene or two.”
56

Movie reviews such as this one served to express gratitude to prison administrations that selected
films, as well as to make oblique requests for the types of fare spectators wished to see more
frequently.
The format of movie reviews allowed Penal Press writers to experiment in creative ways
with the genre of journalistic writing, sometimes even fictionalizing movie reviews as a comedic
device. In 1955, two letters to the editor were published in the Folsom Observer (Folsom Prison,
California) with very different reviews of Folsom’s recent screening of the science fiction movie
Them! (Gordon Douglas, 1954). The first of these letters praised the movie and requested to see
others from the genre such as Target Earth (Paul W. Fairman, 1954) and 20,000 Leagues under
the Sea (Richard Fleischer, 1954).
57
The following letter to the editor, in contrast, was deeply
unsatisfied with the film, writing, “Editor: ‘THEM’ was the lousiest picture shown here in the
last 7 months. How stupid can you get—grown men being scared by nothing more harmless than
studio manufactured rubber ants!!! This kind of junk might be okay for kiddies Sunday matinees,
but not for adults.”
58
The comical contrast between the two reviews makes it possible that they
were parodies invented for readers’ entertainment, rather than genuine reviews submitted to the
editor for publication. Even as parodies, however, this pair of reviews demonstrates how the

55
“Pickup Alley,” Ohio Penitentiary News (Ohio State Penitentiary), January 11, 1958, p. 2.
56
Thelma Huston, “News from the Forbidden City,” Inside World (Mississippi State Penitentiary), June
1953: 21.
57
L.S., “Letters to the Editor,” Folsom Observer (Folsom Prison, California), May 26, 1955: 2.
58
A.A.A., “Letters to the Editor,” Folsom Observer (Folsom Prison, California), May 26, 1955: 2.
57
Penal Press documented the very real debates that occurred between imprisoned viewers over the
value of the movies shown to them. In regard to the sociality that it created between imprison
people, film could even inspire dialogues between people in the pages of a prison paper. In the
women’s column of Mississippi State Penitentiary’s Inside World in 1953, Mabel Green
addressed the paper’s readers in the men’s camps by writing, “Boys, we really enjoyed a good
movie on August 8,” before thanking the prison’s Educational Department for sending a male
projectionist to their camp.
59

Celebrity and entertainment news, such as that which opened this chapter, was a third
component of the overall film culture promoted in the Penal Press. In addition to Marquette
Inmate’s “Start in the Street,” there were numerous celebrity news columns throughout the Penal
Press. Nebraska State Reformatory’s the Monocle featured “Here’s Hollywood,” which later
changed its title to “Flicks and Discs”. The San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison, California)
had a celebrity news column titled “Masks, Wigs and Ether.” On November 11, 1951, Minnesota
State Prison’s Prison Mirror began its “Off the Hollywood Wire” column written by a columnist
with the moniker “Darnoco.” At the Spectator (Michigan State Prison), there was “Blues,
Ballads and Bop” by Al “Flat Top” Daly.
As Jennifer Frost argues in her analysis of gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, Hopper’s
“regular weekday and Saturday columns…brought the distant world of cinema closer.”
60
This
was certainly true of the Penal Press celebrity columns, as well, where cinema was not the only
“distant” world, but where “the world” itself seemed distant. Even salacious details of romance

59
Mabel Green, “Forbidden City,” Inside World (Mississippi State Penitentiary), September 1953: 20.
60
Jennifer Frost, Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservatism (New York:
New York University Press, 2011), 48. See also Laura Isabel Serna, Making Cinelandia: American Films
and Mexican Film Culture Before the Golden Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014),
particularly Chapter 3.
58
or financial ruin could be evocative news about the outside world, which prisoners desperately
wanted to know and experience. In such a context, information that might seem trivial became a
form of mental escape for those enduring the tedium of prison sentences. For example, the Eagle
(Federal Reformatory for Women, West Virginia) featured the column “Cinematic Chatter”
which included the gossipy musing, “Wonder if Carmen Miranda’s engagement to John
Sebastian is the real thing? She has been engaged sooo-ooo many times.”
61
Beyond the
moralistic impulse in this quote, however, is a profound desire to participate in a broader social
network so often foreclosed for imprisoned people, and at least partly offered by celebrity gossip.
Such gossip should rightly be considered an integral part of film distribution within
prisons. Through the Penal Press, imprisoned people themselves were responsible for the
promotion of films, and salacious details of stars’ lives were one way to drum up support for a
prison’s film offerings. At the end of its movie season, which ceased in the summer to promote
physical activity, the Hill Top News at Michigan Reformatory thanked “Mr. E. C. Beatty,
president and treasurer of the W. S. Butterfield Theatres, Inc., of Detroit, who made the
selections, provided the pictures and publicity matter” used by the monthly prison publication.
62

Beyond this supply of films and publicity materials, prisoners themselves did the majority of the
work in advertising movies in the Penal Press.
Penal Press also papers served the interests of prison administrators by promoting orderly
film spectatorship in the prison. In the Hill Top-ic at the Indiana State Farm, there was a
complaint that after the institution’s showing of the Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy movie Boom
Town (Jack Conway, 1940), “the theater floor looked and smelled like a hog pen (begging a

61
Teresa B., “Cinematic Chatter,” Eagle (Federal Reformatory for Women, West Virginia), Spring 1947:
31.
62
“Ionia Briefs,” Hill Top News (Michigan Reformatory), May 1943: 3.
59
clean hog’s pardon).” The writer continued by enumerating the viewers’ crimes of uncleanliness:
“Apple cores, chewed apples, skins [sic] tobacco juice, and other things were scattered over the
seats and floor in a manner that would put to shame the filthiest skunk den in existence.”
63
A
rough sketch of a pig wearing a cap accompanied the announcement to further shame
inconsiderate spectators. In the Eagle, published at the Federal Industrial Institution for Women
in West Virginia, an imprisoned poet named Pauline R. submitted a poem titled “Movie
Menaces,” which chided a troublemaker she called the Rustleruncher:
The Rustlecruncher likes to eat
Right next to you in your movie seat.
It punctures each witty crack
With rustlings from a paper sack
Of peanut brittle or nutcrunch.
And all you hear is “grind and munch.”
An Anti-Rustlecruncher purge
Would not produce a single dirge.
64

Through figures such as Pauline R.’s impolite Rustlecruncher, imprisoned spectators reading the
Penal Press would be shamed into behaving cleanly and quietly during movies. This pleased
prison administrators in particular, who used movie screenings as a method of instilling pacified
decorum among prisoners.

The Impact of the Penal Press on Prison Entertainment

In 1934, Iowa State Penitentiary’s the Presidio posted a ballot soliciting prisoners’
preferences for entertainment, listing athletics, movies, card-playing, and radio as potential
choices [Image 1.9]. “It’s not intended that any of the features, enumerated below, are to be
discontinued,” assured the ballot, “The poll is merely to determine the preferences of the inmate

63
“Attention Inmates!” Hill Top-ic (Indiana State Farm), October 1941: 16.
64
Pauline R., “Movie Menaces,” Eagle (Federal Industrial Institution for Women), Winter 1941: 36.
60
body.”
65
In a myriad of ways, from formal ballots to more impassioned pleas, the Penal Press
served as a way to intervene into the cultural programming at prisons across the United States
and Canada. In this way, the Penal Press was not only responsible for promoting a prison’s film
culture and encouraging orderly spectatorship; it was also an arena of debate in which prisoners
could petition their administrations to make changes. In this section, I will examine instances in
which the Penal Press advocated changes in prisons’ entertainment programs, thereby
influencing the broader cultural milieu of prison entertainment.
One way in which the Penal Press was employed by prisoners to advocate entertainment
changes was by asking for certain forms of leisure technology that did not yet exist in their
institutions. In 1939, the editor of the Rainbow at Nevada State Prison complained that they were
one of the few prisons in the country without movies, a piece of information he likely learned
through the Penal Press exchange circuit. Asserting his thankfulness for the boxing matches
between prisoners that served as the prison’s primary form of entertainment, the editor stopped
short of demanding movies, but made a well-reasoned case for the use of cinema in rehabilitating
Nevada’s relatively small prison population. Arguing that movies were useful in the
rehabilitation of men from their criminal behavior, and warning about the potential dangers of
not providing the entertainment, he wrote, “Without this pleasurable diversion many prisoners
feel their confinement too keenly, brood constantly, endangering their sanity and become a
menace to those who have to associate constantly, day and night, with them.”
66
Notes of
technological innovations received from other institutions from the Penal Press were sometimes
a launching pad for prisoners to encourage their own administrations to adopt reforms. For
instance, the Candle (Wisconsin State Prison) referenced an announcement in the Prison Mirror

65
Presidio (Iowa State Penitentiary), June 1934: 22.
66
R. Boyd, “Shall We Have Movies” Rainbow (Nevada State Prison), January 1939: 28.
61
(Minnesota State Prison) that prisoners there would be enjoying radio during their recreation
hours, and used this news to write, “A similar arrangement would be welcomed by the men
here.”
67
In addition to requesting films or movies to be introduced into a particular institution,
the Penal Press could be used to request changes in film programs that already existed,
particularly by suggesting specific plot devices or genres of films that imprisoned viewers
wanted to see. Prisoner’s demands for certain film fare was even parodied in an illustration for
Folsom Prison’s Represa Sports-Telegram [Image 1.10]. In the illustration, two imprisoned men
turn to each other at the end of a movie, and ones exclaims in outage to the other, “No Donald
Duck! Where’s Donald Duck? Let’s write to the Big Board.”
68

Another instance of the Penal Press being used to alter film programming emerged from
the Mexican and Mexican-American prisoners at San Quentin Prison, who used their Spanish-
language column in the San Quentin News to successfully demand Mexican movies be shown at
the prison. San Quentin’s Spanish language column began in November 1948.
69
Two weeks
later, there was announcement in English that “San Quentin’s Mexican speaking inmates [sic]”
would be shown the movie Camino de Sacramento (Chano Urueta, 1946), a drama featuring the
actor Jorge Negrete.
70
Interestingly, this column devoted much of its attention in the following
years to film information, and would regularly publish synopses of upcoming American movies
translated into Spanish, even though the movies would likely be shown in English without
subtitles. Mexican movies continued to be shown sporadically at San Quentin, however. In 1950,
there was a screening of the movie Juan Charrasqueado (Ernesto Cortázar, 1948) in honor of

67
“Radio,” Candle (Wisconsin State Prison), January 1939: 27.
68
Represa Sports-Telegram (Folsom Prison, California), August 15, 1941: 4.
69
“Nueva Columna Para Los Que Hablan Espanol,” San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison, California),
November 12, 1948: 6.
70
“Latins Will Get Weekend Movie,” San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison, California), November 26,
1948: 1.
62
Mexican Independence. “Besides Mexicans, all those of other nationalities who want to see this
exciting movie can attend the screening,” wrote Z. Z. Cortéz in the Spanish-language column.
71

The English-language announcement of the film in the same issue clarified that other viewers
would be able to “attend after Mexican men [were] seated.”
72
In response to requests from
prisoners to show more Mexican movies, San Quentin warden Clinton T. Duffy took to the pages
of the prison newspaper to say that he was “now arranging a movie for the Filipino boys, in their
dialect [sic],” and would consider obtaining more Mexican films for the prison after securing a
one in Tagalog.
73

Like English-language entertainment columns, sex and celebrity were popular new items
in San Quentin’s Spanish-language column. This entertainment news was concerned with both
Mexican and American film news, particularly in the moments the two national industries
intersected. In 1957, the co-writers of the column announced in Spanish, “They say the beautiful,
beloved, and enchanting Mexican artist Mmmmmaria Félix might shoot a movie with Marlon
Brando…Good for ‘La Doña.’”
74
Although this collaboration between Félix and Brando was
never materialized, the promise of a Mexican film star appearing in a movie with Marlon Brando
was cause for applause, and the co-writers made no secret of their appreciation of the actress’s
appearance. Spanish-language columns in other prison newspapers also commented on the

71
“Aparte de los mexicanos, podran attender a la exhibision [sic] todos aquellos de otras nacionalidades
que deseen ver esta emosionante [sic] pelicula.” Z. Z. Cortéz, “Los reos Mexicanos en San Quentin
Celebraran la Independencia de Mexico,” San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison, California), September
8, 1950: 1. Author’s translation.
72
San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison, California), September 8, 1950: 4.
73
Clinton T. Duffy, “The Warden’s Column, San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison, California), January
27, 1950: 1.
74
“Se dice que la bella, preciosa y encantadora artista Mexicana M M M M Maria Felix quizás filme una
película con Marlon Brando … Bien por ‘La Doña.’” Max D. Hernández and Willie Chacón, “Chismes Y
Novedades,” San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison, California), September 5, 1957: 2. Author’s
translation.
63
cinematic entertainments of their respective institutions. Recognizing a change in the prison’s
film programming, the Spanish-language column “Dice el Cacahuate” (“So Says the Peanut”) in
Arizona State Prison’s Cactus Blossom remarked, “What ever happened to the movies where
they would have a twenty-pistol shootout in a saloon and the dead guy was found stabbed?”
75

This musing may have been a comment on the outlandish plots of movies in general, or it may
have been a comment on the films shown at the Arizona prison itself.
Although prison administrations ultimately had the final word regarding which films
would be presented in their institutions, imprisoned people were keenly aware of their collective
power to shape entertainment programs. The Penal Press was a primary way in which requests
could be made for renovations or changes in the types of narratives that would be projected onto
prisons’ screens. Imprisoned spectators took to prison newspapers to demand certain genres and
even particular movies, as well as films produced in their own first languages, as we seen in the
California and Arizona prison papers. These demands for change in the Penal Press marked the
yearnings of imprisoned people to experience new stories, see new genres, and imagine different
worlds outside of the prison.

The Question of the “Prisoner’s Voice”
In the field of critical prison studies, and for historians of the prison in particular, one of
the most urgent methodological imperatives has to not only include, but to prioritize, the
conceptualizations of imprisonment that have been theorized by imprisoned people. The best
research in the field is committed to this practice as a method to correct decades of

75
“Que camio [sic] a las peliculas donde disparaban un tiroteo de veinte pistolas en una cantina y el
difunto encontrado fue muerto de punaladas [sic].” Chavez and Pina, “Dice el Cacahuate,” Cactus
Blossom (Arizona State Prison), October 1949: 30.
64
criminological accounts that have ignored imprisoned people in their studies of the prison,
disregarding the knowledge they possess and naturalizing their place within spaces of
confinement. Throughout the field of critical prison studies, and in professional organizations
dedicated to the study of imprisonment, this prioritization of imprisoned peoples’ perspectives,
activism, and demands impacted prison studies scholarship, particularly that which analyzes (and
condemns) the ongoing and constantly shifting subjects of prison expansion, prison privatization,
and anti-prison activism. This prioritization of imprisoned peoples’ voices has been particularly
vital for studies of the contemporary prison, in which scholar-activists can be in dialogue with
imprisoned people, and ideally remain politically accountable through these enduring dialogues.
Historical studies of imprisonment, however, are of course unable to access imprisoned peoples’
calls through these same methods. As historians, there is often no choice but to rely on
institutional and administrative reports that provide only the most demeaning portraits of
prisoners. As we learn from Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, which
tells the stories of black women held captive in New York’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility
through an analytical storytelling process Hartman terms “critical fabulation,” the prison archive
can be particularly insufficient at recording the most urgently needed voices in the history of
imprisonment.
76

Because prison administrations played such a large role in funding and selecting
journalists for Penal Press publications, we must not interpret these texts as representing the
attitudes of all imprisoned people. After all, as Regina Kunzel has insisted, we must be reluctant

76
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2019). The term “critical fabulation” emerges from Hartman’s “Venus in Two
Acts,” Small Axe 26, no. 2 (2008): 11. This essay itself is a continuation of research developed for
Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2007).
65
to “summon prisoners to speak the authentic truth of prison life against the more distanced and
mediated representations posed by outsiders” even though they “surely … had a fundamentally
different relationship to carceral life than those who were not imprisoned.”
77
Prisoner-authored
journalism was neither inherently resistant to prison administrations, nor was it entirely
incorporated into administrative structures. Avoiding narrow interpretations of prison journalism
as either resistant or cooperative, we can interpret the influence of Penal Press papers as
blossoming from the horizontal transactions it facilitated between prisoners who were otherwise
separated from one another. Focusing on circulation shows that the public distribution of
prisoners’ writings through the Penal Press created social bonds between faraway readers and
provided a public forum for prisoners’ critical assessments and debates over cinematic images.
Despite all of its promises as an archive, however, the Penal Press is rife with
objectionable reporting and racist imagery. Before the 1960s, all the editors I’ve found have been
white except for Asian American editors such as Pat Yim at Oahu Prison’s immensely popular
monthly magazine Paahao Press. Editorial staffs were largely white, as well, despite claiming to
represent the racially segregated prison populations. Prisoner-edited journalism provides a rich,
albeit troublesome, scope through which critical historians of carceral formations can understand
the history of imprisonment in North America. On its surface, the Penal Press appears to be a
solution to many critical prison studies scholars’ concerns that the field center the voices,
priorities, and demands of imprisoned people. However, this particular archive is also saturated
with imprisoned journalists’ conservative and often white supremacist assessments of their
world. These racial divisions are not coincidental, but instead constitutive of the prison
publishing world. Paper editors were even sometimes part of the racist entertainment cultures of

77
Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 10.
66
their prisons. In 1946, Lee Sweeney, the editor of Iowa State Prison’s magazine the Presidio,
directed and acted in the prison’s variety show, featuring a blackface performance titled
“Plantation Minstrels.”
78

The Penal Press must be interpreted as a project that made persuasive demands for
collectivity across carceral spaces, while simultaneously undercutting much of its visionary
potential by supplementing the priorities of prison administrations for division, hostility, and
white supremacist violence. Although I endorse excavating the penal press archive more
thoroughly in an effort to foreground imprisoned journalists’ voices in historical narratives of
imprisonment, these inclusions must be made cautiously. The Penal Press is an incredible
repository for prison life, particularly prison culture and entertainment, such as sports events, live
performances, moviegoing, and the publication of newspapers itself. It is also a repository for
hateful and incendiary rhetoric aimed at the most marginal communities within the already
marginalized prison population.
Writing on the development of prisoners’ writing into a recognizable literary genre that
can be collected and anthologized as such, Dylan Rodríguez has argued that “[t]he academic and
cultural fabrication of ‘prison writing’ as a literary genre is … a discursive gesture toward order
and coherence where, for the writer, there is generally neither.”
79
Rodríguez points out that the
anthologization of these writings obscures not only the diversity in writers’ political and subject
positions, but also the extreme conditions of terror under which their texts are written. The Penal
Press is similarly diverse and disordered. Nonetheless, it is easier to discuss the Penal Press as a
literary entity since Penal Press journalists viewed themselves in dialogue with imprisoned

78
“The Walled-Off Revue,” Presidio (Iowa State Prison), November 1946: 5-8.
79
Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
67
writers at institutions across the continent. In contrast to the “prison writing” label imposed on
the imprisoned writers of later generations (the practice that concerns Rodríguez), the Penal
Press was built and organized as a genre among the writers themselves.
These journalists possessed shrewd research skills, even with their limitations behind
prison walls, to craft thoughtful editorials about parole reform, juvenile justice, and the nature of
prison journalism. Nevertheless, and unlike the radical intellectuals who would become
emblematic of prison writing in later generations, Penal Press intellectuals were situated by their
position as largely white journalists, and the circuit is bursting with racist and sexist cartoons,
jokes, and commentary. The subjectivities of Penal Press writers are significant for considering
the incredible undertaking of their endeavor, which included building and promoting a press
circuit with hundreds of newspapers with a readership that spanned from prisoners to state
officials. Their subjectivities as prisoners, of course, shaped the concerns and demands of the
prison press circuit. However, their racial subjectivities also informed the production of the
press, and this dissertation’s next chapter will more thoroughly consider how white supremacy
and anti-blackness shaped entertainment and journalism within the early twentieth century
prison.

Conclusion

By the end of the 1960s, the Penal Press was largely defunct. Many of the most active
prison publications had ceased publication during the decade, and those that survived no longer
circulated between institutions for comment and republication. This is partly because there were
fewer newspapers in general beginning in the midcentury, as more people began receiving their
news from television. Prisoners, too, began getting news in this way as TVs were first introduced
into prisons in the 1950s. Undoubtedly, widely publicized uprisings such as those at Attica in
68
1971 put the last nail in the coffin of the Penal Press. Despite the passing of the Penal Press,
however, a small fraction of these papers still exist today. The Angolite, which I discuss more in
Chapter 4, became well known and awarded under the editorship of Wilbert Rideau and Billy
Sinclair in the 1980s. Those papers that survived experienced visual shifts, such as a change
from mimeographic to xerographic reproduction. Prison journalism happened in other ways too,
such as the popularity of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal on National Public Radio or the
twenty-first century podcast Ear Hustle, produced out of San Quentin.
80
The Penal Press,
however, characterized most prominently by its exchange between prisons, had ceased. What
was lost in the circuit’s passing was a rich forum for dialogue among prisoners, particularly that
which centered on culture, leisure, and entertainment.

80
See Mumia Abu-Jamal, Live from Death Row (New York: HarperCollins, 1995). For an episode of the
podcast that remarks on methods of written intra-prison communication that may make an instructive
corollary to Penal Press distribution, see Earlonne Woods and Nigel Poor, “Catch a Kite,” Ear Hustle,
season 1, episode 5, Radiotopia (2017), https://www.earhustlesq.com/episodes/2017/8/09/catch-a-kite.
69

Image 1.1. Lee Holman, “As I See It,” Reformatory Pillar (Minnesota State Reformatory),
August 2, 1950: 7. Microfilmed version from the Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN.

70

Image 1.2. Reflector (Indiana State Reformatory), January 5, 1951: 8. Microfilmed version from
Indiana State Library, Indianapolis, IN.

71

Image 1.3. Hand-painted cover of the Reflector (Minnesota State Reformatory for Women),
Spring 1955. Version from Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN.

72

Image 1.4. Hand-colored cover of the Tattler (Iowa Training School for Girls). Version from
Iowa Women’s Archive, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA.

73

Image 1.5. The Bulletin (San Quentin Prison, California), March 1925: 25.

74

Image 1.6. Chiliarch (Federal Reformatory, Ohio), Fall 1951: 46.
75

Image 1.7. “Movies,” Eagle (Federal Reformatory for Women, WV), Spring 1941: 1.

76

Image 1.8. Rebel News (Louisiana Correctional and Industrial School), September 18, 1964: 12.

77

Image 1.9. Entertainment poll in the Presidio (Iowa State Penitentiary), June 1934: 22.

78

Image 1.10. Represa Sports-Telegram (Folsom Prison, California), August 15, 1941: 4.

79
Chapter 2
Moving Pictures in Suspended Animation: The Origins of Prison Film Exhibition

In the first decade of its presentation in American prisons, film was considered by prison
administrations to be a useful diversion in mollifying an ostensibly unruly prison population. In
recognition of this belief, a 1916 notice in Moving Picture World opined, “Even the prisons are
being robbed of some of their hardships.”
1
The article cited a prison newspaper, gesturing to the
film exhibitions that had been documented in Good Words, a newspaper published at the Federal
Penitentiary in Atlanta, and listed films that had recently shown at the institution, including The
Two Orphans (Herbert Brenon, 1915) starring Theda Bara, and an adaptation of Edgar Allen
Poe’s The Raven (Charles Brabin, 1915). “At one time it was not uncommon for dramatic
companies to visit prisons for a brief entertainment,” the Moving Picture World notice
commented assuredly, “but these were irregular in occurrence, and, naturally, incomplete in
scope, but it is a real and solid charity to brighten the drab lives of men with good pictures, and
since it merely involves the loaning of film it is a thing to be commended to exchanges
everywhere. Most prisons now own projection machines and the only cost is expressage.”
2
We
learn from this notice both the proliferation of cinema in prisons by 1916, as well as some of the
discourse of rehabilitation and reciprocity between prison administrations and imprisoned people
that was used to advocate for its existence in the carceral sphere. This chapter tells the story of
how film in prison went from being “irregular in occurrence” to the popular prison medium that
it would become by the midcentury.

1
“Facts and Comments,” Moving Picture World, vol. 30, no. 12 (December 23, 1916): 1775.
2
“Facts and Comments,” Moving Picture World, vol. 30, no. 12 (December 23, 1916): 1775.
80
The Moving Picture World notice catalogs a transitory period for film exhibition in
prisons, in which occasional exhibitions on holidays or special events were being eclipsed by the
regular film programs that had become installed at a number of prisons and reformatories. The
previously irregular film showings—sometimes presented by itinerant exhibitors visiting the
towns in which prisons were located—were, in many regions of the county, becoming customary
for imprisoned people as ways to experience the outside world. The notice’s claim that “most
prisons” had projection machines by this time is particularly illustrative of this transition, if not
totally factual, since prisons in Canada and the U.S. South, for instance, generally introduced
film programs later than those of the U.S. Northeast and Midwest. After documenting how film
in prison—like film exhibition more generally—was transferring from being a sporadic
encounter to an institutionalized regularity, the notice adds its own moralizing commentary on
the situation of film entertainment in prisons: “Prisons should not be made too attractive, else
there is danger of a waiting list, but even men who have erred are entitled to some brightness in
life, and nothing brings greater entertainment at smaller expense than a good program of
pictures.”
3
Notwithstanding the claim that cinema in prisons would create a “waiting list” of
wrongdoers committing infractions only for the purpose of viewing motion pictures behind bars,
we find in this notice an early anxiety regarding the extent to which imprisoned peoples’ lives in
prison should include restful leisure and entertainment.
This chapter concerns the earliest introduction of cinema into prisons, which took place
as early as 1907. This inquiry emerges from research into Iowa’s Anamosa Prison Press—which
featured news items about an itinerant film exhibitor who showed prisoners short silent films—
as well as other Midwestern prison newspapers in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

3
“Facts and Comments,” Moving Picture World, vol. 30, no. 12 (December 23, 1916): 1775.
81
Iowa’s prisoners were able to view films depicting the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco
earthquake, the construction on the Panama Canal, and the famous Edwin S. Porter film The
Great Train Robbery (1903). I argue that imprisoned people who viewed these early films were
given access to a new visual world of moving images from around the world, despite their
incarceration in prisons and reformatories, and they held astute opinions on the aesthetic and
pedagogic quality of motion pictures.
I examine the introduction of cinema into the prison to consider how early twentieth
century carceral institutions managed, disciplined, and rewarded imprisoned people through the
modern excitements of moving picture spectatorship. I also contend that, even in its earliest
introduction, film in prisons disciplined the thoughts, actions, and imaginations of imprisoned
spectators to align with the racist depictions that saturated early film and entertainment culture.
Although this was certainly true of cinematic exhibition more broadly, as scholars of race and
early film have shown, the expression of racial antipathy through film is particularly notable in
the context of the early twentieth-century prison, which was itself functioning as a mechanism of
racial discipline and disenfranchisement.
4
Racist films and performances in prison facilitated the
assembly and maintenance of categorical divisions based on race, in which spectators racialized
as white differentiated themselves from an institution that had become a primary method of
destabilizing black political participation following the Thirteenth Amendment to the United
States Constitution in 1865.
For an early film history of cinematic presentation in prisons, I rely on some of the first
instances of prison journalism: the Anamosa Prison Press from Iowa, the Mirror from

4
See Alice Maurice, The Cinema and Its Shadow: Race and Technology in Early Cinema (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
82
Minnesota, the Joliet Prison Post from Illinois, and the OP News from Ohio.
5
In this history, I
look toward the regional differences of how Midwestern prisons introduced film differently from
East Coast prisons such as New York’s Sing Sing, which has served as the subject of already
existing work on early film exhibition in prisons.
6
If the goal of studying film in prisons is to
examine the unanticipated architectures into which film was able to enter, the Midwestern prison
was even more peripheral to the popular culture of the early twentieth century than even coastal
prison. Indeed, many coastal prisons introduced liberal reforms earlier than those of other
regions. Nevertheless, the Midwestern institutions were quick to introduce film, athletics, and
other entertainment projects that were heralded as “reforms.” This appearance of reforms outside
of coastal prisons, however, should not be taken as an index of material changes in the structural
composition of carceral power, since, as I will show, these reforms promoted white supremacist
worldviews and reinforce racial antagonisms in the consciousnesses of imprisoned people.

Introducing Cinema to the Prison
“If we were forced to choose only one locality to represent the way the movies became a
part of most communities in America,” Robert C. Allen has argued polemically, “we would have
more reason to choose Anamosa, Iowa, than New York, New York.”
7
For Allen, the
demographic distribution of the country in the early twentieth century congregated the majority

5
Prison newspapers of the early twentieth century differ in some significant ways to the Penal Press
publications I discuss in later chapters. Overall, earlier prison publications were less likely to comment on
the everyday lives of their institution’s inhabitants and were more to likely to aim their journalistic
attention outwardly to current events, political discussions, and international news.
6
See Alison Griffiths, Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
7
Robert C. Allen, “Manhattan Myopia; or, Oh! Iowa!” Cinema Journal 35, no. 3 (1996): 96. For a study
of the small-town theater’s status by the 1930s, see Gregory A. Waller, “Imagining and Promoting the
Small-Town Theater,” Cinema Journal 44, no. 3 (2005): 3-19.
83
of people in small towns rather than urban centers, making a town like Anamosa the likelier case
study of how the majority of people encountered moving pictures. Allen argued that the small
town was the quintessential site of early film, as it was the far more common to live there than in
a city. Allen’s argument has been an addendum to film histories that have prioritized urban film
spectatorship in New York, Paris, and Chicago. Indeed, the same argument might be made by
scholars searching for a locale to represent early film exhibition in prisons: look to Anamosa,
Iowa.
8
The experience of imprisonment in the United States was often divorced from the worlds
of urban entertainment, since prisons have most commonly been built in rural areas, and rural
exhibition practices—especially the role of itineracy in providing motion picture access to rural
areas—shaped the emergence of cinema in carceral spaces.
The earliest mention of cinema that I have found in a prison newspaper is not an
announcement of motion picture exhibition inside a prison itself. It is a 1906 announcement in
the Anamosa Reformatory’s newspaper the Anamosa Prison Press that read, “Among the
attractions at the Anamosa street carnival this week was a moving picture machine with views of
the San Francisco disaster. If it were possible to picture man from the cradle to the grave, some
of the detained could see themselves as others see them.”
9
The town’s newspaper the Anamosa
Journal reported that this carnival, hosted by the town’s fire department, would also feature a
“big military band, Ferris wheel and merry-go-round.”
10
Although the Anamosa prisoner who

8
By 1908, Anamosa was home to a nickelodeon, which suffered a fire that year: “Fire destroyed about
$2000 worth of films and moving picture machine at Anamosa when a broken film fell against the light.
There was a crowd of about 200 present and all got out safely, although some were badly frightened”; see
“Fire in Five Cent Theater: Panic Narrowly Averted in Anamosa Playhouse,” Anamosa Eureka (Iowa),
Sept. 17, 1908. This event was also reported in the reformatory’s newspaper, as it concerned the theater’s
owner Henry Lohrman, who sometimes exhibited films at the institution; see Reformatory Press
(Anamosa Reformatory, Iowa), Sept. 5, 1908: 3.
9
P.P. Man, “Colony Notes,” Anamosa Prison Press (Anamosa Reformatory, Iowa), June 30, 1906: 10.
10
“Street Carnival,” Anamosa Journal (Iowa), June 21, 1906: 5.
84
reported on the San Francisco footage likely did not attend the carnival itself to see the film, the
film exhibitor (likely an itinerant exhibitor) may have shown some of the same prints at an
exhibition inside the reformatory the following year, as indicated by a review in the
reformatory’s newspaper:
“Burkett’s moving Pictures entertained Datained [sic] for ninty [sic] minutes yesterday
afternoon. As common as this form of amusement has got to be[,] the development of it
has all taken place in the past few years. The Burkett pictures run from San Francisco to
Panama and include a Great Train Robbery … In the boxing contest “Britt” looked as
though he had weighed in at 12 stone, while “McGovern” was plainly close to a
sanitarium. Port Arthur withstood a fierce attack from a mosquito fleet of Japanese was-
ships that moved about with the grace and freedom of a man on roller-skates. In the place
of fire and smoke and the odor of burning rubber, a brave little mouse foraged in the
ruins of the San Francisco holocaust. Work on the Panama canal seemed to be less
strenuous than may be seen any day that our Floating squad tackles a car of coal. All this
of course is said in a jokular [sic] spirit. Detained throughly [sic] enjoyed the show and it
goes without saying that the officers and guards who booked the attraction have our
thanks, as has Mr. Burkett for cutting his rates.”
11

This review shows that Anamosa’s prisoners saw footage of the San Francisco fire that
Anamosa’s free people did the previous summer. Moreover, it shows that prisons’ earliest
audiences viewed many of the popular motion pictures that would have been seen by their
unimprisoned counterparts: actualities depicting both mundane and cataclysmic events, athletic
spectacles, reenacted battles passed off as genuine footage of war, and even some of the
medium’s earliest experiments with narrative storytelling. The reformatory newspaper’s review
lists a well-known roster of popular early film entertainment, including popular footage from the
aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake to Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903).
However, instead these early pieces of cinema being exhibited in a large public structure meant
to accommodate curious viewers and designed to host “musical comedy troupes medicine shows,
lecturers, Wild West shows, magicians, stock companies, and exhibitors of mechanical novelties

11
Reform Man, “Reformatoryettes,” Reformatory Press (Anamosa Reformatory, Iowa), Nov. 9, 1907: 6.
Emphasis mine.
85
like the phonograph,” as Kathryn H. Fuller has described the small-town exhibition spaces of the
era, they were presented to a chapel filled with imprisoned spectators, at least some of whom had
never seen a motion picture before.
12
The prison exhibition occurred in the small town—with
fewer than 3000 residents at the time—predicted by Robert Allen to be the quintessential
American location to explore the character of early film: Anamosa, Iowa.
Fuller notes that “itinerant film exhibitors circulated among small town opera houses,
church halls, tent shows and vacation resorts” prior to the establishment of theaters meant to
accommodate cinema.
13
She adds that these exhibitions “followed the formats of small-time
vaudeville, variety and magic lantern shows, mixing brief films, music, sound effects and
song.”
14
The popular footage of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—which circulated to viewers
in remote locations across the country—leads me to believe the same exhibitor staged his film
prints at both the Anamosa town carnival and the Anamosa Reformatory only one year apart, as
that actuality fare is mentioned in both of the announcements. Given the popularity of the San
Francisco disaster in the repertoires of traveling film exhibitors, it is conceivable that the two
events were staged by two different exhibitors, but the coincidence in timing in a relatively
remote Midwestern town suggests to me that Burkett (the indisputable exhibitor at the
reformatory) may have been the exhibitor who presented at the summer carnival in the Iowa
town one year earlier.
15
Since itinerant exhibitors’ films were expensive to purchase and

12
Kathryn H. Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 4-5.
13
Kathryn Helgesen Fuller, “‘You Can Have the Strand in Your Own Town’: The Marginalization of
Small Town Film Exhibition in the Silent Film Era,” Film History 6, no. 2 (1994), 168.
14
Kathryn Helgesen Fuller, “‘You Can Have the Strand in Your Own Town’: The Marginalization of
Small Town Film Exhibition in the Silent Film Era,” Film History 6, no. 2 (1994), 168.
15
For more on the itinerant exhibitors of early cinema in the early twentieth century, see Kathryn
Helgesen Fuller, “The Cook and Harris High Class Moving Picture Company: Itinerant Exhibitors and the
Small-Town Movie Audience, 1900-1910,” New York History 75, no. 1 (1994): 5-38; Charles Musser and
Carol Nelson, High-Class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling
86
“became outdated with increasing rapidity,” Burkett may have entered the Anamosa
Reformatory in part to find an audience that had not yet seen the sensational San Francisco film,
and who would have appreciated it regardless of its age, given the lack of entertainment options
in the reformatory.
16

In At the Picture Show, Fuller explains how the San Francisco disaster was filmed by
both Edison and Biograph in competing bids for audience attention, but notes that due to the
sensationalism of the event and the saturation of prints documenting its aftermath, actualities of
the earthquake grew quickly tiresome to viewers.
17
Viewers in the reformatory, however, may
have been less bored by the footage even in the relatively late year of 1907, not only because
they were less likely to have seen these pictures in earlier viewings because they would have
been incarcerated at the time of those earlier exhibitions, but also because these motion pictures
would have been one of the only reprieves from a carceral system that was monotonous by
design, as prison administrators shared a common belief that austerity was key in reforming
those who were accused of harming society. This is corroborated by the review’s insistence that
“the Datained [sic]” at the reformatory enjoyed all of the fare which they were shown, and the
review lacks any comment on the films’ age.
The motion picture review in Anamosa’s Reformatory Press also mentions a filmed
boxing match between Jimmy Britt and Terry McGovern. Another match between Britt and the
Danish-American boxer Oscar “Battling” Nelson had been filmed by the Miles brothers—who
also produced the well-known A Trip Down Market Street (1906), filmed on a San Francisco

Exhibition, 1880-1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Gregory A Waller, “Robert
Southard and the History of Traveling Film Exhibition,” Film Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2003): 2-14.
16
Kathryn Helgesen Fuller, “‘You Can Have the Strand in Your Own Town’: The Marginalization of
Small Town Film Exhibition in the Silent Film Era,” Film History 6, no. 2 (1994), 169.
17
See Kathryn H. Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan
Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 20.
87
cable car shortly before the city’s earthquake—and was a popular staple in early boxing matches.
(The popularity of the Britt-Nelson fight leads me to speculate that this may have actually been
the fight presented to viewers at the reformatory, and not the Britt-McGovern fight.)
18
The
reformatory review also makes references to filmed footage of the Battle of Port Arthur (which
initiated the Russo-Japanese War). Despite the reviewer’s claim, however, this appears to have
actually been the 1903 film War of the Worlds, which captured an international naval exhibition
in New York’s harbor, but which was later passed off at the 1904 naval battle to make it appear
more current to motion picture audiences.
19
The Anamosa Reformatory audience even received
Edwin S. Porter’s popular and innovative The Great Train Robbery (1903), which has been
referenced, reviewed, praised, and debated by film scholars for decades due to its novel editing
techniques.
20
If Allen is correct that we should look to towns like Anamosa to better understand
early film reception practices, it behooves scholars to examine all exhibition sites in the town,
including the Anamosa Reformatory.
In Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and the Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America,
Alison Griffiths notes that a substantial number of people encountered their first film in prisons,
and explains that this was a popular piece of information to share among outside writers
commenting on prison film exhibition. She writes, “The sense of glee in these accounts seems
premised upon both the idea of incongruity—the films versus their reception contest—and the
idea that the venue might alter the perceptual experience of cinema, that prisoners might see

18
See Dan Streible, Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2008), 169-173.
19
See Andrea Stulman Dennett and Nina Warnke, “Disaster Spectacles at the Turn of the Century,” Film
History 4, no. 2 (1990): 103-104.
20
See, for example, Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison
Manufacturing Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
88
something differently when they stared at the screen by dint of their incarceration.”
21
It is indeed
true that this served as a trope of prison film spectatorship, but it is also interesting that those
who had seems films before entering the prison sometimes wrote about the technology of
moving images as a metaphor for their drab reality in prison. For instance, an imprisoned writer
in the Anamosa Reformatory, known only by his number “2656,” composed an open letter to a
friend of his who had himself been imprisoned. In the letter, the author attempts to meaningfully
fill the time that has been allotted to him to write a letter, but is at pains to think of an appropriate
correspondent with whom to share his thoughts and experiences. “I was in no mood to write to
any one [sic],” he confesses, “I wanted to be alone, wrapped in reverie; alone to stare vacant-
eyed at the pageant of events which pass like moving pictures on the whitened walls and awaken
thoughts of other days.”
22
For the man referred to only by his institutional number, the moving
picture was a symbol for his thoughts, active and mobile across the flat surfaces of his cell while
he stayed put there to think them. His florid words to his friend suggest a profound attention to
the sensations of time and movement under incarceration through a process I have termed the
prisoner’s cinema, borrowing from the colloquial name for a perceptual phenomenon. For him,
cinema became the moving representation that allowed him to imagine his past on the outside,
which also, he may have hoped, would be his future. The sentiments expressed by the Anamosa
prisoner are also echoed in the words of a writer incarcerated at San Quentin. This unnamed
editorialist argued that, for prisoners, “the stories [motion pictures tell] are a potent factor in
preserving the memories of that which has been sacrificed on the altar of submission.”
23

21
See Alison Griffiths, Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
22
2656, ““My Dear Friend Bill,” Anamosa Prison Press (Anamosa Reformatory, Iowa), June 30, 1906: 6.
23
“Our Motion Pictures,” Bulletin (San Quentin Prison, California), April 1916: 1.
89
If imprisoned people were amused by the coterie of early film fare, prison administrators
shared their own views on the cinematic medium and its utility in the carceral spaces that they
managed. In an interview with Edmund M. Allen, the warden of the Joliet State Penitentiary in
Illinois, the Joliet Prison Post provided information on the warden’s opinions about
entertainment at the prison. The warden explicitly tied entertainment to the prison’s labor
demands, stating, “As a health measure, I permit recreation on every working day.”
24
For Allen,
the appropriate division between prison labor and prison recreation could be partitioned in
temporally precise measurements, with recreation receiving an hour carved into the workday.
Allen recounted with pride how he introduced baseball to the prison, and in months when it was
too cold for outdoor athletics, “the prisoners [would] view moving pictures in the chapel on
every other Friday.”
25
These diversions were paid for through “the prison library and amusement
fund,” which earned its funds through “the sale of admission tickets to visitors viewing the
prison.”
26
“Visitors” were a common practice in the early twentieth century prison, as
townspeople who held no relation to those imprisoned in a penal institution would sometimes be
permitted to stroll through its halls and observe the imprisoned. This was viewed as a form of
leisure for the members of a town’s upper-class who practiced it, strolling through the local
prison to look upon the social reverse of their own status and position. “Tourists … visited these
new institutions because they were encouraged to do so,” John F. Sears notes. “The promoters
and superintendents of the institutions welcomed visitors because they wanted to raise funds
from private sources, gain the approval of legislators who might then vote to support them, allay

24
“Edmund M. Allen on Prison Reform,” Joliet Prison Post (Joliet Prison, Illinois), Jan. 1, 1914: 5.
25
“Edmund M. Allen on Prison Reform,” Joliet Prison Post (Joliet Prison, Illinois), Jan 1, 1914: 6.
26
“Edmund M. Allen on Prison Reform,” Joliet Prison Post (Joliet Prison, Illinois), Jan 1, 1914: 6.
90
suspicion about the new, controversial methods of treatment, and demonstrate that the harsh
methods previously applied to prisoners had been replaced by humane ones.”
27

Many prison administrations explicitly used early film screening privileges as a way to
discipline imprisoned people. In one demonstration of this, Colorado’s warden Thomas Tynan
revealed his motivations for showing films at his institution, “We found, when we installed the
motion picture apparatus at the institution, that it helped us to keep discipline, for the reason that
men who violated rules were excluded from the picture exhibitions for all the way from three to
six months.”
28
(Tynan wrote this to justify the construction of athletic fields at the prison to serve
a similar disciplinary function.) In its own experimentation with motion pictures as a disciplinary
tactic in 1914, the Tennessee State Prison allowed the so-called “first class convicts … the
privilege of seeing regular motion pictures twice a week.”
29
The prison reported that cinema
quickly changed the behavior of the institution’s imprisoned men, insisting that “[i]nfractions of
prison rules have become less, since every convict, from the life-termers to the one-year men, are
anxious to see the happenings of the outside world on the screen.”
30
The Tennessee prisoners
even worked harder, according to observers, and “[p]risoners who had gone about their labor in
sullen silence thanked the warden for his efforts toward bettering their condition and taking the
rough edge off their lot.”
31
The disciplinary usage of cinema as a “privilege” for “well-behaved”

27
John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 92.
28
Quoted in “Ball Park for Prisoners,” Joliet Prison Post (Joliet Prison, Illinois), Mar. 1, 1914: 136.
29
Robert L. Pique, “Film Drama Aid to Prison Discipline,” Motion Picture News, July 4, 1914: 28.
30
Robert L. Pique, “Film Drama Aid to Prison Discipline,” Motion Picture News, July 4, 1914: 28.
31
Robert L. Pique, “Film Drama Aid to Prison Discipline,” Motion Picture News, July 4, 1914: 28.
91
prisoners was widespread, and some prisons and reformatories awarded cards or coins for “good
conduct” that would allow imprisoned people to see the weekly movies.
32

The transition from the 1900s to the 1910s brought changes to film exhibition in prisons,
just as it did for exhibition practices on the outside. Foremost among these was that although
outside exhibitors did sometimes still enter into prisons and reformatories to present their film
prints, the staging of cinema was transformed into an institutionalized procedure, one that
occurred within the harshly regimented timetables of prison temporality. The scenes that
entertained imprisoned viewers were often presented by imprisoned film operators by the 1910s,
and film projection training became a common way for administrations to attempt to express
goodwill to imprisoned people. One news item from the Rock, published at Alcatraz, stated, “Our
Movie Operator seems to have been in hard luck during the past month, having had the rather
rare occurrence of the film breaking on him once or twice. To top it all off, he had to endure a
toothache for a week before he was able to get to the dentist. SYMPATHY.”
33
At many
institutions, as we will see in later chapters, the imprisoned film projectionist—representing “one
of their own” in the eyes of prisoners and administrations alike—would become a symbol of a
reforming institution that offered an institutionalized film program, despite the broken films,
damaged screens, noisy viewers, or dirty accommodations that often attended these events.
Notwithstanding its transition from itinerant exhibitors to a regular motion picture
program, many of the characteristics of prison exhibition remained the same. While on the
outside this transition resulted in the establishment of theatrical spaces for the presentation of
motion pictures, inside prisons the exhibition spaces remained largely the same, taking place in

32
The museum at the Anamosa State Penitentiary even sells such tokens—used by the prison in the
twentieth century to determine whose conduct was worthy of filmgoing—at the gift shop of their prison
museum.
33
“Knocks and Boosts,” Rock (United States Disciplinary Barracks, California), January 1916: 12.
92
chapels, mess halls, or other common areas. For imprisoned viewers, another element that
prevailed across this transition from itinerant to theatrical exhibition was that prison audiences
narrated themselves as being akin to paying customers, despite the fact that there are very few
instances of prisoners paying to see films, and despite the fact that they were distinguished from
patrons in that they were given little decision-making power in what they would be shown. One
imprisoned writer at Anamosa Reformatory opined, “Theatrical managers declare that the only
sure road to success in the entertainment line is to give the public what they want, and this
opinion was confirmed last Sunday afternoon by the audience in the chapel—those who have
been interviewed say they got what they wanted. The moving picture show was a decided
success, and it is hoped that the management of the prison can so arrange the season’s program
that the feature will be repeated.”
34
Although the writer’s comparison of prison audiences to
theatrical audiences obscures the fundamental differences that existed between the different
experiences of film spectatorship, prison journalism was indicative of forthcoming
transformations in how film would be staged in prisons later in the twentieth century.

Debating Film’s Uses
Early prison journalism included substantial debates regarding the most useful methods
of improving the lives of imprisoned people, which many imprisoned journalists explicitly or
implicitly connected to the betterment of society overall. Some of these viewpoints could be far-
sighted in their radical vision for a society that did not rely on prisons as a widespread method of
social discipline, while other prison journalists held more modest beliefs that supported the
necessity of the prison as a system of punishment, despite themselves being the targets of such a

34
Kerby, “Echoes from the Galleries,” Reformatory Press (Anamosa Reformatory, Iowa), May 8, 1909:
6.
93
structure, as long as it made serious reforms in its disciplinary practices. Given the amount of
debate that prison journalists had regarding prison punishment, prison reform, and societal
change, it is no surprise that cinema would be discussed among these writers and disputed for its
potential to either oppress or liberate those that came into its purview.
If wardens and administrators argued about the uses of motion pictures as a method for
disciplining and reforming prisoners, imprisoned people themselves debated over their own
appearance in such pictures. In 1914, the Minnesota State Prison’s Mirror wrote a scathing
critique of the men at the Illinois State Penitentiary in Joliet, who had appeared in an early
educational film documenting prison life in the institution. The motion picture that resulted,
Joliet Prison (1914), attempted to tell the story of the institution from a man’s first entrance into
the prison to the day he would finally gain his freedom and leave its walls.
35
Although they
responded to an announcement of the film and had apparently not viewed the motion picture
itself, writers at the Mirror were fierce critics of the picture, writing, “We didn’t think that any
prison in the country would descend to the level of making a public show of its convicted
unfortunates; or make capital of its methods of punishment of refractory prisoners, especially
when that punishment consists of the ball and chain—one of the last relics of a barbaric age.”
36

The Mirror article continued by criticizing the invasive use of media technologies in cataloging
imprisoned people as part of its “processing” procedures. “It is bad enough for a convicted man

35
A review in Motion Picture New catalogued some of the film’s scenes: “The new prisoner being
photographed, and the Bertillon identification system of measurements and finger prints is seen. The
prisoner is given a haircut, bath and clean clothing furnished. The prisoners are seen at work in the tailor
shop, the rattan shop, the show factory, and the broom factory. … Armed guard patrolling the prison wall,
the stone quarry with 250 prisoners entering the east gate of the penitentiary after their day’s work, the
prisoners at play and at chapel, the volunteer fire department responding to an alarm of fire, and an
offender against the prison discipline being placed in a punishment cell, are other vivid scenes.” C.J.
Verhalen, “The Illinois State Penitentiary,” Motion Picture News, Apr. 4, 1914 :63. Extant prints of the
film are unlocated and it appears to be lost.
36
“Reckless Editing,” Joliet Prison Post (Joliet Prison, Illinois), May 1, 1914: 238.
94
to have to submit to being photographed upon his entry into the prison, and having his picture
adorn a place in the prisons private gallery” the Mirror wrote, “but when it comes to being
subjected to the publicity of moving pictures and being held up as a sensational attraction for five
and ten cent show houses its seems to be a step taken in the wrong direction,” and the writer
accused the Illinois prison of exploiting its prisoners for the sake of publicity.
37
At its core, the
Minnesota State Prison paper’s review of the Joliet Prison motion picture carried a deep
skepticism about the filming of motion pictures in prisons, and worried that these images were
used to denigrate and humiliate imprisoned people. By connecting them to intake photography,
the review focused its critique on the dehumanization of capturing images when the
photographer and subject were on inherently uneven ground and when the purpose of the image
was to further surveil the subject.
38

In a response derisively titled “Reckless Editing,” journalists at the Joliet Prison Post
responded by writing, “We wish to say that if the editor of The Mirror had read the daily press he
would know that the moving pictures were taken after the inmates of this prison had
unanimously voted in favor of them.”
39
In his rebuttal to the writer at the Minnesota State Prison,
the Joliet writer also added the men of Joliet had been shown the motion picture after it had been
produced to make sure it met their satisfaction. “The pictures were shown in the chapel,” he
wrote,” and the prisoners voted unanimously in favor of ‘releasing’ them.”
40
According to the
Joliet Prison Post, all of the imprisoned men who viewed the picture were certain that they
would not be identifiable in the film due to the distance and angles at which the cameras were
located when filming the prisoners’ actions, adding that “the pictures are educational and … they

37
“Reckless Editing,” Joliet Prison Post (Joliet Prison, Illinois), May 1, 1914: 238.
38
See Alan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (1989): 36-64.
39
“Reckless Editing,” Joliet Prison Post (Joliet Prison, Illinois), May 1, 1914: 238.
40
“Reckless Editing,” Joliet Prison Post (Joliet Prison, Illinois), May 1, 1914: 238.
95
are also of great value in the cause of modern prison reform” since they might cause spectators to
see the inside of a prison for the first time and empathize with its inhabitants.
41

At the same time that imprisoned people discussed the value of motion pictures in their
institutions, prison administrators also held passionate dialogues about the value of the medium
in meeting their institutions’ purposes, even discussing the matter in their conference
proceedings. Chief among the proposed purposes of cinema for an imprisoned populace was
education, and administrators introduced cinema in the hope that motion pictures would serve a
didactic function in teaching prisoners to become proficient in science, geography, and language.
In some ways, early educational cinema in prisons furthered the pedagogic function of adult
education programs such as the Chautauqua movement, which aimed to make learning more
accessible to small-town Americans through public exhibitions and lectures in an effort to
democratize what Andrew C. Rieser has referred to a “useful knowledge.”
42
According to Frank
Buckley, the Minnesota State Prison even “maintained a Chautauqua reading circle long after the
experiment had ceased” at other prisons, as well as among free people, lasting there until 1938.
43

According to a Moving Picture World article, the Minnesota prison’s Chautauqua meetings were
held in the same auditorium that hosted religious services. This auditorium was also the location
of a 5 p.m. motion picture presentation every Wednesday. With comedies being the most popular
genre, the prison’s warden was quoted to say, “And is there any better medicine for a mind
diseased than laughter?”
44

41
“Reckless Editing,” Joliet Prison Post (Joliet Prison, Illinois), May 1, 1914: 238.
42
See Chapter 6 of Andrew C. Rieser, The Chautauqua Movement: Protestants, Progressives, and the
Culture of Modern Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 207-239. See also, John E.
Tapia, Circuit Chautauqua: From Rural Education to Popular Entertainment in Early Twentieth Century
America (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 1997).
43
Frank Buckley, “Chautauqua in the Minnesota State Prison,” Minnesota History 29, no. 4 (1948): 321.
44
Grace E. Polk, “Film in Prisons,” Moving Picture World, March 18, 1916: 1871.
96
It was assumed that the instructional quality of the prison Chautauqua circle could be
replicated through educational motion pictures. This was the aim of the wardens of the Kansas
State Penitentiary and the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, who cooperated to show
motion pictures in their institutions. “The intention is to show pictures of the educational type,” a
Nickelodeon announcement assured readers, “with the idea of bringing prisoners in touch with
the outside world.”
45
The article highlighted the presumed necessity of education in prisons,
since it was surmised that prisoners lacked the basic moral character that resulted from proper
learning. “Many of the men have no knowledge of what is taking place outside the prison walls,”
it continued. “Motion pictures will show them this.”
46
A 1912 announcement in Motography
explained that instead of the minstrel and burlesque performers that commonly performed at the
Ohio Penitentiary (described further below), motion pictures would be shown for Thanksgiving
festivities because they held a greater pedagogic purpose, were cheaper, and didn’t “take the
prisoners [away] from their work.”
47
Faith in the instructional quality of motion pictures can be
gleaned from the genres that were selected to be shown in the Ohio prison. “[T]he moving
pictures can’t be of the Wild West variety,” Motography wrote, “They have to be the educational
variety and will be censored by Warden Jones and Chaplain Richards before the prisoners are
given a look.”
48
Religious instruction was part of this broader adult education, and religious films
stirred feelings in imprisoned viewers. When the religious film The Life of Christ was shown in
the chapel at Pittsburg’s Western Penitentiary as part of a Sunday entertainment lineup that also
included a performance by the prison’s orchestra, Motion Picture World commented that “sad-
faced men left the chapel for the corridors and cells, who an hour before had been smiling with

45
“Pictures for Leavenworth Convicts,” Nickelodeon, November 15, 1910: 282.
46
“Pictures for Leavenworth Convicts,” Nickelodeon, November 15, 1910: 282.
47
“Penitentiary Holiday,” Motography, July 6, 1912: 11.
48
“Penitentiary Holiday,” Motography, July 6, 1912: 11.
97
eagerness at the expected treat.”
49
The magazine added, “The scenes, founded on Biblical stories,
seemed real to them, the music lent impressiveness, the songs breathed of home, a home that
once was theirs, not that where walls of stone and bars and gloom are omnipresent.”
50

In her paper “The Educational Value of Motion Pictures in the Prison,” presented at the
1911 American Prison Association meeting, R. G. Dolese of the General Film Company
addressed an audience that included prison administrators to reflect on the value of motion
pictures to imprisoned people even beyond what was considered to be films’ more apparent
educational purpose. “If you feel that it must simply be travel, or perhaps teaching geography or
history or literature,” she stated, “we could give you pictures in that line; but what we want you
to feel is that motion pictures will have a strong and potent interest and a vital moral effect on
every individual, if presented to them in the correct way.”
51
Dolese insisted that even films with
no overt pedagogic purpose could be instructive to prisoners because the promoted the proper
socialization of an imprisoned populace that has been divorced from the rest of the society. “If
we shut humanity away from humanity we are taking the human being out of the social life, and
the social environments,” she continued, “and we must supply him with something to take its
place or else his mind becomes weak, and in consequence his morals follow suit.”
52
She also tied
film exhibition in prisons to prisoners’ labor, remarking that the memories of recently exhibited
images might sustain a worker while he toiled. “[W]hen one is doing manual labor there are
many times that your mind is at liberty to be used in other directions, and the picture seen by the

49
“Trade Notes,” Moving Picture World, August 1907: 375.
50
“Trade Notes,” Moving Picture World, August 1907: 375.
51
R. G. Dolese, “The Educational Value of Motion Pictures in the Prison,” Proceedings of the Annual
Congress of the American Prison Association (Indianapolis, IN: William B. Burford, 1911), 334.
52
R. G. Dolese, “The Educational Value of Motion Pictures in the Prison,” Proceedings of the Annual
Congress of the American Prison Association (Indianapolis, IN: William B. Burford, 1911), 335.
98
student or the man the night before is probably the one that comes back to him.”
53
Dolese ended
her talk by assuring the administrators of the inexpensiveness of motion picture equipment, its
easiness to operate by prison employees, and the wide availability of motion picture rentals.
The ethics of capturing images of imprisoned people was nearly as controversial as the
process of showing moving images to those same people. Imprisoned people thought and
debated the correct methods of creating such images for film actualities. They also argued about
the uses of such images for creating empathy in the unimprisoned people who might view them
and think differently about the caging of humans. At stake in this debate was imprisoned
peoples’ humanity in a carceral sphere that they regularly described as dehumanizing. The
question of the imprisoned person’s humanity was a recurrent theme in penal journalism, and the
papers’ writers often described their goal as proving their own humanity to society on the
outside. As we will see below, however, the concept of “humanity” was granted unevenly among
imprisoned people, and anti-black antipathy in the form of entertainment regularly attempted to
excuse and explain racist hierarchies in the prison.

Blackface Minstrelsy in the Prison
As we can see from prisoners’ reviews of films shown at the Anamosa Reformatory and
elsewhere in the early 1900s, early film spectatorship in prisons was an energetic affair,
entertaining people who regularly described their lives, passions, and senses as having been
dulled by the languorous temporalities of detention. One of the foundations for this early motion
picture culture in prisons was the presence of anti-black performance that permeated through all
genres and public spaces in the nineteenth century. Early cinema was populated by minstrel

53
R. G. Dolese, “The Educational Value of Motion Pictures in the Prison,” Proceedings of the Annual
Congress of the American Prison Association (Indianapolis, IN: William B. Burford, 1911), 335.
99
characters that would be seen on prison screens throughout the country and interpreted by their
viewers. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Anamosa Reformatory’s newspaper
documented the film exhibitions that entertained prisoners there. These films were shown in the
reformatory’s chapel, and imprisoned journalists at the reformatory celebrated the owner of the
local nickelodeon, Henry Lohrman. Consider, for example, this film reviews from the
reformatory’s paper from 1909:
“Two solid hours of moving pictures and illustrated songs constituted our New Year
entertainment. Mr. Lohrman had promised us “something good.” He kept his promise.
Six thousand feet of film fitted across the sheet! Comic, serio-comic, fantastic, and
dramatic followed in succession. One moment we watched the thrilling adventures of a
woman and her che-e-ild among the bloodthirsty Zulus, the next we were shown a series
of remarkable catastrophes overtaking well meaning human beings. We jumped to India
and, eyes bulging with astonishment, saw wonderfully intelligent elephants perform
manual labor; we followed the adventures of the abused juvenile chimney sweep and
accompanied him to the bottom of the sea where he was transformed into a water baby;
we were transported to Lake Something or other, in the land of macaroni, and wound up,
breathless but happy, at an athletic meet.”
54

In this review, we learn that the Iowa reformatory’s motion picture program jumped across
region and genre, and featured a picture with “bloodthirsty Zulus.”
In another review of the same exhibition, the author attempts to give the reader a greater
understanding of the prisoner’s interior thoughts and feelings. Anamosa Reformatory author R.
D. Thompson penned an essay titled “The Heart of the Inmate,” which appeared in the Iowa
institution’s Reformatory Press. To show prisoners’ capacity for feeling, Thompson refers to an
exhibition of the film as The Zulu’s Child at the prison, although he is almost describing the D.
W. Griffith film The Zulu’s Heart (1908), alongside the Percy Stow film The Little Chimney
Sweep (1907), an adaptation of Charles Kingsley’s racist children’s book The Water Babies.
Thompson summarizes the former film as one that “portrayed the capture and subsequent release

54
5931, “Pictures and Melody,” Reformatory Press (Anamosa Reformatory, Iowa), Jan. 2, 1909: 3.
100
of a Boer woman and baby girl by hostile Zulus.”
55
Griffith’s The Zulu’s Heart opens with a
group of white actors in blackface as stereotyped caricatures of Africans who are mourning the
death of a child. In a following scene, these mourners ambush a wagon of white settlers and kill
the white family’s father with a spear while the mother and daughter flee before ultimately being
captured themselves. Through the empathy of one of the “Africans,” who attacks those who
would do them harm, the mother and daughter are freed. Nicole Devarenne writes that this film,
reminiscent of the director’s famously white supremacist The Birth of a Nation (1915), “uses an
imagined African geography to represent white American anxieties characteristic of the post-
Reconstruction and Jim Crow era.”
56

Through a bizarre alchemy of race, incarceration, and violence, the prison exhibition of
The Zulu’s Heart became evidence for the imprisoned film reviewer Thompson of the goodness
in prisoners’ consciences. He provided the example of a prisoner who nursed a robin back to
health, and then used audience reactions to D. W. Griffith’s film to ostensibly prove that
prisoners were more humane than those outside of prison may believe. “During the showing of
this picture,” he wrote of The Zulu’s Heart, “the men of ‘our house’ unconsciously displayed
their innermost self by most evident denunciation of all things brutal; but at all kindness shown,
and when right was might, pronounced applause greeted the scene.”
57
He continued, “Where, oh,
where but in prison would men so enthusiastically applaud a view on canvas? However, many
men here to-day were here long before the ‘nickle mint’ had made its appearance and their
enthusiasm was most natural. … There are, of course, exceptions to all rules, but under many a

55
R.D. Thompson, “The Heart of the Inmate,” Reformatory Press (Anamosa Reformatory, Iowa), Jan. 9,
1909: 6.
56
Nicole Devarenne, “‘History by Lightning’: D.W. Griffith in South Africa,” in A Companion to D.W.
Griffith, ed. Charlie Keil (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), 487.
57
R.D. Thompson, “The Heart of the Inmate,” Reformatory Press (Anamosa Reformatory, Iowa), Jan. 9,
1909: 6-7.
101
prison garment is a great, big heart: a kind, generous nature, and a whole lot of manhood.”
58
It is
not the exhibition of The Zulu’s Heart that is extraordinary, as many films that included racist
narratives and demeaning caricatures of racial and ethnic minorities—by D. W. Griffith and
others—populated the screens of prisons across the country. Instead, what is remarkable is that
Anamosa prisoners’ investment in this film was heralded by the imprisoned journalist as a sign
of the imprisoned person’s empathy, intellect, and integrity.
Blackface minstrelsy was both a precinematic entertainment in prisons and a form of
entertainment that coexisted with cinematic exhibition. From an early period, minstrelsy was
considered part of the recreational programs of prisons across the country. For July 4, 1877, the
warden of the Illinois penitentiary at Joliet “permitted—for the first time in the history of the
prison—[prisoners] to have the freedom of their respective cell house for a couple of hours, on
condition that they should not abuse the privilege.”
59
The warden reported that prisoners “talked,
laughed and sang, engaged in athletic sports, and improvised minstrel performances to their
hearts’ content.”
60
In Love and Theft, Eric Lott refers to minstrelsy as “an index of popular white
racial feeling in the United States,” and argues the white working class used blackface as a way
to resolve race and class anxieties.
61
This included racist ridicule of black stock characters, who
were portrayed as backwards, servile, and unassuming, and would come to be enjoyed both by
members of the white working and upper classes. The white working class composed the most
likely group of white Americans to end up in prison, making minstrelsy a common way for these

58
R.D. Thompson, “The Heart of the Inmate,” Reformatory Press (Anamosa Reformatory, Iowa), Jan. 9,
1909: 7.
59
Quoted in Corinne Bacon and Thomas Mott Osborne, Prison Reform (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1917),
53.
60
Quoted in Corinne Bacon and Thomas Mott Osborne, Prison Reform (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1917),
53.
61
Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993), 5.
102
hierarchies to redeploy and spread their harmful worldview among an imprisoned white
spectatorship. Lott and others have argued that minstrelsy was a performance method by which
whiteness was constructed, since it proliferated at a moment when whiteness was beginning to
incorporate poor, immigrant, and groups that had been otherwise sidelined from belonging. As
can be seen in the popularity of anti-black entertainment regimes, the prison became a pivotal
site for this incorporation of otherwise unwelcome people into the “wages of whiteness.”
62

Even in the earliest motion pictures, film reinforced racial hierarchies in the prison. Early
cinema—both inside and outside of prisons—was accompanied by an array of skits, sketch
comedy, vaudeville, choral arrangements, and other types of performances that enhanced the
experience of watching motion pictures. One of the routines that held roots in the vaudeville
circuit was the blackface performance. Although an immensely popular live entertainment genre
across the country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, blackface held a particular
valence in the prison, which became a racially coded institution after the abolition slavery, at
which point the prison became a primary means of destabilizing black communities. The
blackface performance would include music, dance, and racist sketch comedy, and could even
include a film screening as part of its multi-act show. Because film was so thoroughly imbedded
into the entertainment fabric of many prisons and so often accompanied by other forms of
entertainment, the boundary between minstrelsy on the prison stage and minstrelsy on the prison
screen was blurred, as the practice straddled the mediums of both live performance and motion
picture to affect the worldviews of imprisoned audiences. Moreover, the enforcement of race and
gender hierarchies in prisons limited the kinds of spectatorship that were possible within prisons’
entertainment repertoires. The institutional control over prison audiences was part of wider

62
David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
(New York: Verso, 1999).
103
systems of de jure and de facto segregation that structured theaters across North America, and
segregation in entertainment venues was a primary method of enforcing racial and gender
divisions.
Prison newspapers often remained complicit with the racial beliefs that organized
entertainment in prisons, such as the numerous Penal Press publications that advertised live
minstrel performances or blackface films, accompanied by caricatured blackface depictions
drawn by imprisoned illustrators. For this reason, we only have reviews of prison minstrel
performers written by white prison journalists, even prisoner minstrel performers could be black
or white, depending on the institution. In an entertainment landscape that was devoid of choices
in entertainment, these performances were overwhelmingly popular, as evidenced by the lengthy
reviews they received in prison newspapers. However, the authors of these papers were
uniformly white until the mid-twentieth century, and we have little in the way of writings of
imprisoned people of color to gauge how they might have experienced the cinema and
performance exhibitions that took place in their prisons and reformatories.
We can be certain, however, that imprisoned white audiences enjoyed the minstrel
performances that were staged at prisons across the country. At the reformatory in Anamosa,
Iowa, for instance, a prison journalist using the penname “Cosmic” gushed over a recent staging
of a blackface performance at the institution in March 1911. Cosmic reported that the performers
“[w]orked, and studied, and rehearsed, and sang, and danced, early and late, for the past two
months.”
63
Imprisoned audience members and outside visitors enjoyed painted scenery,
blackface comedy skits, a trapeze artist, and a performance by the reformatory’s imprisoned
orchestra. Because The Zulu’s Heart was shown at the same institution only two years prior, we

63
Cosmic, “Minstrel Show,” Reformatory Press (Anamosa Reformatory, Iowa), March 25, 1911: 5.
104
know that blackface performances in prisons were contemporaneous with the exhibition of
blackface films in prisons. Imprisoned white spectators who viewed such film fare would be able
to perform the anti-black routines for their fellow prisoners, solidifying their perceptions of their
own racial belonging and performing rituals that demarcated the putative limitations of humanity
based on racist exclusion.

Minstrelsy at the Ohio Penitentiary
One of the longest lasting rituals of minstrelsy staged in a prison was Ohio Penitentiary’s
annual Christmas performance. One imprisoned reviewer enthused about the Christmas
performance by writing, “Rivaling the most ostentatious in minstreldom with an array of talent
such as has never been gathered within these walls, the Minstrel Show of 1923 went across with
a slam-bang of versatility and frivolity that rocked its audience with mirth and gayety, smoothed
away the passage of time and jotted itself down in the memory of the oldest inhabitant as one of
the top-notch shows ever put on at the old O.P.”
64
The reviewer commented on the singing,
orchestration, and slapstick that were included as part of the performance. The minstrel show
occurred every year at Christmas time, in large part due to the planning of the warden’s wife
Mrs. Preston E. Thomas, who made sure the performance occurred annually for the imprisoned
audience at Ohio Penitentiary.
Ohio Penitentiary’s Christmastime minstrel shows of the 1920s were preceded by
decades of blackface performance that stretched back to the 1800s. In his description of the 1892
Christmas show presented to the Columbus prisoners, superintendent of the penitentiary’s
schools Dan J. Morgan declared in his book Historical Lights and Shadows of the Ohio

64
“O.P. Minstrels Score Big Hit,” Ohio Penitentiary News (Ohio Penitentiary), Dec. 29, 1923: 1.
105
Penitentiary and the Horrors of the Death Trap, “No one in the world has more genuine fun on
holidays than do the ‘boys’ in the Ohio Penitentiary.”
65
Morgan described the morning church
services held in the prison chapel, in which the chaplain “preached a sensible and suitable
Christmas sermon” before the prisoners were taken to the dining hall for a large meal.
66

Afterwards, the men were led by lockstep back to the chapel for a Christmas show that began
with “old time minstrel entertainment” performed by fellow prisoners in blackface.
67
“The
minstrels[’] conventional in gingham coats with swallow-tails and red trimmings and
perpendicularly striped pantaloons marched solemnly in,” Morgan wrote, “and the prisoners [in
the audience] bent forward to recognize familiar faces behind the burnt cork decorations.”
68
The
racially coded exhibition of this Christmas performance did not end with the anti-black minstrel
performances, but also included “a number of war songs and dances” by Piute prisoner Willie
Dunn, although fellow prison performer George Blanchard “had more fun than a little bit, and
when the sturdy chief’s back was turned, communicated his humor to the spectators” in apparent
mock of Dunn’s exhibition.
69
The successors of this 1892 Christmas performance would
continue in a seemingly unbroken chain well into the twentieth century to be viewed by likely
thousands of prisoners at the Columbus prison throughout the decades of its existence.
Ohio Penitentiary’s prison newspaper was similar to other in its cohort in providing
reflections on carceral life that would be interest to imprisoned readers, including articles on

65
Dan J. Morgan, Historical Lights and Shadows of the Ohio Penitentiary and the Horrors of the Death
Trap (Columbus: Ohio Penitentiary Print, 1893), 96.
66
Dan J. Morgan, Historical Lights and Shadows of the Ohio Penitentiary and the Horrors of the Death
Trap (Columbus: Ohio Penitentiary Print, 1893), 97.
67
Dan J. Morgan, Historical Lights and Shadows of the Ohio Penitentiary and the Horrors of the Death
Trap (Columbus: Ohio Penitentiary Print, 1893), 97.
68
Dan J. Morgan, Historical Lights and Shadows of the Ohio Penitentiary and the Horrors of the Death
Trap (Columbus: Ohio Penitentiary Print, 1893), 97.
69
Dan J. Morgan, Historical Lights and Shadows of the Ohio Penitentiary and the Horrors of the Death
Trap (Columbus: Ohio Penitentiary Print, 1893), 99.
106
Southern convict leasing systems, indeterminate prison sentences, the death penalty, and parole.
Technology and crime also appeared in the prison newspaper, such as its reporting on a case in
which a phonograph produced during a pianist’s recording session was used as evidence that she
was assaulted.
70
The basest depictions of black people appeared in the newspaper published at
Ohio Penitentiary. In a racist joke published in the Ohio Penitentiary News in 1908, stock
blackface character Sambo dialogued with his interlocutor Roughrider about the health effects of
his watermelon consumption in the exaggerated vernacular characteristic of minstrel
performance, ultimately deciding that death from eating the fruit would be pleasurable.
71

Anti-black entertainment permeated the Ohio Penitentiary at the sonic level too. As part
of a stage play that would premiere at a local theater, it was “arranged with Deputy Warden
Zuber, of the Ohio Penitentiary, to have a series of phonographic records made of a pack of
bloodhounds on the trail of a negro fugitive.”
72
The phonograph of the prisoner’s scream was
intended to feature during the stage performance, and according to reporting in the entertainment
press, “[t]here was no trouble in finding the negro convict, and the pack of hounds was easily
available.”
73
It continued by reminding the audience, “when you … hear the baying of the
hounds, just remember that they are the real thing.”
74
The use of an Ohio prisoner’s scream in a
stage production through a phonographic recording parallels in many ways the dubiously
authentic phonographs recorded at the scenes of lynchings studied by Gustavus Sadler.
75

70
“Talking Machine Testifies,” Ohio Penitentiary News, December 19, 1908: 1.
71
“Watermelons Were Fine,” Ohio Penitentiary News, July 25, 1908: 1.
72
William H. Campbell, “Big Town Amusement News in Brief,” Billboard, October 15, 1910: 44.
73
William H. Campbell, “Big Town Amusement News in Brief,” Billboard, October 15, 1910: 44.
74
William H. Campbell, “Big Town Amusement News in Brief,” Billboard, October 15, 1910: 44.
75
Gustavus Stadler, “Never Heard Such a Thing: Lynching and Phonographic Modernity,” Social Text
28, no. 1 (2010): 87-105.
107
Although minstrel performances have been documented in the Ohio Penitentiary as early
as the 1890s, they were still popular in the Columbus prison in the 1920s, particularly at the
annual Christmas minstrel show. A positive review of the 1926 show noted that the show’s
patron Mrs. Preston E. Thomas “[had] been criticised somewhat by certain persons on the
outside for putting on the Minstrel Show and for securing Christmas trees for the enjoyment of
the inmates,” presumably because prisoners were not seen as deserving of the entertainment, not
because the content of the minstrel show was deemed objectionable. After the 1929 Christmas
minstrel show, the Ohio Penitentiary News republished a review from an outside newspaper that
wrote that the “highlights of the performance [were] the jollying, frolicking and prancing of the
‘masculine women.’ Bowlegged, fatlegged and skinnylegged, the chorines received the warmest
hands as they sang and danced.”
76
In 1932 it was announced that the annual Christmas shows
would come to an end because “the current economic distress was a definite threat to the
financial success of any such production.”
77
The show was replaced with the film The Night of
June 13 (Stephen Roberts, 1932), which was exhibited using two new Simplex projectors and
new wider screen.

Theorizing the Prison Minstrel
If minstrelsy was a widely popular film and performance genre of the early twentieth
century, why is it notable that the genre would flourish in prisons? After all, nearly all forms of
entertainment that were popular outside of prisons found a home inside their walls. To answer
this question, we must better understand how the demographics of incarceration had shifted in
the thirty years prior to the invention of cinema. In Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants

76
Ohio Penitentiary News, December 28, 1929: 3.
77
“The Why of No Inmate Talent Show This Christmas,” Ohio Penitentiary News, December 17, 1932: 3.
108
in the Hollywood Melting Pot, Michael Rogin argues that the prominent use of blackface in early
motion pictures served to reconstitute the constructed racial boundaries between European ethnic
groups that had recently immigrated to the United States. More specifically, these ethnic
communities congealed into a reformed racial whiteness that established itself as distinct from
blackness. Minstrelsy played a key role in this racial reformulation by inviting Europeans ethnics
into a whiteness from which they had previously been restricted, creating a “conjunction between
blackface and Americanization” in which members of these communities could parody blackness
to show their distance from it.
78
As an immensely popular art form of the twentieth century,
cinema was able to take up the mantle of serving this role from the popular live performances
that both preceded it and existed contemporaneously to it. For Rogin, in other words, cinema
became a primary means through which ethnic groups (many of them immigrants) began to view
themselves as white, and the preponderance of cinematic minstrel characters facilitated this
process by ostensibly differentiating whiteness from blackness through racist parody.
As white performers and viewers used blackface as a way to differentiate themselves
from black images that were characterized as abject—as Rogin, Lott, and others have argued—
black viewers often viewed the minstrel as a grotesque representation of white supremacist
fantasies of black servility. It became a symbol of humiliation and shame for many, and its
popularity was contested by African American groups, including the grassroots campaigns that
confronted exhibitions of D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). Commenting on the
problematic portrayals of African Americans in early cinema, Jacqueline Najuma Stewart has
described the “fascinating but alienating nature of early cinema for Black viewers.”
79
The prison

78
Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998), 13.
79
Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005), xvii.
109
was a particularly fierce battleground over the racial anxieties embodied by minstrel
performances, since blackness in the post-Reconstruction era became inextricably linked in the
white public imagination to vice, violence, and criminality.
80
As many have pointed out, this led
to the hyper-criminalization of African American communities following the U.S. abolition of
slavery in 1865, and African Americans were incarcerated at rates much higher than their white
counterparts in the aftermath of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery “except as
punishment for crime.”
81
To clarify the points of this argument, it is perhaps best to break
minstrelsy into some of its constituent parts; namely, the minstrel’s relationship to labor and
movement, two arenas in which racist caricature have been examined as affecting the lived
realities of black communities.
On the subject of the minstrel and labor, animation historian Nicholas Sammond has
argued that “the figure of the minstrel itself was located in a mythos of the black body as
resistant to labor—whether forced or voluntary—that is, as inherently ‘lazy.’”
82
In the context of
prison labor, there existed an impetus to mediate the harsh labor demands under which
imprisoned people of all races worked and administrators’ self-delusions that they were caring
for prisoners by extending leisure and entertainment. With this in mind, then, we must consider
the centrality of labor to the minstrel mythos in relation to what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has
identified as the forms of surplus labor that authorize prison expansion at times of national and
economic crisis. Gilmore writes, “Capital must be able to rid of workers whose labor power is no

80
See W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in American, 1860-1880 (New York: Free Press, 1992); and
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern
Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
81
See Christopher R. Adamson, “Punishment After Slavery: Southern State Penal Systems, 1865-1890,”
Social Problems 30, no. 5 (1983): 555-569.
82
Nicholas Sammond, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 24.
110
longer desirable—whether permanently, by mechanical or human replacement, or temporary
layoffs—and have access to new or previously idled labor as the need arises.”
83
The
communities that were most directly affected by the prison in the late nineteenth century—that
is, the communities most typically dispossessed as surplus labor—were those made vulnerable as
a result of racial injustice in forms that have included various permutations of
disenfranchisement, labor discrimination, and racist violence. The space of the prison, then, was
coded as an architecture built to detain and discipline the nation’s racial minorities. In such a
context, white prisoners may have so vigorously participated in rituals of blackface minstrelsy to
differentiate themselves from blackness in an inherently anti-black institution.
Adding to the connection between the minstrel and labor was the minstrel’s
animatedness, which made it a particularly salient character in the prison, which was experienced
by its imprisoned people as imposing stillness and silence. In recognition of how exaggerated
animation was central to the movement patterns ascribed to black people in the white
supremacist imagination of the minstrel, Nicholas Sammond has also observed how “the minstrel
body’s relative plasticity, its freedom of movement—as when wheeling around to ‘Jump Jim
Crow’—suggested a primitive freedom from the constraints of civilized behavior.”
84
It is
necessary to analyze this ostensible “freedom of movement” in the corporeal sense through the
structural conditions that have restricted black movement. Alessandra Raengo has employed the
term “motility” to note “the difficulty blackness poses in determining the agency implied in
movement, including the way black movement is so structurally mistaken for compulsion,

83
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing
California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 71.
84
Nicholas Sammond, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 24.
111
‘surplus liveness,’ or an innate overabundance of performativity and affectability.”
85
For Raengo,
this creates ambivalence in how observers interpret agency for subjects racialized as black, since
that movement is overdetermined by social and cultural codes, including presumptions of guilt
and danger in black movement.
Since such severe restrictions were placed on movement inside the prison, the minstrel
performer would possess a momentary reprieve from such authoritarian limitations. Account
after account of the prison, regardless of the era in which it was written, describes how restricted
movement causes physical and mental anguish for imprisoned people, who express alienation
from their own bodies and thoughts as a result of not having freedom over their mobility.
86
Not
surprisingly, one of the primary pleasures of cinema for imprisoned people was that it allowed
them dominion over spaces, architectures, and mobilities that were denied to them through the
grim boundaries of incarceration. It is important to note, however, that such a momentary
reprieve in mobility constraints would only be offered by administrations in the context of racial
caricature. The performer might even be permitted to leave the institution to tour his
performance, as was the African American leader of Angola Prison’s minstrel troupe, which
traveled the U.S. South with its shows of imprisoned minstrel performers.
87
Neither the
performer nor his audience would be freed, however, leaving the mobility provided by this
position to be only momentary.

Conclusion

85
Alessandra Raengo, “Blackness and the Image of Motility: A Suspenseful Critique,” Black Camera 8,
no. 1 (2016), 192.
86
For a philosophical meditation on this phenomenon, see Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social
Death and Its Afterlives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
87
For James McElroy’s story, see Chapter 3 of Dennis Childs, Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration
from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 93-140.
112
In the stultifying temporalities of the American prison, practices and rituals presumed to
be long past recur and endure, coopted into the ever-shifting machinery of the institution. The
residues of early blackface performances in prisons, for instance, were reanimated in later
decades as they seeped into new media to ridicule and deride. These media included a variety of
popular films, of course, but also into the sonic realm through radio programs such as Thirty
Minutes behind the Walls, which featured the talent of prisoners from the Texas State Prison. In
his study of Texas and California prisons during the Great Depression, Ethan Blue discusses the
Thirty Minutes program “Fathead and Soupbone,” which he calls an example of “radio
blackface.”
88
The same logic of portraying blackness through grotesque and clownish caricature
make their way into numerous illustrations throughout the Penal Press. Drawings of black
minstrel characters were a particular favorite of the illustrators of Wisconsin State Prison’s
G.E.C. News and Candle papers, including a 1936 drawing in which a suited minstrel character
declares his innocence in a courtroom front of a judge.
89

Blackface performances themselves endured, as well, and the last instance of the practice
that I have found occurred in a June 1957 issue of the Presidio, published at the Iowa State
Penitentiary in Fort Madison, Iowa. The photograph of the 1957 performance features
imprisoned actors in blackface makeup and exaggerated costume meant to invite ridicule,
complete with the caption, “LeRoy Walton barely manages to stagger offstage while Diggs at
right fishes for a goldfish.”
90
The ritual of movement, gesture, costume, makeup and vocal
caricature remained resilient in the space of the prison, used to reinforce the perceived difference

88
Ethan Blue, Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons (New York:
New York University Press, 2012), 148. For more on blackface and sound, see Noah Arceneaux,
“Blackface Broadcasting in the Early Days of Radio,” Journal of Radio Studies 12, no. 1 (2005): 61-73.
89
“Humor,” G.E.C. News (Wisconsin State Prison), March 15, 1936: back cover.
90
“The Presidio Presents I.S.P.’s Annual Inmate Show,” Presidio (Iowa State Penitentiary, IA), June
1957: 9.
113
of whiteness in a space that had been coded as black through nearly a century of legal and
cultural manipulation that destabilized black political participation.
The origins of film in prisons were uneven and unpredictable, arriving in Northeast and
Midwest institutions as early as the 1900s while many prisons in the U.S. South, West, and
Canada did not feature regular film programs until forty years later. Therefore, the mutli-sited
introductions of film depended largely on the regional and institutional differences of North
American prisons, which themselves depended largely on administrative attitudes regarding
punishment and reward. In this chapter I have focused on the Midwestern institutions of Iowa,
Illinois, Minnesota, and Ohio because these locations represent a substantial portion of the
imprisoned people who first viewed early films in prisons. Regardless of these regional
differences, however, understanding the emergence of cinema inside carceral spaces requires
attention to the racist hierarchies that produced the crisis of American imprisonment and became
enabled by its overshadowing presence.
One particularly prominent element of this history is the frequency with which minstrel
performances were staged in prisons for the enjoyment of prisoners and prison personnel alike.
This type of performance, although popular among various audiences in numerous venues across
the country, signified quite candidly in carceral settings, which coalesced as institutional
methods of anti-black terror and control. Histories of early motion pictures in prison are unique
in that they tell us much about how the medium seeped into even the most peripheral of places to
be viewed by those people most on the margins of their societies. Nonetheless, it is crucial that
these histories also point out the terrible hierarchies that existed even in these peripheral places,
in which uneven power structures could create a periphery of the periphery. For this reason, we
must attend to the horrifying foundations on which early film exhibition proliferated, so that we
114
may better understand the current crises, debates, and demands that inform how media
technologies are used in prisons today.

115
Chapter 3
Blood, Bonds, and 16mm: Film and Prisoners’ Wartime Labor

During the height of World War II in 1943, San Quentin prisoner Roark Tamerlane—the
pseudonym of H. Buderus von Carlshausen—penned the impassioned essay “America!–Add
Stars to Our Stripes!” asking that prisoners’ contributions to the war be recognized and
celebrated by those outside of prison. As evidence for his case, Tamerlane enumerates the
products that San Quentin prisoners manufactured in the service of World War II: “submarine
nets, […] small assault barges, […] mattress-covers for naval hospital beds; steel cafeteria trays;
nearly 5,000,000 […] jute-bags […] and thousands-of-yards of jute-cloth, for camouflage
purposes; numberless [sic] scale-model planes; hundreds of metal first-aid cases; [and] sirens for
air-raid protection.”
1
Tamerlane followed this list by observing that prisoners also donated their
blood and purchased war bonds as expressions of their patriotism, despite not earning wages for
their labor. In fact, the essay’s imprisoned author suggested that prisoners’ lack of remuneration
for their work made them exceptionally patriotic, declaring “[t]here are no strikes here” despite
the reality that “not a man earns as much as one cent,” except San Quentin’s agricultural
harvesters and fire fighters.
2
Repeatedly calling on fellow Americans to “add stars to our
stripes,” Tamerlane championed San Quentin’s warden, Clinton T. Duffy, for modernizing the
prison into a workshop where these war industries could flourish. Shocked by Duffy’s reform
mentality, Tamerlane asked rhetorically, “Was I dreaming or am I making motion pictures,

1
Roark Tamerlane [H. Buderus von Carlshausen], “America!–Add Stars to Our Stripes!” unpublished
essay, 1943, pp. 1-2. California Reading Room, California State Library, Sacramento, CA.
2
Roark Tamerlane [H. Buderus von Carlshausen], “America!–Add Stars to Our Stripes!” unpublished
essay, 1943, p. 2. California Reading Room, California State Library, Sacramento, CA.
116
America? Is this man the warden of a prison?” In answer to his own question, he replied, “Yes!–
[H]e is the warden of the world’s biggest Big-house, as your Hollywood writers put it.”
3

The motion pictures and Hollywood writers that Tamerlane referenced were, in fact,
essential ingredients to the story of World War II labor. As film historians have shown in
detailed studies of Hollywood films with war narratives and films produced by the United States
military, including 16mm films promoting war bonds and enlistment, cinematic productivity
exploded during World War II.
4
At a time of uncertainty on a global scale that held potential
effects for the status of prisoners at home and abroad, the war effort was also deeply intertwined
with the cultural regimes that were staged at San Quentin and other North American prisons. For
instance, Tamerlane remarked how in May 1943 the prison’s auditorium was “‘drafted’ […] for
war work,” but confirmed that the auditorium’s repurposing would not interfere with the
entertainment exhibited there.
5
The San Quentin auditorium—the place in which men watched
movies and the place where the First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt spoke when she visited San
Quentin in April 1943—was repurposed for the war effort.
6
In his essay, Tamerlane also wrote
about film stars and live performers visiting the prison. As we can see through the way he
inflected celebrity and entertainment culture into his narrative of prisoners’ war labor, Tamerlane

3
Roark Tamerlane [H. Buderus von Carlshausen], “America!–Add Stars to Our Stripes!” unpublished
essay, 1943: 2. California Reading Room, California State Library, Sacramento, CA.
4
See Michael E. Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers: Warner Bros.’s Campaign Against Nazism (New
York: New York University Press, 1999); Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood,
American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Clayton R.
Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda
Shaped World War II Movies (London: Free Press, 1987).
5
Roark Tamerlane [H. Buderus von Carlshausen], “America!–Add Stars to Our Stripes!” unpublished
essay, 1943: 60 [59a insert]. California Reading Room, California State Library, Sacramento, CA.
6
Roark Tamerlane [H. Buderus von Carlshausen], “America!–Add Stars to Our Stripes!” unpublished
essay, 1943: 81. California Reading Room, California State Library, Sacramento, CA.
117
posited a tacit relationship between amusement and patriotism at San Quentin, which was
repeated throughout North American prison culture during World War II.
As in other eras, the freedoms and privileges of citizenship were deferred for prisoners at
San Quentin in the 1940s. Therefore, it is extraordinary that prisons’ entertainment and print
cultures would invest such immense effort in incorporating prisoners into American nationalism.
Tamerlane himself recognized this reality when he wrote, “We [prisoners] have remembered
[Pearl Harbor]! We the half-million who have lost the right to call ourselves citizens, but—thank
God!—not the right to call ourselves Americans!”
7
For Tamerlane, the suspension of American
citizenship did not prevent prisoners from being American, despite the fact that many of San
Quentin’s prisoners in the midcentury were indeed foreign born. As Ethan Blue says of
Tamerlane and his fellow captives, “Prisoners’ expressions of nationalism were an effort to
destigmatize themselves, to change the terms of the discourse by which they were outcast.”
8
To
understand the gulf Tamerlane posited between American citizenship and American identity to
make his statement comprehensible, it is necessary to untangle the cultural economies that
circulated throughout San Quentin during wartime.
If one function of wartime entertainment broadly was to inspire national belonging for a
country at war, this goal was all the more imperative in the context of the American prison. In
prisons, wardens and other administrators exhibited enlistment pictures, war bond films, and
Hollywood movies depicting the war. These entertainments became a method of fomenting
American nationalism within a population whose citizenship status was uncertain. Moreover,
even though an enormous amount of entertainment was inflected by military storylines during

7
Roark Tamerlane [H. Buderus von Carlshausen], “America!–Add Stars to Our Stripes!” unpublished
essay, 1943: 3. California Reading Room, California State Library, Sacramento, CA.
8
Ethan Blue, Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday life in Texas and California Prisons (New York:
New York University Press, 2012), 243.
118
World War II, this militarized cultural milieu held a particular valence in prisons, since
imprisoned men and women contributed an enormous and surprising degree of labor and funding
to the war effort. As we learn from Penal Press papers, prisoners not only participated in
manufacturing labor to make goods that would be used abroad by American soldiers, they also
participated in scarcity measures, bought thousands of dollars of war bonds, and donated
thousands of pints of blood to be used by wounded military personnel. In short, American
prisoners performed all of the duties of American patriotism, and this performance was
undergirded by both orderly labor regimes and the excitements of cinematic entertainment.
This chapter uses California’s San Quentin Prison as a case study for examining the
movies shown to prisoners during World War II, a time when the prison was exceptionally
productive in the war effort. In particular, educational films produced by branches of the United
States military and Hollywood movies depicting the country at wartime were shown at the
prison. In an argument that foreshadows the exploration of “reform” as a measure to extract
greater industrial labor from imprisoned workers at Angola Prison in Chapter 4 of this
dissertation, my goal here is to interpret World War II’s cinematic outpouring as a way to
facilitate wartime work in prisons. Throughout this chapter, I bring San Quentin into context by
citing the massive war production that occurred at other prisons at the time. Most critically, I
contend that film played a pivotal role in helping imprisoned people feel a sense of belonging to
the nation during a time when the uncertainties of citizenship were viewed as potentially lethal to
American democracy.
The punitive space of the military existed in a continuum with the punitive space of the
prison. There is scholarly need to better understand prisoners’ far-reaching role in World War II
labor production since little has been written about their work in the service of war. Therefore, it
119
may appear idiosyncratic to tell the history of prisoners’ wartime labor through cinema, before a
more general history of prisoners’ war contributions has been written. Nevertheless, there is
sufficient evidence to argue that the scale of wartime prison industry was made possible through
the restorative and often indoctrinating effects of two features of everyday prison life: the prison
newspaper and the motion picture. Labor in this analysis is not limited to the wartime
manufacturing that benefitted United States military incursions, although manufacturing labor
certainly dominated America’s prisons during the war. I also treat prisoners’ purchase of war
bonds as a form of labor because this spending placed prisoners within a national economy of
value and exchange; similarly, I describe blood donation as labor because this expenditure of a
biological product requires both the time and physical exertion that are so central to American
labor regimens.
Most importantly, perhaps, I also contend that prisoners and their administrations labored
to enforce perceived racial difference through entertainment regimens. From the exhibition of
16mm films that promoted black enlistment to live blackface performances during wartime,
labor was expended to stage racist performances that reinforced perceived racial difference at a
time when the economic demands of war were reordering American race and gender hierarchies.
Anti-black racism was one of the critical metrics through which American nationalism was
filtered in the space of the prison. Although World War II is often narrated as a catalyst for
equalizing the nation’s race and gender hierarchies, this chapter implicitly calls this narrative into
question by examining the racial logics of labor and entertainment regimes in the wartime prison.

World War II in Film History
120
World War II has been thoroughly explored within film history as an era of remarkable
cinematic yield. In the United States, the Office of War Information (OWI) generated an
extraordinary array of wartime propaganda through its Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP). The
purpose of this agency was to “[r]review, clear, and approve all proposed radio and motion
picture programs sponsored by Federal departments and agencies; and serve as the central point
of clearance and contact” between these media industries and the U.S. government.
9
The OWI
enlisted Hollywood talent to make films that encouraged spectators to enlist in the military,
purchase war bonds, and ration their consumer goods. Government-funded films included works
by well-known filmmakers such as Frank Capra, John Huston, Preston Sturges, and John Ford.
Such films served the pedagogical purpose of indoctrinating their viewers into the cultural habits
of a country in war, helping their viewers form American identities through their domestic
participation in World War II. In addition to films aimed at domestic spectators, the BMP also
created pictures meant to entertain American military personnel serving abroad. As a result of
this cinematic output during World War II, film studios and distributors were able to capitalize
from a new film format, 16 mm, which flourished in the post-war years. In short, the production
and circulation of wartime cinema by the BMP has been credited with transforming the formats,
technologies, genres, and exhibition sites associated with moving images.
There has been enormous scholarly output to study the confluence of cinematic and
military interests that created this economy of wartime film culture.
10
Some, such as Clayton R.

9
Quoted in Cedric Larson, “The Domestic Motion Picture Work of the Office of War Information,”
Hollywood Quarterly 3, no. 4 (1948): 434.
10
For texts not cited elsewhere in this chapter, see Bernard F. Dick, The Star-Spangled Screen: The
American World War II Film (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1985); William Friedman
Fagelson, “Fighting Films: The Everyday Tactics of World War II Soldiers,” Cinema Journal 40, no. 3
(2001): 94-112; Robert Fyne, Long Ago and Far Away: Hollywood and the Second World War (Lanham,
MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008); and Robert L. McLaughlin and Sally E. Perry, We’ll Always Have the
Movies: American Cinema during World War II (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006).
121
Koppes and Gregory D. Black, interpret this era as having an “uneasy relationship between
propaganda and democracy [that] proved especially troublesome.”
11
The use of film as
propaganda during World War II was an explicit aim of its creators, who knowingly exploited
the persuasive quality of cinema. In fact, Elmer Davis, director of OWI wrote in correspondence
to Byron Price, director of the Office of Censorship, “The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea
into most people’s minds is to let it go in through the medium of an entertainment picture when
they do not realize that they are being propagandized.”
12
At the level of genre, wartime cinema
encompassed a broad variety of generic subjects and themes for consumption by a variety of
audiences.
The OWI—and wartime film more generally—found themselves embroiled within
political debates about the nature of film, censorship, and propaganda during wartime. Created
by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the OWI was seen as a liberal bastion and faced attacks in
the United States legislature by conservatives who wished to cut its funding on the basis that the
OWI supported civil rights for racial minorities.
13
Nonetheless, Koppes and Black show that
“Hollywood turned out nearly 500 pictures annually during the war and drew eighty million paid
admissions per week, well above the prewar peak,” while other industries faced labor shortages
and strict rationing measures.
14
This massive cinematic productivity created ripple effects in the
industry that would change the way films were created, distributed, and formatted. Moreover,

11
Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, “What to Show the World: The Office of War Information
and Hollywood, 1942-1945,” Journal of American History 64, no. 1 (1977): 87.
12
Elmer Davis to Byron Price, quoted in Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, “What to Show the
World: The Office of War Information and Hollywood, 1942-1945,” The Journal of American History 64,
no. 1 (1977): 88.
13
See Kathryn Cramer Brownell, “‘It’s Entertainment, and It Will Sell Bonds!’: 16mm Film and the
World War II War Bond Campaign,” The Moving Image 10, no. 2 (2010): 66.
14
Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, “What to Show the World: The Office of War Information
and Hollywood, 1942-1945,” The Journal of American History 64, no. 1 (1977): 89.
122
these films composed a range of wartime cinema that had a broad reach beyond their attended
audiences. They even, as I will show, entered the domestic prison, and functioned to enable
penal labor in the service of the war.
As Haidee Wasson has shown, cinematic technologies were greatly innovated by the
United States military as a result of World War II, and film projectors in particular were adapted
to possess greater portability and durability to survive traveling great distances and withstand
potential damage during transport. Using the JAN (Joint Army Navy) projector as an example of
this portability, Wasson argues that World War II facilitated a shift in film exhibition from “a
film program that had been set in place to entertain and to train soldiers [that] was still largely
built on the immobile, stationary theatrical model using 35 mm equipment” to a more “nimble
kind of display system that could serve multiple, expanding, and even unforeseen needs.”
15
It
was not only the projector that experienced innovation as a result of war entertainment and
cinematic military instruction. The film format itself also transitioned as the 35mm gauge of film
stock was quickly eclipsed by 16mm, which had traditionally been associated with amateur
filmmaking.
16
In her writing on short films produced by the BMP to encourage the purchase of
war bonds, Kathryn Cramer Brownell argues that the new format of 16mm that flourished during
World War II allowed nontheatrical distributors to expand beyond educational film. In fact, she
writes, loan drives accompanied by war bond films “reaffirmed the importance of using film [to
solicit bond donors], thus providing an opportunity not only for more Hollywood involvement in
the process of selling bonds but also for an enhanced effort to professionalize the 16mm film

15
Haidee Wasson, “Protocols of Portability,” Film History 25, nos. 1-2 (2013): 242.
16
See Gregory Waller, “Projecting the Promise of 16mm, 1935-1945,” in Useful Cinema, ed. Charles R.
Acland and Haidee Wasson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 125-148.
123
industry that had proved itself an essential wartime medium along with 35mm film, radio, and
print.”
17

These technological modernizations in moving image technology were partly the result of
efforts to accommodate the new cinematic exhibition venues that arose during war, namely the
army encampment and the navy ship. In the Canadian context during World War II, Peter Lester
has provided histories of each of these exhibition sites in two articles. According to Lester,
Canada’s Navy, Army Air Force (NAAF) Film Committee expanded from serving only 35 army
camps in 1940 to over 600 camps by 1943, the largest of which seated 5000 spectators.
18
Lester
also provides a history of the Royal Canada Naval Film Society (RCNFS), whose “primary
motivation was to supply as-of-yet unserviced naval vessels with continuous entertainment,” but
which “expanded to include the screening facilities in naval establishments ashore.”
19
These new
militarized exhibition venues spread 16mm across the globe and tested the accessibility on which
it would be marketed to nontheatrical consumers.
The challenges of exhibiting films to soldiers paralleled in some key ways the challenges
of exhibiting films to prisoners. By the 1940s, regular cinematic programs had already become a
regular feature of prisoners’ daily lives. In his study of director Frank Capra’s audiences, Eric
Smoodin devotes an entire chapter to individuals who viewed Capra movies while held in
confinement in the 1940s: American soldiers, German prisoners of war, and San Quentin
prisoners. Divided into two parts, the first half of Smoodin’s chapter studies American soldiers
and German POWs being shown films from Frank Capra’s oeuvre; the second part examines

17
Kathryn Cramer Brownell, “‘It’s Entertainment, and It Will Sell Bonds!’: 16mm Film and the World
War II War Bond Campaign,” The Moving Image 10, no. 2 (2010): 73.
18
Peter Lester, “Sweet Sixteen Goes to War: Hollywood, the NAAF and 16mm Film Exhibition in
Canada during WWII,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 19, no. 1 (2010): 12.
19
Peter Lester, “Four Cents to Sea: 16mm, the Royal Canadian Naval Film Society, and the Mobilization
of Entertainment,” Film History 25, no. 4 (2013): 66.
124
spectatorship in prisons. Smoodin scrutinizes the impact of a 1947 screening of It’s a Wonderful
Life (1946) at San Quentin by analyzing letters written by imprisoned spectators to their warden,
Clinton T. Duffy. Through these letters, Smoodin concludes that the responses might
“demonstrate the possibility of reception practices unique to the confined spectator.”
20
Smoodin
focuses on Duffy’s pedagogical goals in screening films such as It’s a Wonderful Life. Although
not intuitively connected, Smoodin connects the two halves of this chapter around the theme of
spectatorship among “audiences living in various degrees of confinement.”
21
This analysis is
impactful to the study of cinematic exhibition because it sheds light on the relatively unexplored
spectatorship of people with relatively little control over their entertainment options, making
them markedly different from the film consumer often posited by film histories of the spectator.
At prisons across the country, and at San Quentin in particular, imprisoned people viewed
themselves as embodiments of wartime American values, and 16mm films (both Hollywood and
nontheatrical) were a major part of this self-perception. Smoodin restricts his analogy between
soldiers and prisoners as being one of spectatorial confinement. He does not discuss, for
instance, how prisoners bought war bonds, donated blood, or worked more directly
manufacturing industrial war goods. However, San Quentin’s spectators resembled American
soldiers not only because of their confinement, but also because they saw themselves as active
contributors to wartime measures, even requesting parole so that they might serve on the front
lines.

Prisoners’ Wartime Labor

20
Eric Smoodin, Regarding Frank Capra: Audience, Celebrity, and American Film Studies, 1930-1960
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 200.
21
Eric Smoodin, Regarding Frank Capra: Audience, Celebrity, and American Film Studies, 1930-1960
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 160.
125
Prisoners’ labor was integral to wartime labor more generally, and imprisoned people
took to the pages of the Penal Press to say as much to both their imprisoned and unimprisoned
readership. Editor Leslie Homer of the Candle (Wisconsin State Prison), for instance, argued that
the prisoner should be interpreted as a resource like paper or metal, which were being rationed
during the war. In a phenomenological meditation on these rationed objects, Homer mused that
prisoners served a role in society similar to that of taken-for-granted commodities, writing “In
times of peace very little attention is paid to the scrap heaps of various kinds that exist all over
the nation. We don’t worry much about waste paper, or scrap iron; and we haven’t worried too
much about scrap human beings.”
22
War, Homer argued, activated the hidden value of these
objects, marshaling them for new uses in the national imagination. Similarly, prisoners’ social
value transformed too, according to Homer, who wrote, “the days of peace are past and suddenly
every scrap of paper becomes valuable; all the scrap-iron heaps of the nation are salvaged; and
sooner or later attention will have to be given to the human scrap heaps—the prisons of the
nation.”
23

It is an astonishing rhetorical flourish for Homer to call himself and his fellow prisoners
“human scrap heaps” in the eyes of his compatriots. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating exploration
of scarcity and industry during World War II, since it allows Homer to situate imprisoned men
and women as an unappreciated resource that becomes activated (and hopefully valued) during
wartime. Homer’s writing style in this essay resembles that of Roark Tamerlane, whose insistent
refrain to “add stars to [prisoners’] stripes” opened this chapter. The two authors share a
profound sense that prisoners were not only vital to the production of commodities necessary for
war-making, but also that their patriotism and productivity were desperately unrecognized by the

22
Leslie Homer, “Editorial,” Candle (Wisconsin State Prison), February 1942: 18.
23
Leslie Homer, “Editorial,” Candle (Wisconsin State Prison), February 1942: 18. My emphasis.
126
country’s unimprisoned populace. Both also used this rhetoric to insist that prisoners be released
from prison to better serve their country as infantry. On this point, Homer mused, “In times of
war no nation can afford to carry an incubus of any sort; a man or woman in prison is most
certainly an incubus on the economic life of the nation.”
24
In this quote and the broader essay
from which it is taken, Homer arranges a compelling ethical argument, albeit one that remains
relatively sanguine about the power of the nation to extract labor from people who performed
manufacturing work behind bars. This line of thinking is representative of a larger structural
analysis of World War II put forward by imprisoned intellectuals, who articulated a multifaceted
American patriotism in the face and penal repression, and held deep concerns about how
prisoners’ wartime labor would be understood by those living outside of prisons.
The industrial productivity that entered prisons during World War II followed prisons’
relative austerity during the Great Depression. Although Ethan Blue’s writing primarily focuses
on entertainment in prisons during the Depression, he closes his book with an analysis of the
prison during World War II. In this examination, Blue writes, “[a]rmament factories and military
service […] took over the role that prisons played in the 1930s, but generally conferred prestige
rather than insult, and directed violence abroad rather than within.”
25
In addition to the
disciplinary function of factories, however, the prison itself became a factory during World War
II, as imprisoned workers fabricated the supplies that would be used to conduct war in across
broad stretches of space in Europe and the Pacific. As Penal Press authors were quick to remind
their readers, there was a vast litany of these supplies, with an impressive variety of uses in
battle.

24
Leslie Homer, “Editorial: The Need is Now,” Candle (Wisconsin State Prison), March 1942: 18.
25
Ethan Blue, Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday life in Texas and California Prisons (New York:
New York University Press, 2012), 241.
127
One of the primary wartime products produced at San Quentin’s jute mill was burlap,
which could be used to store and transport military goods. In addition to burlap, netting was also
manufactured at San Quentin. A weekly cartoon published in the San Quentin News titled “This
is San Quentin,” illustrated by the paper’s artist “Peek,” highlighted the cargo nets that were
produced at San Quentin to be used for the war. As the illustration conveys, “[t]housands of
these all-purpose cargo slings—strong enough to swing an automobile or equal weight from
dock to ship—have been made by inmates of San Quentin.”
26
Later that month, “Peek’s” cartoon
featured the production of assault boats at San Quentin [Image 3.1]. The illustration assures the
reader that “[b]oats damaged in battle are completely rebuilt by San Quentin inmates, tested in
water, painted and turned back to the military.”
27
Burlap, netting, and assault boats comprised
only a slice of the enormous industrial output of San Quentin during wartime though, since San
Quentin prisoners also produced the mattress covers, cafeteria trays, first aid cases, and sirens
enumerated by Tamerlane at the beginning of this chapter.
Moreover, San Quentin was not alone in producing goods for World War II, and the
manufacturing output there was not unusual for North American prisons during the war. At
nearby Folsom Prison, Warden Clyde I. Plummer recruited prisoners for the “[m]anufacture [and
laundering] of bed linens, repair of shoes, alteration of uniforms, manufacture of cargo slings,
valves, and other defense work” in a $100,000 contract with the Mare Island Navy Yard.
28

Similarly, the United State Penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, earned an “army ordnance

26
“Peek,” “This is San Quentin,” San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison, California),” March 17, 1944:
4.
27
“Peek,” “This is San Quentin,” San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison, California),” March 24, 1944:
4.
28
“Inmates Laundering Linen for Navy Yard,” Folsom Observer (Folsom Prison, California), October 9,
1942: 1.
128
contract for the manufacture of fins for aerial bombs.”
29
Wartime industry was so popular that
wardens even met to attend a conference devoted to penal manufacturing called the Prison
Industries Conference. A summary of this conference was printed in the pages of the Hawkeye
(Iowa State Reformatory), who summarized the conference’s recommendations to include
repairing military shoes and furniture, sewing and laundering military uniforms, and salvaging
metal; surprisingly, the conference attendees (many of whom were prison administrators) also
recommended that prisoners receive payment for this manner of work.
30
It was also during
World War II that California’s notorious use of prisoner labor for firefighting began, when, as
Volker Janssen notes, “wardens … moved prisoners into the depression-era forestry camps of the
Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and California’s State Relief Agency (SRA) to suppress both
natural wildfires and possible arson by Japanese Americans.”
31

In addition to wartime labor production, blood donation was a hugely popular wartime
event in prisons across the United States. The Candle (Wisconsin State Prison), for instance,
reported in 1942 that Wisconsin prisoners donated 250 pints of blood, purchased more than
$6000 worth of war bonds, donated over $500 to the Red Cross and USO, and provided wartime
labor.
32
By November 1944, a journalist at the same institution reported that 2,357 pints of blood
had been donated by that time by prisoners at Wisconsin State Prison, seeing a massive rise from
the report only two years prior.
33

One account of prisoners’ blood donation was included in “Peek’s” “This is San
Quentin” cartoon [Image 3.2]. At the time of its publication in February 1944, the cartoon

29
“Message for Hitler, Japs,” San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison, California), April 9, 1942: 1.
30
Lee Wright, “The Prisoners Go to War,” Hawkeye (Iowa State Reformatory), July 1943: 5-7.
31
Volker Janssen, “When the ‘Jungle’ Met the Forest: Public Work, Civil Defense, and Prison Camps in
Postwar California,” The Journal of American History 96, no. 3 (2009): 703.
32
“Prisoners and the War Effort,” Candle (Wisconsin State Prison), December 1942: 17.
33
Steve Rakauskas, “Record Blood Donate,” Candle (Wisconsin State Prison), November 1944: 9.
129
bragged that over 1600 pints of blood had been donated by San Quentin prisoners, and claimed
that, “Every donors’ aim is to become a member of the ‘gallon club.’”
34
The cartoon features an
imprisoned donor in his standard-issue shirtsleeves, trousers, and shoes, lying in a hospital bed
while a nurse extracts his blood from an injection site below the tourniquet wrapped above his
elbow. To this right of his bed, a second nurse instructs a crowd of imprisoned men in identical
clothing waiting to donate their blood. Panel inserts detail the recuperation process following
prisoners’ blood donation.
While artistic renderings such as this one suggest the importance of the practice for
imprisoned donors, prison administrators also advocated prisoners’ blood donation. Illinois
warden E. Ragen even claimed that his prisoners’ blood was “of a uniformly richer type than that
of the average outside group,” which he believed resulted from “the balanced diet and regular
lives of his charges.”
35
It should be added, moreover, that this biologically troublesome
interpretation of prisoners’ blood—enveloped in thinly veiled eugenicism—occurred at a time in
which prisoners were regularly used for human experimentation.
36
Furthermore, blood was
racially segregated throughout World War II, thereby privileging white blood donors in prison
and allowing them greater access to the national sentiment associated with the act of blood
donation.
Despite their meager means working defense jobs housed in prisons, prisoners were
encouraged to put their earnings toward the purchase U.S. Savings Bonds. The San Quentin
News and the Folsom Observer held announcements encouraging their readers to purchase war

34
“Peek,” “This is San Quentin,” San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison, California), February 25, 1944:
4.
35
“Prisoners’ Blood is Said by Illinois Warden to Be Rich,” San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison,
California), January 14, 1944: 1.
36
See Allen M. Hornblum, Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison (New York:
Routledge, 1998).
130
bonds, as did many of the other papers in the Penal Press circuit. The pages of countless Penal
Press newspapers bombarded readers with reminders to buy war bonds. These advertisements
used inspiring or fanciful graphics. In one of these war bond ads—which is notable for
combining the ethics of war bond purchase with those of wartime rationing—there is a linocut of
a mother pig talking to her piglet child [Image 3.3]. She says, “Your father has just been
rationed!” / “But… War Bonds Are NOT Rationed / Buy More in Fourty-Four.”
37
There is a
playful nature to this ad, of course, but it demonstrates not only prisoners’ participation in
rationing by commenting on the rationing of foodstuffs such as ham for the war effort, but also
their encouragement to spend their limited funds on war bonds. It appears that these ads in Penal
Press papers were successful in encouraging prisoners to purchase war bonds, as over $350,000
of war bonds were purchased at San Quentin alone.
38

War bonds were not the only expense for the patriotic prisoner. The Candle (Wisconsin
State Prison), for instance, after reporting that prison industries paid an average of 15 cents a
day, remarked that Wisconsin prisoners raised $382.77 to be donated to the Red Cross. “The
majority of citizens all too often picture the men in prison as being a heartless bunch of bums,”
writes the Wisconsin State Prison journalist,” but the record of [prisoners’] donations to the Red
Cross paint[s] a different picture.”
39
The Candle also reported that prisoners who donated money
to a bomber would be able to name it. Imprisoned donors first chose the name “Spirit of St.
Germaine,” named after Arthur St. Germaine, a man imprisoned at the Massachusetts State
Prison Colony who died as a result of an experiment conducted by the United States Navy at the
prison. They also suggested the names “Striped Lady” and “Fighting Felon, according to the

37
Presidio (Iowa State Penitentiary), January 1944: 33.
38
“S. Q. War Bonds Total $358,917 since ‘Harbor,” San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison, California),
February 3, 1944: 1.
39
“The Red Cross in Prison,” Candle (Wisconsin State Prison), February 1942: 14.
131
paper.”
40
These names would indicate to observers that the funders of these aircraft were
incarcerated, which was particularly important to a number of Penal Press commenters who
wanted prisoners’ war contributions to be known by those outside prison. It is especially
astounding that prisoners purchased war bonds and donated to war-related charities when one
considers that money was considered contraband in prisons such as San Quentin.
41

The cover art of numerous Penal Press magazines reflected the overall fervor of
American nationalism that was expressed inside the pages of these periodicals. A June 1943
cover of the Hawkeye (Iowa State Reformatory) featured caricatured portraits of Adolf Hitler,
Benito Mussolini, and Hideki Tojo crowded around an eight-ball (suggesting that the fascist
leaders would experience bad luck in their war campaigns). Such caricature was popular in the
visual culture of war in the Penal Press, and images of these leaders could be found throughout
the prison paper circuit, as could stereotyped drawings of citizens of these countries (particularly
Japan). The March 1943 cover of the Candle (Wisconsin State Prison) showed Hitler cowering
under an intimidating eagle decorated in the design of the American flag, his hands clasped in
prayer while an Allied bomber plane flies across the sky. Later that year, the Candle’s September
1943 cover featured bombs cascading onto a map of Nazi-occupied Europe [Image 3.4].
Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a January 1943 cover of San Quentin’s newspaper
featured a racist caricature of a Japanese soldier disemboweled from behind by a bayonetted
rifle, while the New Year’s infant tears his uniform with a sickle.
42
Because the bayonet impales
the Japanese soldier from behind and is thrust upward, the image illustrates a troublingly sexual
encounter between the two nations by evoking anal rape. Together, this archive of Penal Press

40
“Prisoners and Bonds,” Candle (Wisconsin State Prison), December 1943: 26.
41
Clinton T. Duffy, “The Warden’s Column: Facts! Not Rumors” San Quentin News (San Quentin
Prison, California), October 23, 1941: 1.
42
Cover of the San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison, California), January 1, 1943.
132
covers suggests that American prisons’ wartime visual cultures greatly resembled those that
flourished outside prisons. In other words, the editors of these papers viewed themselves as
equally patriotic as their unimprisoned counterparts, and adopted artistic techniques that would
express their American nationalism.
One of the questions that gripped prisoners in the Penal Press was whether they should be
able to serve in the military. Many penned passionate arguments in the affirmative, and several
argued that prisoners should be released on parole to serve in the military. One captive at the
Iowa State Reformatory recounted that as he learned that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was
asking Congress to declare war, he “wanted to scream and rave for release from [the
reformatory] so that [he] could be doing [his] part for the war effort.”
43
Using a carceral
metaphor to envision national unity during the war, the Iowa prisoner advised, “For the duration
of this war, let’s not be cops and robbers with all its attendant hatreds and bickerings. Let’s all be
Americans.”
44
Following Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, San Quentin’s newspaper published
a front-page article announcing, “The San Quentin News proposes that battalions of mobile
workers be formed by voluntary enlistments from the ranks of eligible prison inmates […] whose
crimes are minor, or those who have served over a certain period of time.”
45

The question of releasing prisoners for war service began even before the United States
entered the war. In November 1941, only a month before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,
The Candle (Wisconsin State Prison) reported on the 71st Congress of the American Prison
Association. Lamenting that they were unable to send imprisoned reporters to cover the

43
“War and Patience,” Hawkeye (Iowa State Reformatory), November-December 1941: 20.
44
“War and Patience,” Hawkeye (Iowa State Reformatory), November-December 1941: 21. Emphasis in
the original.
45
“Labor Battalions of Prison Inmates Proposed by News,” San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison,
California), December 18, 1941: 1.
133
congress, staff writer Ian Mactavish wrote his summary in the prison periodical using the words
of Wisconsin State Prison’s Warden John C. Burke. The theme of the 1941 Congress was
“Crime Control for National Security and Defense,” although the warden told Mactavish that this
was not widely discussed at the meeting. In response to these proceedings, Mactavish responded:
[T]hose of us who remember back to World War I, remember that in the main, prisons
moved along but little disturbed or changed by world events. We feel fairly certain that
unless present world conditions hold far greater changes for this country than are now
apparent, the prisons of the country will roll along as though there were no war. It takes
more than a mere world war to change prisons; it takes that most powerful of all forces,
and lots of it, to change prisons, it takes Time.
46

Mactavish and other prison journalists, however, were not the only ones considering prisoners’
release to serve as soldiers. The Folsom Observer, for instance, reported that the Selective
Service System was considering freeing 25% of the American prison population to be drafted
into military service.
47
The famous reform warden of Sing Sing Prison, Lewis E. Lawes, even
said glibly, “You couldn’t very well put their corpses back in prison.”
48
This macabre quote
shows how the line between prisoner and soldier was not too great of a mental leap during World
War II, and that even the most celebrated prison reformists viewed the war as a method of
decarceration.

Film and World War II in Prisons
Although prisoners watched films beginning in the early twentieth century, by the
midcentury there had been profound changes in programming. Hollywood movies were a
popular staple within the midcentury prison, and there was no discernible censorship in any

46
Ian Mactavish, “The American Prison Association,” Candle (Wisconsin State Prison), November 1941:
16.
47
“Plan to Draft Prisoners is Made Public,” Folsom Observer (Folsom Prison, California), October 2,
1942: 1.
48
Lewis E. Lawes, quoted in “Lawes on Prison Patriotism,” Folsom Observer (Folsom Prison,
California), January 29, 1943: 2.
134
individual picture, as there had been in the era of early prisons, although there was certainly
censorship in the selection of films for exhibition in prisons.
49
Surprisingly, perhaps, many of the
films screened in prisons contained narratives that glorified criminalized behaviors, such as the
gangster film. Less surprisingly, narratives about redemption from criminal lifestyles were also
popular fare in prisons. Nonetheless, these popular narrative themes—along with musicals,
westerns, and comedies—competed with war films to catch spectators’ attention on the prison
screen.
Even though imprisoned men and women across North America watched movies during
wartime, San Quentin is an instructive case study in prisoner viewership. San Quentin held film
screenings for prisoners as early as the 1920s, often through friendships between San Quentin
wardens and motion picture celebrities. Because San Quentin was located in California, it held a
physical and symbolic proximity to Hollywood that endowed the institution with a rich history of
participation within the state’s film industry. This allowed film actors, directors, and producers to
visit the prison, meet with its wardens, and create connections with their incarcerated fans.
In one instance of exchange between San Quentin prisoners and Hollywood celebrities
from 1941, the San Quentin paper offered Humphrey Bogart an advertising job, allegedly to
rehabilitate his reputation as a film villain. “The job is yours,” claimed the paper in jest, “if you
can satisfy us as to your integrity and ability.”
50
Bogart soon replied to light-heartedly accept the
position, writing, “I don’t know what kind of advertising manager I’ll make. My promotional
experience has been limited to conning suckers.”
51
In addition to Bogart, San Quentin prisoners

49
See Alison Griffiths, Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
50
“News Offers to Aid Reformation of Screen Villain,” San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison,
California), October 30, 1941: 1.
51
“Humphrey Bogart Joins News Staff,” San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison, California), November
13, 1941: 1-2.
135
also had the opportunity to interact with actress Mae West. A front-page letter from West was
addressed to San Quentin prisoners in response to a valentine she received from men at the
prison:
To The Men of San Quentin: I want to thank you for your beautiful Valentine. It was a
lovely thought. And the Valentine, itself, was so artistically lettered and beautifully
colored. I imagine you made it there yourselves, as I don’t think you could get out to get
one. So, because it is your work I appreciate it all the more.
52

She teases the San Quentin men by flirtatiously offering to visit them, humorously writing that
she is known for cheering up many of her male friends, and signed off by concluding, “Sin-
sationally yours, Mae West.”
Despite San Quentin having such deep ties with Hollywood, World War II was an
especially important time for cinematic entertainment. The San Quentin News offered regular
announcements about Hollywood movies, as did many other Penal Press papers at institutions
across the Midwest and South, but it also uniquely documented the “adult education” curriculum,
which included many of the films produced by the United States military. In an analysis of the
movies shown at San Quentin between January and December 1942 (as announced in the pages
of the prison newspaper), I have found titles such as London Can Take It! (Humphrey Jennings
and Harry Watt, 1940), Meet the Fleet (B. Reeves Eason, 1940), Bataan (Tay Garnett, 1943),
and animated shorts such as Donald Gets Drafted (Jack King, 1942), in which Donald Duck
comically joins the United States Army.
53
The prison also exhibited newsreels from Telenews
along with animated shorts before the feature-length film, in an exhibition order that resembled a
theatrical set-up. Department of War films played as part of the prison’s “adult education”

52
Mae West, “‘Takes TIME to Learn About San Quentin!!’” San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison,
California), March 5, 1941: 1.
53
San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison, California) movie announcements between January 1942 and
December 1942.
136
program, which included 16mm educational films for training in skills, trades, and industries, but
also more generally instructed viewers in topics ranging from popular science to human
geography.
The way that prisoners viewed wartime films was just as important as the films they
watched. Prison administrators surveilled the behavior of imprisoned people in their everyday
lives to evaluated whether they were worthy of watching movies, and scrutinized their behavior
during movies to confirm if they were seeing them “correctly.” In the San Quentin News,
Warden Duffy’s front-page column included regular messages to prisoners regarding their
behavior while viewing films. These notes were deeply paternalistic in their attempt to discipline
prisoners’ film spectatorship. They included periodic threats to halt film screenings if spectators
could not be cleaner during the movies. When they behaved according to his standard, Duffy
condescendingly informed them, “I am really proud of you, for you have shown that you
appreciate what the administration does to make your life in here a little more comfortable.”
54

Duffy even implemented a process by which men would view movies based on the color of a
“privilege card” that they received.
55

Iowa State Reformatory’s monthly magazine the Hawkeye publicized the numerous war-
themed movies showing at their institution, as well. Between October 1943 and October 1945, it
announced the screening of mainstream war films such as Berlin Correspondent (Eugene Forde,
1942), Commandos Strike at Dawn (John Farrow, 1942), China Girl (Henry Hathaway, 1942),
Immortal Sergeant (John M. Stahl, 1943), Destroyer (William A. Seiter, 1943), Crash Dive
(Archie Mayo, 1943), Guadalcanal Diary (Lewis Seiler, 1943), The Sullivans (Lloyd Bacon,

54
Clinton T. Duffy, “The Warden’s Column: Facts! Not Rumors” San Quentin News (San Quentin
Prison, California), November 20, 1941: 1.
55
“New System for Showing Movies Will Be Used,” San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison, California),
December 3, 1942: 1.
137
1944), The Purple Heart (Lewis Milestone, 1944), Secret Command (A. Edward Sutherland,
1944), and The Eve of St. Mark (John M. Stahl, 1944).
56
The documentary Desert Victory (Roy
Boulting and David MacDonald, 1943) was also shown at the reformatory, which depicted
British and American battles in North Africa. The reformatory’s prisoners even watched war
comedies such as Mr. Winkle Goes to War (Alfred E. Green, 1944), and spectated war-themed
entertainment such as Four Jills in a Jeep (William A. Seiter, 1944), which staged the live
performances of women for soldiers’ entertainment abroad.
Closer to San Quentin, at California’s Folsom Prison, prisoners watched The Fleet’s In
(Victor Schertzinger, 1942), Ship Ahoy (Edward Buzzell, 1942), and the warden announced that
he was trying to secure the “Navy film” Wake Island (John Farrow, 1942).
57
It is notable that
Folsom’s war-themed film fare emphasized naval battles and the lives of American sailors at sea.
Compared to the films shown in Iowa, for example, the films shown at Folsom highlighted the
Navy’s role in World War II. This is noteworthy because Folsom Prison held a lucrative labor
contract with the Navy. Also at Folsom Prison, “official War Department Films were shown in
the educational building … by 1
st
Lieutenant Joseph C. Dixon of the Santa Ana Air Base.”
58

Based on the announcements for films in papers from San Quentin, Folsom, and
Midwestern prisons, we can see that movies produced for American soldiers also circulated in
domestic carceral spaces. Films made to motivate viewers to enlist or buy war bonds entered into
prisons across the United States, as well. There is a puzzle to these exhibition choices, since
prisoners were limited in their ability to participate in the patriotic performances prescribed by

56
Hawkeye (Iowa State Reformatory) movie announcements between October 1943 and 1945.
57
The Folsom Observer (Folsom Prison, California), movie announcements between September and
December 1942.
58
“War Training Films Shown Students Here,” The Folsom Observer (Folsom Prison, California),
December 7, 1942, p. 3
138
these films (they could not, for instance, enlist in the military if they were not paroled). The
remainder of this chapter asks why such films would be exhibited in prisons, when imprisoned
people were not the audiences for whom they were filmed. In what follows, I show that these
films assisted in inspiring patriotism among a group of people for whom citizenship had been
suspended, which in turn facilitated prisoners’ labor toward the war effort.

Cinema’s Role in Facilitating Wartime Labor in Prisons
Why would an OWI film encouraging African American enlistment be shown at San
Quentin, considering that the majority of the film’s imprisoned viewers would not be able to
enlist? World War II movies fit into a complex circuit of wartime cultural products intended to
initiate Americans into a national identity that would sacrifice personal enrichment for the
collective victory of the nation. In prisons, as elsewhere, these films inspired viewers to ration,
buy bonds, and serve as soldiers. Despite the widespread prominence of this function of wartime
entertainment, however, the contradictions of citizenship and belonging possessed a unique
valence for those women and men in prison, since prisoners held a tenuous contract with the
remainder of society. Films, of course, were not solely responsible for the ferocious nationalism
demonstrated by the editors and contributors to Penal Press papers. Moreover, Hollywood war
films and war bond 16mm’s were shown in theatrical and nontheatrical venues across North
America, so there was nothing out of the ordinary about film programming in prisons.
Nonetheless, prisons were hugely important in wartime contributions, and war film exhibition
exploded alongside that phenomenon. In short, film and wartime labor were coincident in
prisons, and in at least some moments of their coincidence, constitutive of one another.
139
American nationalism functioned in prisons in a manner similar to how Miranda Joseph
describes the rhetoric surrounding community in Against the Romance of Community. Drawing
from the definition of supplementarity provided by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Miranda
Joseph argues that “community is often presented as a complement to capitalism, balancing and
humanizing it, even, in fact, enabling it.”
59
For Joseph, there is a “supplementarity of community
with capital,” in which the social and communal bonding practices that are routinely posited as
separate from economic activity are actually constituted from within capitalist production.
60
In
the case of wartime nationalism, imprisoned journalists frequently rehearsed the belief that the
national community and its attendant social practices were under threat from fascism. What
became obscured in this rhetoric was the extent to which discourses of a national community
were used to recruit prisoners into exploitative regimes of labor, particularly in unpaid industrial
manufacturing. Moreover, these discourses disguised the ambivalent position that prisoners held
within this made-up national community, particularly the black, poor, and foreign-born prisoners
who were incarcerated at San Quentin and other institutions across the country.
Despite the incredible frenzy of war support in prisons, there was nothing automatic
about prisoners supporting the war. An editorial in the Hawkeye (Iowa State Reformatory) in
March 1942 lambasted prisoners who only gave a performance of patriotism so they could be
released on parole, but not serve in the military. Others, the editorial remarked, horrified, wanted
Hitler to win because they resented the way their country has treated them, and had “blind[ed]
their eyes to the true splendor of this nation in its entirety.”
61
Because prisoners were believed to

59
Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2002), 1.
60
See Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2002), especially Chapter 1, “The Supplementarity of Community with Capital.”
61
“How About Facing the Facts?” Hawkeye (Iowa State Reformatory), March 1942: 1.
140
be prone to such beliefs in protest of their confinement, and because their patriotism could not be
taken for granted, the propagandistic nature of war film was used by prison administrations to
enable feelings of American patriotism.
One of the films that showed at San Quentin in June 1944 was the popular propaganda
piece The Negro Soldier (Stuart Heisler, 1944). Created by the United States Department of War
and produced by director Frank Capra, The Negro Soldier was an attempt to encourage black
men and women to enlist in the United States military. The film used the black church as a
narrative framing device to create a record of black contributions to United States war and
military history. Throughout the film, the minister of a black church (Carlton Moss) recites this
history of African Americans’ contributions to war, beginning with the first casualty of the
Revolutionary War, Crispus Attucks. Although a number of its scenes were reenactments of
historical events, the opening title card states that other footage originated in “original War
Department films, newsreels, United Nations sources and captured enemy material,” which
included authentic scenes from battle.
62

In one scene, there are slow fades from the American flag to the United States
Constitution to the Nazi flag to the cover of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925), which the
minister holds in his hands as he describes its horrors to his congregation. The minister reads
anti-black passages from Mein Kampf to his congregation as a way to make his congregation
(and the film’s audience) understand that urgency of World War II in the lives of African
Americans. Although the film creates a passionate indictment of the Nazi regime for its
foundational racism, the film leaves unmentioned that, at the time, the United States military was

62
Opening title card, The Negro Soldier, dir. Stuart Heisler, 1944.
141
itself a racially segregated institution.
63
Musically, The Negro Soldier combined a variety of
sounds meant to inspire both religious and nationalist sentiments. It ends with a church choir
singing a medley that includes “Onward Christian Soldier,” “Joshua Fought the Battle of
Jericho,” and “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”
Thomas Cripps and David Culbert have argued that The Negro Soldier is “an example of
social symbiosis,” insisting that its cultural resonance “emerged from a coalition of four wary
interest groups which came together in antagonistic cooperation.”
64
These groups were a United
States Army that was desperate for new recruits, African Americans demanding dignity and
political power in the face Jim Crow segregation, social scientists who viewed black war
participation as an avenue toward racial reconciliation, and Hollywood filmmakers who could
profit from the vigorous exchange between film studios and the United State military. Together,
these conflicting forces operated together to create a propaganda film that would circulate so
widely that it would even become exhibited to prisoners who could not choose to enlist.
To better understand why such a film, exhibited to prisoners with its impossible invitation
to enlist in the military, it is important to understand how the racial politics of World War II—
made manifest in films such as The Negro Soldier—were studied and critiqued in North
American prisons. At Indiana State Farm, for instance, a prisoner named Robert Bostic wrote an
article titled “The Negro Speaks,” in which he indicted the United States for its anti-black
sentiments by contrasting it with fascist Germany. Making a tacit charge against the segregated
of the United States armed forces, Bostic wrote, “we in America are trying to uphold democracy
yet practice hate of race, creed and color. We are simply practicing intolerance, which is a Nazi

63
See Richard Dalfiume, Fighting on Two Fronts: Desegregation of the Armed Forces, 1939-1953
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1969).
64
Thomas Cripps and David Culbert, “The Negro Soldier: Film Propaganda in Black and White,”
American Quarterly 31, no. 5 (1979): 617.
142
principle, within our own ranks.”
65
Taken as a counterpoint to the prevailing wartime rhetoric
broadcast through wartime cinema and radio, Bostic’s reproach may be interpreted as critiquing
they very principles on which The Negro Soldier based its claim for black participation in war.
66

The implications for showing The Negro Soldier at San Quentin are compelling, because
although some of the imprisoned viewers of the propaganda film at San Quentin would have
been African American, there would also have been Mexican, white, and foreign-born spectators,
as well. Nonetheless, as at many prisons in the midcentury, white supremacist penal structures
gave white prisoners greater control over the prison press and racially segregated prison
entertainment systems. This serves as a reminder that even though a racially diverse audience
may have viewed the recruitment film, it played within a context of penal surveillance rooted in
the captivity and destabilization of black communities.

Conclusion

Imprisoned World War II-era spectators consumed a variety of wartime entertainments
that included cinema, radio, and live performance. The cinematic repertoire at each institution
included Hollywood movies with war themes and nonfiction 16mms produced by the OWI for
the purpose of instructing viewers how to best become part of the United States through a
patriotism based on morality, duty, and sacrifice. However, the incarcerated status of these
viewers exposed the lie dormant in these patriotic images, as did the poverty and racial identities
of many of these spectators. The exhibition of nontheatrical wartime propaganda pictures in
prisons tells us much about the investments of administrations to selectively incorporate
imprisoned people into the fabric of wartime rituals. However, prisoners’ participation in these

65
Robert Bostic, “A Negro Speaks,” Hill Top-ic, May 1942: 11.
66
See also, Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, “Blacks, Loyalty, and Motion-Picture
Propaganda in World War II,” Journal of American History 73, no. 2 (1986): 383-406.
143
rituals did not result in a fundamental, long-lasting transformation of the prison system through
decarceration.
Nontheatrical wartime films in prisons most directly played the role of drumming up
support for wartime labor in prisons, and imprisoned people across the country labored in a
variety of ways from construction and assembly projects, to laundering, to blood donation, to the
purchasing of war bonds. In each of these forms of labor, it was necessary for prison
administrations to make imprisoned workers feel as if they were part of the national citizenry,
and not outside of the civil society for whom they were working. As we will see in the next
chapter, film reforms in prisons continued in the postwar era for the similar purpose of
facilitating the labor capacities of carceral subjects. In wartime, this connection between
nontheatrical war films and labor was touted as reform, and it continued to be touted as such in
the postwar era, as well.
144

Image 3.1. “Peek,” “This is San Quentin,” San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison, California),”
March 24, 1944: 4.

145

Image 3.2. “Peek,” “This is San Quentin,” San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison, California),
February 25, 1944: 4.

146

Image 3.3. Presidio (Iowa State Penitentiary), January 1944: 33.

147

Image 3.4. Wisconsin State Prison’s the Candle cover for its September 1943 issue.

148
Chapter 4
“All Those Little Spools and Lights”: Labor and the Moving Image at Angola Prison

During an outdoor movie screening at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in 1953, Wesley
Alton Allgood was shot three times and killed while allegedly trying to escape. The prison’s
newspaper the Angolite reported that Allgood was shot after climbing a fence “only 150 feet
from where the nearest spectators were watching the movie,” but the announcement shed doubt
on whether he was actually escaping, since a number of audience members reported that they
thought Allgood “had gone after the laundry which was hanging on the line near where he was
killed.”
1
Although the guard—a prisoner himself—claimed to have instructed Allgood to stop to
moving, the spectators, “who quickly scattered at the sound of the shots, said they heard no call
to halt on the part of the guard, but admitted they might not have been able to hear because of the
noise of the screen dialogue.”
2
The shooting occurred at Angola’s all-white Camp E, which held
over 300 imprisoned men. Two years earlier, a group of Camp E prisoners known as the “Heel
String Gang” had sliced open their Achilles tendons with razor blades to protest austere working
conditions and severe punishments. The incident provoked statewide alarm and bad press in the
national news, and contributed to the hiring of administrators who advocated penal reforms, one
of which was the establishment of a regular film program.
Prisoners at the penitentiary (colloquially known as Angola Prison) were shown
Hollywood movies twice a week, and 16 mm film prints were shared across the penitentiary’s
eight labor camps. Although the Angolite did not report the film playing at the time of Allgood’s
death, an earlier issue of the paper announced that the Bing Crosby musical If I Had My Way
(David Butler, 1940) and the prison escape drama Brute Force (Jules Dassin, 1947) were

1
“Trusty Slain by Guard Here,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), June 6, 1953: 1.
2
“Trusty Slain by Guard Here,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), June 6, 1953: 2.
149
scheduled to be shown at the prison the week of his fatal shooting. This movie announcement
was accompanied by the newspaper’s standard notice that the program was “subject to a last-
minute change and/or cancellation,” but it is most likely that one of these two films was playing
during Allgood’s purported escape attempt.
3
Of these, the showing of Brute Force at the time of
Allgood’s death would be a particularly chilling coincidence, since it depicts a massive prison
rebellion that forms in response to the harsh conditions of imprisonment at the fictional Westgate
Penitentiary. In the film, Burt Lancaster plays Joe Collins, who organizes his fellow prisoners to
stage an uprising and failed escape in opposition to the prison’s corrupt and sadistic Captain
Munsey (Hume Cronyn). Because the 1950s were a decade in which Angola was attempting to
rehabilitate its public image through a series of institutional reforms, it is extraordinary that
Brute Force was scheduled to screen at the penitentiary the same week that a real-life shooting
took place there.
This chapter evaluates how the implementation and improvement of media technologies
at Angola Prison overlapped with the penitentiary’s structures of forced labor, institutional
violence, and uneven reform. Through an analysis of the prison newspaper the Angolite in its
first years of publication, I contend that imprisoned audiences’ spectatorship was mobilized in
the service of reform rhetoric that obfuscated the ongoing challenges of prisoners’ lives and
labors. In this moment of reform, the healthy operation of the penitentiary’s entertainment
economy was held up as a sign of goodwill between Louisiana’s elected officials, prison
administrators, and imprisoned people. Meanwhile, institutional narratives of benevolence and
reciprocity between imprisoned people and prison administrators concealed Angola’s ongoing
regimes of violence and labor exploitation. Because film exhibition and the introduction of

3
“At Angola Theaters,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), May 23, 1953: 5.
150
televisions were among the reforms promoted most vocally by Angola’s prison administration,
studying imprisoned peoples’ engagement with media gives us a firmer understanding of both
the promises and failures of prison reform. Furthermore, the prison administration’s investment
in film and television reveals the endurance of institutional violence that erupted before, during,
and after reforms became commonplace at Angola and prisons elsewhere.
To contextualize Angola’s labor relations during its 1950s reform period, this chapter
begins with a history of the penitentiary that underscores its place in a modernizing Southern
economy following the Civil War. I highlight the racial and gendered arrangements of prison
labor to show that the penitentiary produced conceptions of race and gender difference that
became embedded in its midcentury spectatorship cultures. This history of prison labor is
followed by an examination of film spectatorship documented in the Angolite, which promoted
film presentation as a substantive reform that verified how new prison administrators planned to
ameliorate prison conditions. I track key improvements in the presentation of moving images at
Angola, one of which was the training of imprisoned film projectionists, including the instruction
of imprisoned women in this vocation. I also highlight the technological advances in moving
image exhibition that impacted Angola’s viewers, including the introduction of televisions to the
penitentiary. These innovations are analyzed within the context of prisoners’ labor, concluding
with my assertion that prisoners’ spectatorship became a facet of regimenting their daily lives in
the service of more productive labor. I insist that renovations in the presentation of prison
entertainment accompanied regimes of abuse that defied reform efforts.

Histories of Labor and Violence

Intricate matrices of labor and violence have been scattered perilously across Angola’s
grounds from its inception. Since they were first leased by the state to work on what are now the
151
grounds of the Louisiana State Penitentiary in 1869, the state’s incarcerated men and women
have performed a wide range of agricultural and manufacturing work. Imprisoned laborers in the
1950s tended the penitentiary’s thousands of acres of farmland, harvesting cotton, sugarcane, and
other crops, and worked in an on-site cannery, sugar mill, and license plate factory. Angola’s
imprisoned work force also performed tasks necessary for the maintenance of the prison’s daily
operation, including cooking, sewing, laundering, and other forms of domestic work for prison
staff and their families.
Prior to 1865, the land that would become Angola Prison was cultivated by enslaved
laborers on a series of plantations. These plantations would continue to be farmed by an
imprisoned black work force following slavery’s abolition. Convict leasing began in Louisiana in
1844, predating the emancipation of slavery, and continued until it was abolished in 1901, with
only brief periods of state control during that time.
4
In 1869, prisoners were leased by the state to
Confederate Major Samuel Lawrence James through lucrative post-emancipation convict leasing
contracts until 1901, when the state retook control of the prisoners’ labor.
5
Mark T. Carleton
explains how James used his wealth to “purchase Angola, an extensive cotton plantation in West
Feliciana Parish, and to purchase [Louisiana’s] convict lease” from its original owners.
6
It was a

4
Mark T. Carleton, Politics and Punishment: The History of the Louisiana State Penal System (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), 7.
5
For more on Southern systems of forced prison labor, see Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another
Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor
Books, 2009); Talitha L. LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New
South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free
Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (New York: Verso, 1996); Matthew J.
Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-1928 (Columbia:
University of South Carolina, 1996); and David M. Oshinsky, “Worse than Slavery”: Parchman Farm
and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1997).
6
Mark T. Carleton, Politics and Punishment: The History of the Louisiana State Penal System (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), 20.
152
system that earned James massive profits from the labor of leased prisoners and saved the state
from the financial upkeep of a penitentiary. Through duplicitous political maneuvering, James
was able to renew this contract despite substantial violations of its terms, and held it until his
death in 1894.
Under the James regime, imprisoned workers built levees and performed grueling
agricultural labor at Angola. Carleton documents the extreme brutalities that were unleashed on
imprisoned black workers within Louisiana’s convict leasing regime, and shows the incredibly
high mortality rates of leased prisoners that averaged “about a hundred [deaths] annually
between 1883 and 1901.”
7
This high mortality was the result not only of harsh labor, but also
improper medical care, inadequate nutrition, and severe corporal punishment. Although the
renewal of James’s lease depended on “[a] clause … [that] specifically forbade the lessee to
engage convicts in farm or plantation work,” James successfully fought these terms, revealing
how Louisiana’s convict lease extended anti-black arrangements of forced labor and punishment
on Southern plantations following the abolition of chattel slavery in 1865.
8
Instead, the economic
and cultural values of the South pivoted on the legal disenfranchisement of black communities
through processes of criminalization that facilitated their capture in the Southern prison, which in
turn depended on the convict lease and other mechanisms of coerced labor.
Following Reconstruction, Southern states passed “black codes” that criminalized a litany
of behaviors targeting black communities, confirming post-bellum beliefs that black men and
women were more likely to commit crimes. Social and legal logics of black criminality were
partly facilitated through the phrasing of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,

7
Mark T. Carleton, Politics and Punishment: The History of the Louisiana State Penal System (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), 40n22.
8
Mark T. Carleton, Politics and Punishment: The History of the Louisiana State Penal System (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), 63.
153
which abolished slavery while reinscribing its relations of servitude by declaring that its practice
was abolished “except as a punishment for crime” in what Colin Dayan has called an “escape
clause, a corrective loophole that left a form of slavery intact,” effectively transferring the
privatized economy of chattel slavery into a practice of state ownership over imprisoned people
and their labor.
9
The intensive policing practices that attended this new legal apparatus served to
limit black mobility and contain black labor organizing. In Louisiana, as in other states, formerly
enslaved people were targeted by Southern police forces, both reflecting and reinforcing a
burgeoning sociological belief that blackness was an indicator of criminality, the purpose and
outcome of which was a widespread disruption of black civic participation. Anti-black labor
conditions, including convict leasing, were consequences of this belief that black communities
were more likely to engage in violent and criminal behaviors. As Angela Y. Davis has written,
the shifts of the Reconstruction period were interpreted by many who experienced them as a
transition “from the prison of slavery to the slavery of prison.”
10

Although often excluded from dominant narratives that recount the penitentiary’s history,
the violence of the institution was deeply gendered. This gendered violence was intimately
linked to the Louisiana legal system’s processes of racialization, since many of the women most
vulnerable to attack were black. Imprisoned women regularly worked in domestic roles for
guards and administrators, and were frequently subjected to whipping. In the leasing era, sexual
violence was a routine method for terrorizing imprisoned women and suppressing their collective
resistance to captivity. Anne M. Butler reveals that under the James regime of leased prison

9
Colin Dayan, The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2011), 62.
10
Angela Y. Davis, “From the Prison of Slavery to the Slavery of Prison: Frederick Douglass and the
Convict Lease System,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing, 1998), 74-95.
154
labor, imprisoned black women provided domestic labor, worked in Angola’s fields, and were
“sent … into the camp areas as ‘rewards’” for male prisoners.
11
Like whipping and other forms
or corporal punishment, sexual violence was a form of terror that bridged antebellum chattel
slavery and post-slavery convict leasing regimes; sexual violence committed against black
women, endemic to the culture of the antebellum Southern plantation aristocracy, persisted in the
post-emancipation era through convict leasing. As Sarah Haley has shown, Southern designs for
imprisoning women “produced and reinforced racialized constructions of gender and gendered
divisions of labor” for a modernizing Southern economy.
12

The False Promise of Reform
Although Louisiana’s convict leasing period was characterized by corporal punishment,
racial and gendered terror, and horrific labor conditions, violence continued at Angola Prison
into the 1900s. In 1901, the state retook control over managing its prisoners and ended the era of
convict leasing. This shift, however, did not eliminate unequal relations between imprisoned
workers and their overseers. Accounts of whipping prisoners continued regularly throughout the
early 1900s, and a torture device called the “sweat box” became a notorious method for
punishing prisoners. A small, claustrophobic unit left in the sun on hot days, the sweat box
created extreme states of physical and mental torture for the punished prisoner. Angola also held

11
Anne M. Butler, Gendered Justice in the American West: Women Prisoners in Men’s Penitentiaries
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 183. Butler cites an unpublished report from an assistant
warden to Warden Frank Blackburn in 1985 (see 76n55 and 196n49).
12
Sarah Haley, “‘Like I Was a Man’: Chain Gangs, Gender, and the Domestic Carceral Sphere in Jim
Crow Georgia,” Signs 39, no. 1 (2013): 53. For more on the intersections of blackness, gender, and labor
in the histories of carceral violence outside of the U.S. South, see Hazel V. Carby, “Policing the Black
Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (1992): 738-755; Kali N. Gross, Colored
Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910 (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2006); and Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk with You like a Woman: African American
Women, Justice, Reform in New York, 1890-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
155
prisoners in punitive cells called the Red Hats, which isolated prisoners from social interaction
and became a major pressure point in campaigns to reform the prison. Another widely critiqued
practice at Angola was the use of so-called “convict guards” to overlook the penitentiary’s
fieldwork. These guards were armed prisoners tasked in the management and discipline of other
imprisoned workers, creating a hierarchized social order and saving the state the cost of hiring
guards.
Reform efforts were initiated in 1951 in response to the protests of the Heel String Gang,
a group of Camp E prisoners held in the Red Hats disciplinary unit who self-mutilated by
severing their Achilles tendons. An investigation into the penitentiary ensued in the wake of this
coordinated act of self-harm and determined that the appalling conditions of the penitentiary
were its direct cause.
13
Governor Earl Long was accused of neglect for his mismanagement of
the penitentiary, as was his pick for the penitentiary’s warden, Rudolf Easterly. In 1952,
Collier’s magazine published a piece titled “America’s Worst Prison,” which became pivotal in
garnering public outcry against the penitentiary’s abuses, causing embarrassment for Governor
Long’s administration.
14
The controversies surrounding the penitentiary were a source of debate
in Louisiana’s 1952 gubernatorial election, which was ultimately won by Robert Kennon over
Carlos Spaht, the latter of whom was supported by Governor Long.
In 1953, Maurice Sigler was instated as the warden and tasked with placating the public
anxieties and negative press that surrounded the penitentiary following Camp E’s Heel String
scandal. For the new warden, introducing a regular entertainment program to the penitentiary
was a significant component of the reform effort. An interview in the Angolite quoted Sigler on

13
See Anne Butler and C. Murray Henderson, Angola: Louisiana State Penitentiary, a Half-Century of
Rage and Reform (Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1990).
14
Edward W. Stagg and John Lear, “America’s Worst Prison,” Collier’s, November 22, 1952: 13-16.
156
the subjects of prisoner rehabilitation, job training, and recreation, and he stated that Angola’s
new administration “believe[d] in clean wholesome amusement—in ballgames and movie
shows” as part of its reform agenda.
15
In addition to “wholesome amusement,” Sigler proposed
racially desegregating the prison, abolishing corporal punishment, and ending the use of armed
prisoners as guards.
16
In Sigler’s vision for the massive changes that needed to be enacted at
Angola, film and other entertainments were not ancillary to reform more generally, but were
instead a central feature in improving the lives of the men and women imprisoned at Angola.
During his tenure as warden, Sigler instituted a variety of significant changes in the
operation of the penitentiary. One of the early changes of Sigler’s wardenship was replacing the
prisons’ striped uniforms (called “big stripes”) with denim ones. One imprisoned commentator,
who contended that striped uniforms were “a mark of caste [and] humiliation,” celebrated
Sigler’s decision to abolish them, calling it the “the biggest change possible.”
17
In June 1953,
Sigler permitted elections for representatives to serve on “inmate councils” at the penitentiary’s
individual labor camps. The penitentiary’s classification officer Colon P. Coaker explained that
these councils would allow members of these camps to bring grievances to the administration,
and would also “[enable] the presentation of educational programs in the interest of inmate
rehabilitation.”
18
As discussed further below, improvements in film exhibition were also
considered among the reforms benefitting prisoners under the Sigler administration, and new
cultures of spectatorship emerged at the penitentiary.

15
“Warden Lists LSP’s Aims,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), May 30, 1953: 5.
16
See Sharon Johnson Rion, Beyond His Time: The Maurice Sigler Story (Lanham, MD: American
Correctional Association, 2001).
17
“Those %&**¢! Big Stripes Abolished!” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), February 1953: 3.
18
Colon P. Coaker, “What’s an Inmate Council,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), June 13, 1953:
7.
157
Despite these changes, however, many of the most damning features of the penitentiary
remained intact, and Sigler faced formidable challenges to his vision for the penitentiary,
particularly from the dynastic white families of guards who managed the prison. According to
his biographer, Sigler “set out to establish a professional prison operation, impose order, and
train staff, which required that they dismantle the hierarchy of free families that had controlled
the prison for generations by passing jobs to their children.”
19
Sigler’s advocacy for change was
met with resistance that prevented the discontinuation of convict guards and the racial
desegregation of a prison cafeteria. Despite his personal disagreement with the death penalty, the
warden also oversaw the state’s executions at Angola.
20
The Red Hats isolation cells persisted at
Angola, and even the prison’s head film projectionist C. F. “Catfoot” Hunt was placed in
isolation for missing fieldwork.
21
Another significant aspect of the prison that stayed consistent
was its requirement that prisoners perform arduous fieldwork, a feature that persists at Angola to
this day. In short, although the Sigler administration made headways in amending some of the
penitentiary’s objectionable practices, Angola Prison remained a site defined by its racial
segregation, punitive labor conditions, and state executions of prisoners.
The penitentiary’s 8 ½ x 14 mimeographed newspaper the Angolite was one product of
the new administration’s reform efforts, and also served a vital role in promoting these efforts to
Angola’s imprisoned readership. Beginning with a Christmas edition in 1952, the Angolite
matured into a weekly operation in May 1953, marketing itself in each issue as “Dixie’s only
prison weekly.” The first weekly issue of the newspaper announced a circulation of 1000 copies;

19
Sharon Johnson Rion, Beyond His Time: The Maurice Sigler Story (Lanham, MD: American
Correctional Association, 2001), 11-12.
20
Sharon Johnson Rion, Beyond His Time: The Maurice Sigler Story (Lanham, MD: American
Correctional Association, 2001), 23.
21
“Catfoot Cooped,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), November 14, 1953: 8.
158
it stated that “[a]pproximately 200 copies weekly [would] be mailed” to unimprisoned people
and to readers at other prisons, and that “[a]n additional 250 copies … [would] also be mailed by
inmates from the various Angola Camps,” presumably to their families and loved ones.
22
During
this time, the newspaper advertised that it would be sent by mail for $2. Its founding roughly
coincided with the prison’s new reform administration, and news items regularly commented on
Sigler’s planned improvements following his appointment as warden.
The prison paper was active in disseminating the penitentiary’s new reforms since it
circulated not only to Angola’s prisoners, but also to other prisons through a lively exchange of
prisoner-edited news. By the mid-twentieth century, there was a robust circuit of prison
publications that included the Presidio from Iowa State Prison, the Atlantian from the United
States Penitentiary in Georgia, and the Paahao Press from Hawaii’s Oahu Prison. Nearly every
prison newspaper was populated with advertisements for movies that were scheduled to be
shown at their respective prisons, and some even included reviews of these movies after they had
been screened. Prison papers also commonly included entertainment columns to comment on
popular film, television, and radio programs, as well as share celebrity gossip as an expression of
fandom. A writer for the entertainment column “Off the Hollywood Wire” in Minnesota State
Prison’s Mirror brought attention to how entertainment journalism in prison newspapers might
differ from the standards set by professional papers, promising to try to answer readers’
questions about celebrities but reminding them, “my efforts will be somewhat hampered for
obvious reasons.”
23
Reflecting Richard Abel’s observation that newspapers were a “cultural
partner of the movies” due to their ability to advertise films, prison newspapers proved that this

22
“Weekly Gets Official O.K.,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), May 2, 1953: 2.
23
Darnoco, “Off the Hollywood Wire,” Mirror (Minnesota State Prison), November 15, 1951: 3.
159
partnership held true even in amateur journalistic enterprises, and prison journalists used their
papers to create vibrant fan cultures around prisons’ cinematic entertainments.
24

Much of the Angolite’s popularity in the 1950s was due to its imprisoned editor William
Sadler, who adopted the nicknamed “Old Wooden Ear.” A white journalist who served two
sentences at Angola Prison, with a period of freedom in the 1940s, Old Wooden Ear headed a
newspaper during both of his sentences. He founded the Angola Argus in 1940, but it folded after
his first release from the penitentiary in 1942, and the editor remarked that “there was no attempt
to revive an inmate publicatio[n] until after the new administration” had been established at
Angola.
25
(He was mistaken on this point, since a 1947 newspaper titled the Angola News was
published at the penitentiary in the interim between his sentences.)
26
The charismatic editor held
notoriety among the editors of newspapers at other prisons across North America, and when he
was released from his first sentence at Angola in 1942, Folsom Prison’s Observer described Old
Wooden Ear as the “nationally famous … founder and militant editor” of the Angola Argus.
27

Old Wooden Ear was also responsible for co-founding the newspaper This is It at Tennessee
State Prison during a sentence he served there between his two sentences at Angola, and he shed
light on Angola’s atrocities in a series of articles for the New Orleans newspaper the Item titled
“Hell on Angola.” During his second prison sentence at Angola, Old Wooden Ear served as

24
Richard Abel, Menus for Movieland: Newspapers and the Emergence of American Culture, 1913-1916
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 6.
25
Old Wooden Ear, “Old Wooden Ear,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), March 1953: 29.
26
Extant copies of the Angola News are held in the “Miscellaneous” folder in the Louisiana State
Penitentiary vertical file at the State Library of Louisiana in Baton Rouge. There are movie
announcements listed in this newspaper, including The Man Who Wouldn’t Die (Herbert I. Leeds, 1942),
Riverboat Rhythm (Leslie Goodwins, 1946), Mr. Dynamite (John Rawlins, 1941), The Dark Corner
(Henry Hathaway, 1946), and Ghost Mine (Sam Newfield, 1941).
27
“‘Old Wooden Ear’ Hits the Bricks from ‘Gola,” Folsom Observer (Folsom Prison, California),
October 16, 1942: 1.
160
editor of the Angolite and held the position until his final release from the Louisiana penitentiary
in 1956.
Importantly for the promotion of reform era transformations, Old Wooden Ear vocally
championed Maurice Sigler and the policies of the new administration in the Angolite. He
appreciated the relative liberty he was given by the new administration to publish without
censorship, remarking that “not one word [had] been blue-penciled by Warden Sigler,” referring
to the journalistic practice of editing a publication with a blue pencil.
28
In one editorial, Old
Wooden Ear commented on the reception of his newspaper beyond Angola, writing, “Freeworld
readers and penal contemporaries are often startled and astonished at the freedom of expression
contained in this prison published newspaper.”
29
In confirmation of this point, journalists for the
Telescope at Canada’s Kingston Penitentiary expressed their jealousy at the Angolite’s professed
lack of censorship, writing that they “look[ed] with envy on the obvious omission of any ‘blue
pencilling [sic]’” in the Louisiana paper.
30
Through Old Wooden Ear’s editorship, the Angolite
became a popular mouthpiece for announcing Angola’s changes, not only for the newspaper’s
imprisoned readership, but also for its “free world” readers in Louisiana and beyond. Even Old
Wooden Ear’s prominent nickname served as a reminder of Angola’s past state and the promises
of reform under Sigler’s wardenship, since the editor received his moniker as a result of “a
savage beating out in the fields in 1938” that left him deaf in one ear.
31

To prove that Maurice Sigler’s wardenship was an improvement over Angola’s former
governance, Old Wooden Ear published a regular column titled “Angola Diary” that included

28
Old Wooden Ear, “Old Wooden Ear,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), May 23, 1953: 4.
Emphasis in the original.
29
Old Wooden Ear, “Of Mice and Men,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), November 14, 1953: 4.
30
“A Peek at the Penal Press,” Telescope (Kingston Penitentiary, ON), April 1956: 13.
31
Old Wooden Ear, “Old Wooden Ear,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), July 11, 1953: 5.
161
passages from his own journal, written during the first of his two prison sentences at Angola
Prison. In a June 1936 journal entry published in the “Angola Diary” column in 1953, for
instance, Old Wooden Ear recounted witnessing an African American woman beaten for “putting
rags in her cans” while working at the penitentiary’s cannery.
32
The brutalities documented in the
“Angola Diary” column were meant to provide evidence for the reform era’s progress.
Recognizing the viciousness of this event, Old Wooden Ear condemned its brutality to reaffirm
that progress had been achieved since Angola’s pre-reform administration.
Nonetheless, the role of Old Wooden Ear as editor of the Angolite shows how “reform”
was articulated at an institution that remained racially segregated, held prisoners in isolation
units, and compelled them to work long hours in the prison’s fields without proper remuneration.
The white newspaper editor held dubious attitudes about race, gender, and labor at Angola. Early
in the Angolite’s publication, there were strains between Old Wooden Ear and his readers in
Camp D, the women’s camp. In a letter to the editor that Old Wooden Ear titled “Gals Peeved,” a
group of Camp D readers asked, “You don’t seem to ever have the room to print what we send
you, so guess there’s no use sending you anything anymore?”
33
Old Wooden Ear’s reply was
dismissive, addressing the women as “children” and retorting that the newspaper simply did not
yet have space for the column submitted from Camp D, but that future issues would be able to
accommodate their material. Indeed, the women’s column would later become a standard feature
of the Angolite, but the editor’s attitude toward Camp D women carried through later issues of
the paper.
Old Wooden Ear used his newspaper as a platform to trivialize claims of racial and
gender discrimination at the prison. For example, in November 1953 the Angolite reported on 26

32
“Angola Diary,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), June 13, 1953: 4.
33
“Letters to the Editor,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), March 1953: 22.
162
black prisoners held in correctional cells who engaged in collective self-harm by cutting their
arms and shoulders with razor blades in response to onerous fieldwork and the loss of “good
time” credits that could be put toward shortened prison sentences for exhibiting authorized
conduct. Comparing this action to the Heel String Gang, the group of white prisoners who cut
their Achilles tendons two years earlier in a similar demonstration, Old Wooden Ear asserted
“the white men had ample grounds for their protest.”
34
In contrast, he described the black self-
harmers as “selfish,” adding his all-capitalized insistence, “In no other Southern prison is the
Negro so well treated as he is on today’s Angola!”
35
Black women at Angola self-harmed with
razors blades as well, as evidenced by a brief notice that “[t]wo unidentified colored women
from Camp D were treated for minor lacerations” in 1954.
36
Although the newspaper editor
never revealed or even speculated upon the intentions behind these injuries, the razor blade was
nonetheless a common instrument for protesting penitentiary conditions among white and black
prisoners alike. By rendering black collective action illegible, while simultaneously viewing
similar white protests as defensible, the imprisoned editor’s journalism served to bolster the
white supremacist logics that undergirded the institution as a whole. Even though Old Wooden
Ear’s editorship ended with his final release from Angola in 1956, the newspaper he edited
remains in place today, and many of its exclusionary journalistic attitudes did not change until
the editorship of Wilbert Rideau, who became famous in the late 1970s and 1980s for
reinvigorating the publication with exposés on the prison’s administrative practices.
37

34
“Editorial,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), November 21, 1953: 5.
35
“Editorial,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), November 21, 1953: 5.
36
“Two Use Razor Blade, Put Selves in Stitches,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), September 18,
1954: 1.
37
Wilbert Rideau and Ron Wikberg, Life Sentences: Rage and Survival behind Bars (New York: Times
Books, 1992).
163
The Sigler administration’s reforms were implemented without widespread support
among prison staff, and Sigler resigned from the penitentiary in 1958. By the end of the decade,
Angola’s reputation was restored to being as notorious for brutality as it had been prior to
Sigler’s wardenship. Many of the changes Sigler promised had not materialized: the Red Hats
disciplinary cells remained, racially segregated labor camps endured, and the penitentiary
grounds were still patrolled by imprisoned guards instead of a professional workforce. Angola
proved to possess what Robert Perkinson called “the paradox of all penal reform: that only so
much humanizing can take place in an institution conceived and maintained to hold people
against their will.”
38
Moreover, promises of reform at Angola were premised on the maintenance
of otherwise conservative attitudes about race, gender, and labor.

Histories of Spectatorship
The earliest documentation I have found of a film screening at Angola Prison appears in a
state government report from 1936, which states, “Last Christmas a movie (talky) machine was
bought for instruction and entertainment. Regular programs are given at all camps under the
supervision of the Chaplain.”
39
The Christmas 1935 film screenings may not have been the first
to occur at Angola for prisoners, and it is likely that prison guards and their families had access
to popular movies before this time, but it does appear that this date marks the beginning of a
consistent film program for prisoners. If so, Angola was far behind prisons in the U.S. Northeast
and Midwest, many of which were showing motion pictures to prisoners as early as the 1900s,
and implementing regular film programs by the 1910s. Although the few extant issues of the

38
Robert Perkinson, “Angola and the Agony of Prison Reform,” Radical Philosophy Review 3, no. 1
(2000), 16.
39
R. L. Himes, Louisiana State Penitentiary Biennial Report, 1934-1936 (Baton Rouge, LA: Otlieb
Press), 13.
164
Angola Argus—the early 1940s predecessor to the Angolite—do not list the penitentiary’s film
program, they do reveal that the movie schedule was held weekly by this time, and that films
were distributed to the prison from Louisiana’s State Department of Institutions.
40
By the time
the prison newspaper was resurrected in the form of the Angolite in the 1950s, the weekly film
program was routine enough for the paper to advertise upcoming movies and sometimes provide
film synopses.
Alison Griffiths demonstrates that vaudeville performance often coexisted with film in
prisons in the 1910s, noting that “[early] cinema was integrated into a multimedia lineup rather
than being top billing.”
41
This integration of live performance and cinematic exhibition defined
early cinema, but Angola’s entertainment programming proves that residues of this integration
between live and cinematic entertainment lingered for longer in prisons. The practice of
multimedia exhibition continued into the midcentury at Angola, especially during the holidays
when entertainment was regarded as a gift that administrators could offer to imprisoned people.
By the midcentury, Angola had an extensive cadre of musicians, vocalists, actors, and other
performers among its imprisoned population.
42
Performances of racist parody figured among
these spectacles, and members of Angola’s white and black camps performed in separate
minstrel shows for their fellow prisoners, penitentiary guards, and guards’ families. The
exhibition of popular films at Angola coexisted with these other forms of entertainment, and

40
“Weekly Talkies Will Come through B.R. Department,” Angola Argus (Louisiana State Penitentiary),
March 1, 1941: 6.
41
Alison Griffiths, “‘A Portal to the Outside World’: Motion Pictures in the Penitentiary,” Film History
25, no. 4 (2013): 3.
42
“Minstrel Almost Ready,” Angolite, May 23, 1953: 6. See also Dennis Childs, Slaves of the State:
Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2015), 93-140.
165
prison spectatorship cultures were shaped by racial and gendered anxieties, violences, and
intimacies.
As at many prisons in the mid-twentieth century, film exhibition at Angola was heralded
as having an instructive purpose as much as an entertaining one. A 1944 report states that 76
films were screened at the prison in the prior fiscal year “[covering] a variety of themes,
including incentive films released by the armed services to war industries.”
43
By this time, film
screenings were actively incorporated into the industrial training courses held at prisons across
the country, and it was well accepted that film could serve as a pedagogic tool for educating
imprisoned laborers in jobs that they could perform both during and after their incarceration.
This report emphasizes the link that was made between Angola prisoners’ labor and the broader
political interests of the United States during World War II. As at other institutions, prisoners
were expected to contribute to the war effort through subsistence and industrial labor. Some
prison newspapers from the period encouraged prisoners to contribute to the war effort by
purchasing war bonds and donating their blood as a service to U.S. soldiers fighting abroad.
Angola’s film culture at this time would have encouraged the link between prisoners’ labor and
national war interests by encouraging prisoners to feel as though they belonged to a national
body that otherwise excluded them by virtue of their incarceration.
Although Angola Prison was a nontheatrical site of film exhibition, its film advertising
practices mimicked those of movie theaters. An early issue of the Angolite boasted that “[n]ews
of movies shows … [would] follow the freeworld style of presentation,” with announcements of
upcoming movies and their actors.
44
Occasionally, cartoons depicting the real or imagined

43
Louisiana Department of Institutions, Department of Institutions Annual Report, 1943-1944 (Baton
Rouge, LA, 1944), 82.
44
“Stars to Shine in Movie News,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), February 1953: 2.
166
plotlines of these movies would accompany these announcements. Announcements often
parodied theatrical promotion, and an advertisement for the films Night and the City (1950) and
The Foxes of Harrow (1947) included the quip, “Ladies will please remove their hats.”
45
These
announcements trafficked in the nostalgia of movie theater experiences that imprisoned men and
women may have enjoyed before their incarceration. Similar comical notices included “Patrons
are requested not to allow their children to play in the aisles while the picture is showing,”
“Please do not park chewing gum under the seats,” “Patrons will please check their weapons at
the box office,” and “No smooching in the balcony, please!”
46
Additionally, Old Wooden Ear’s
film advertising routinely featured wildly fictionalized plots, such as an ad for the film
adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955) that read, “Come! See Adam eat
the forbidden fruit. See the big snake. See the fig tree,” and purported the film to feature the
actors “Minnie Boozleploof and Gabriel Cazinickichewskiwics.”
47
When writers for the
newspaper at New York’s Elmira Reformatory asked the Angolite editor about these fake movie
synopses, he responded that he had gotten “tired of reading the press-agented blurbs handed out
by Hollywood and decided to write [his] own.”
48

Orderly film spectatorship was promoted as feature of proper decorum for those hoping
to one day leave Angola. Under Old Wooden Ear’s editorship, the Angolite featured front-page
lessons in prison etiquette. These weekly lessons, accompanied by an illustration of a smiling
worm, encouraged imprisoned readers to avoid the self-centered behaviors of the “Angol-
Worm.” An invention of Old Wooden Ear, the Angol-Worm was the prison’s fictional

45
Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), February 12, 1955: 2.
46
Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), January 1, 1955: 2; January 8, 1955: 2; February 26, 1955: 2;
July 2, 1955: 2.
47
Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), March 24, 1956: 2.
48
Old Wooden Ear, Angolite, May 12, 1956: 5.
167
wrongdoer who exhibited an array of bad manners. By eschewing the Angol-Worm’s greed and
idleness, the Angolite’s imprisoned readership was instructed to act courteously, practice good
hygiene, and avoid gossip and profanity. As part of this instruction, Old Wooden Ear viewed
orderly film spectatorship as necessary for the transformation of Angola’s prisoners into
reformed citizens, and one August 1953 issue of the newspaper featured an Angol-Worm who
disrupted the movies with his noisiness. This Angol-Worm was a moviegoer “who, because he
[didn’t] like the movie shown, [proceeded] to boo and yowl so no one else [could] enjoy it
either” [Image 4.1].
49
With this public reprimand, the prison newspaper lauded peaceful movie
spectatorship as a key practice in prisoners’ self-improvement and rehabilitation. (Being a
courteous viewer was important for other media as well. After televisions were installed at the
prison, one Angol-Worm was the “TV bug” who “[took] two chairs to make himself snug.”)
50

The Angol-Worm’s disorderly moviegoing belonged to a broader culture of film
spectatorship documented in the Angolite under Old Wooden Ear’s editorship, a time when
Angola Prison was under intense public scrutiny. Administrative personnel responded to
criticisms of misconduct by highlighting the penitentiary’s recreational activities. Old Wooden
Ear’s weekly Angol-Worm is evidence that moral instruction was considered an integral
component in the prison’s reforms, since the Worm’s behavior during weekly movies could be
scorned as ungracious in the face of reformist benevolence. The Angol-Worm was a platform for
Old Wooden Ear to chastise behaviors he witnessed among his fellow prisoners, and the editor
was likely irritated by audience behavior during recent screenings at the penitentiary. His fellow
spectators may have jeered during the biopic The Babe Ruth Story (Roy Del Ruth, 1948), the
film noir He Walked by Night (Alfred L. Werker, 1948), the Desi Arnaz musical Cuban Pete

49
“The Angol-Worm,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), August 1, 1953: 1.
50
“The Angol-Worm,” Angolite, February 25, 1956: 1.
168
(Jean Yarbrough, 1946), or the World War II drama Decision Before Dawn (Anatole Litvak,
1951), which were among the movies scheduled to appear at the prison in the weeks before Old
Wooden Ear rebuked the booing Angol-Worm in the Angolite. These movies were each several
years old by the time they were screened at the penitentiary, a factor which may have contributed
to the dissatisfaction of some audience members. If the movies themselves did not elicit protest,
the exhibition environment in which they were shown offered cause for complaint, since the
Angolite regularly published announcements that movie screens were cracked, distributors had
sent incorrect or damaged films, or projection equipment was broken as a result of misuse. For
instance, one announcement published in the Angolite asked, “Did you hear a noise like someone
eating a bag of popcorn behind you when the movies were shown lately?”
51
Blaming this noise
on the projection equipment, the newspaper assured readers that “[t]he offending units were sent
to the Ampro Company in New Orleans and were returned completely reconditioned with the
squeak taken out.”
52

Under a shroud of extreme structural inequity, Angola Prison’s nontheatrical film
exhibition emerged within a history of music, performance, and athletics. Through the
penitentiary’s newspaper, the new warden advertised these activities as components of a broader
reform effort. Movies were especially popular topics of publication in the Angolite under Old
Wooden Ear’s editorship, and the editor used his platform to contend that disciplined viewership
was fundamental to prisoners’ personal rehabilitation. Nevertheless, Angola’s audiences
sometimes objected to the narrative or aesthetic value of movies, the timeliness of their
exhibition at the penitentiary, and the quality of the prison’s projection equipment. These

51
“Squawks Taken Out of Movie Machines,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), May 2, 1953: 9.
52
“Squawks Taken Out of Movie Machines,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), May 2, 1953: 9.
169
circumstances provide the context in which Angola’s imprisoned men and women engaged with
the prison’s midcentury innovations in moving image entertainment.

Exhibiting a New Reality

A number of reforms to the exhibition of moving images attended the broader reform
project of the penitentiary under the Sigler administration. For example, the Angolite closely
followed the training of imprisoned projectionists at the penitentiary under the direction of C. F.
“Catfoot” Hunt. The story of projection at Angola begins with a July 1953 announcement listing
individuals who had been selected from each of the men’s camps to train as projectionists under
Hunt: “That each Angola unit may have its own operator of movie equipment on hand at all
times for the showing of films here, a school was last week started under the tutelage of an
inmate who is, himself, an expert on the repair, operation and upkeep of movie apparatus.”
53
It
was deemed necessary to train projectionists at each of the isolated camps, since screenings
would be held at them separately, either outdoors when weather permitted or in dormitory
lobbies.
54
Two feature-length movies were advertised in the Angolite per week, and their
screenings would alternate among the various camps. Some of the movies that these men would
train to project in the upcoming weeks, such as Captain Fury (Hal Roach, 1939)—featuring the
Irish protagonist’s escape and organized revolt against an Australian prison colony—and the
prolifically criminal “juvenile delinquent” hero Danny Lester of Bad Boy (Kurt Neumann, 1949),
would directly comment on the experiences of captivity and criminality; others, the musicals and
comedies screened at the camps, would serve as a diversion from this topic. There is no

53
“School for Movie Operators Opened,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), July 18, 1953: 9.
54
When the films moved indoors during the winter of 1953, Catfoot reported to the prison newspaper,
“[N]o one likes to see a Jane Russell film out in the chilly winds, so we’ve put the shows in the camp
lobbies.” “Movies Under Winter Wraps,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), November 21, 1953: 3.
170
discussion of compensation for the projection services listed in the newspaper, but Angola’s
projectionists were almost certainly unpaid for their labor.
The July announcement of projectionists’ training ended by reporting that no
projectionists had been chosen from the women’s camp.
55
Nonetheless, there was a noteworthy
upheaval only two months later concerning the training of projectionists at Angola’s Camp D,
where 58 imprisoned women lived in racially segregated quarters. As editor Old Wooden Ear
explained, Hunt was training Delores Thomas and Jackie Krohn to operate the prison’s
projection equipment, scoffing that once the women “learn[ed] what all those little spools and
lights are for[,] they’[d] be on their own, making with the movies.”
56
Dismissing women’s
capacity to work in professions he believed to be gendered for men, Old Wooden Ear glibly
prophesized that the women’s camp would “soon have plumberesses and carpentresses and so
on.”
57
Through this and subsequent announcements, the Angolite’s editorship paternalistically
questioned the capacity of women to operate the projection equipment used to screen the prison’s
16 mm films.
Nonetheless, Thomas and Krohn would have acquired the competencies required to
screen films at Camp D such as Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood (Michael Curtiz
and William Keighley, 1938), Diplomatic Courier (Henry Hathaway, 1952, mistakenly printed
in the Angolite as “Diplomatic Carrier”), and the musical Two Tickets to Broadway (James V.
Kern, 1951). There is something poetic in imagining Thomas and Krohn “making with the
movies” through “all those little spools and lights,” their dexterity stirring a profoundly
phenomenological intimacy with the object of their labor to produce moving images that would

55
“School for Movie Operators Opened,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), July 18, 1953: 9.
56
“Just Us Girls!” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), September 12, 1953: 12.
57
“Just Us Girls!” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), September 12, 1953: 12.
171
be viewed by other women in their camp. This, however, was not Old Wooden Ear’s sentiment
regarding the projectionists trained at Camp D. In subsequent issues of the Angolite, he reported
that Thomas and Krohn resigned their positions soon after beginning them, and that the warden
insisted that they perform the job for which they were trained. “The two were given an extensive
course in how to make the wheels go round on the machines,” Old Wooden Ear wrote only two
weeks after the initial announcement that Thomas and Krohn would be trained as projectionists,

until they

“suddenly manifested a notable lack of interest.”
58
The reported result of the women’s
resignation was that male projectionists would be working Camp D. According to Old Wooden
Ear, the excuse Thomas and Krohn used was that women “should either be on the screen or in
the audience.”
59
Warden Sigler was unconvinced by this argument, and reinstated the two
women to their role as Camp D projectionists.
After several weeks of commentary on the training of projectionists at Camp D, Old
Wooden Ear punctuated his reporting on the subject by patently dismissing the objections of an
African American woman who observed that the projectionists trained in her camp were white.
The paper did not publish her complaint except through the editor’s recollection of it, but Old
Wooden Ear wrote in response, “To the colored girl whose verbal gripe was because none of her
race had been chosen to operate movie machines at Camp D: They tell me all were given a
chance to volunteer for the training, but that not one on the colored side indicated willingness.”
60

Although the woman’s “gripe” is filtered through Old Wooden Ear’s dismissal, the editor’s
objection that the projectionist position was open to everyone is called into question by a 1954
announcement requesting two volunteers to serve as projectionists in the prison’s hospital. The

58
“Girls Don’t Like That Movie Job,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), September 26, 1953: 6.
59
“Movie Operator Beef Quickly Quieted,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), October 3, 1953: 5-
A. Emphasis in the original.
60
Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), October 24, 1953: 5. Emphasis in the original.
172
announcement, “Applicants must be white and somewhat in possession of 10 fingers instead of
all thumbs,” casts doubt on Old Wooden Ear’s earlier claims that there was no racial
discrimination in the projectionist appointments at the women’s camp.
61

Despite the quick dismissals of complaints of racial hierarchies imbedded in the systems
of labor distribution at the prison, the outbreaks of collective self-harm described above confirm
that black men and women imprisoned at Angola organized against their exclusion from jobs,
activities, and privileges. The protest of the unnamed black woman in the racially segregated
Camp D may have been a peripheral to Old Wooden Ear’s concerns, but it in light of the
gendered and racialized oppressions that built and maintained the penitentiary, it is no accident
that media became a site of struggle. Racial segregation disciplined black civic participation all
across the South, depriving African Americans from living in adequate housing, accessing public
transportation, and exercising the rights of citizenship through voting. Southern police forces,
courts, and penitentiaries targeted African Americans for arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment.
Racially segregated entertainment formed part of these broader Jim Crow efforts to keep African
American communities from accessing public facilities. In comparison to Northern theaters that
segregated audiences by relegating African Americans to a balcony, Elizabeth Abel notes that
Southern theaters adopted “packed upper galleries walled off from the rest of the theater and
accessible only through an exterior flight of stairs.”
62
The complaint of the unnamed woman in
Angola’s newspaper brings attention to the dehumanizing quality of racially segregated
entertainment both at the penitentiary and in the broader Louisiana society, gesturing toward

61
“Need 2 Operators,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), February 13, 1954: 7.
62
Elizabeth Abel, Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2010), 217.
173
segregated entertainment’s role in curtailing black freedom as a component of widespread
disenfranchisement from citizenship and public life.
Because Angola’s camps were racially segregated, often referred to in the newspaper as
either “white” or “colored” camps, and because film screenings were held at these individual
camps, imprisoned spectators viewed movies in a segregated environment throughout the
postwar era. Of course, segregated film spectatorship was widespread throughout the U.S. South
during this time, and in many ways Angola’s film spectatorship mirrored the broader segregation
of public accommodations through Jim Crow legal structures, which included film spectatorship
and other cultural activities. However, Angola’s segregated viewing was unique in that it was not
the architecture of a theater that separated imprisoned spectators, such as the balconies that
separated black spectators from white spectators in Southern cities, but was instead reinforced
through the distances between labor camps that were already isolated.
63
This segregation of the
penitentiary’s film screenings and other cultural events was not limited to Angola. Inside World,
the newspaper published at the Mississippi State Penitentiary (better known as Parchman Farm),
also advertised film showings for “whites” and “colored” audiences, and a number of other
institutions’ newspapers show evidence of racially segregated screenings. Southern prisons’
racially segregated labor camps could also affect their types of films that administrators might

63
On segregated film exhibition in the U.S. South, see Cara Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and
the Building of Modern Black Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). See also two
chapters in Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experiment of Cinema, ed. Richard Maltby,
Melvyn Stokes, and Robert C. Allen (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2008): Christopher J.
McKenna, “Tri-racial Theaters in Robeson County, North Carolina, 1896-1940,” 45-59; and Thomas
Doherty, “Race Houses, Jim Crow Roosts, and Lily White Palaces: Desegregating the Motion Picture
Theater,” 196-214.
174
select for exhibition, and one report from the Mississippi prison stated, “We occasionally show
movies with complete colored casts for the benefit of the many colored units at Parchman.”
64

Film was not the only moving image technology that was presented to Angola prisoners
in segregated settings. Angola’s televisions were first installed at the prison’s women’s camp in
1954. Moving image culture in the postwar era was heavily shaped by the new affordability of
televisions, and many homes were being furnished with the increasingly accessible medium.
Prisons also purchased televisions throughout the 1950s, creating new methods of viewership for
those suspended in states of confinement, and an antenna was erected in 1954 that permitted
television reception at Angola.
65
An announcement from October of that year reads: “Installed
last week at the Women’s Camp, a new, 21-inch television set is said to be giving excellent
reception through the use of a 30-foot antenna.”
66
The televisions reinforced the penitentiary’s
racially segregated spectatorship, as another television was soon introduced to the Camp D
rumpus room so white and black women would not share the new entertainment.
67
Additionally,
the choice of first introducing the television into Angola’s women’s camp reflected postwar
attitudes that women’s labor obligations were primarily centered in the domestic sphere, even
though the Angola’s women’s camp hardly resembled the suburban ideal.
The choice of using the women’s camp as the laboratory for television’s introduction
rested on thoroughly gendered ideals of women’s passivity, and in particular, the perception that
television spectatorship was inactive. In fact, although women prisoners were often excluded
from early film screenings in the 1910s for fear that the film medium carried connotations of

64
Biennial Report of the Superintendent and Other Officers of the Mississippi State Penitentiary (1951-
1953), 39. Accessed in the Special Collections of Mississippi State University Libraries, Starkville, MS.
65
“Inmate TV Hopes Soar with Erection of Booster Here,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), July
31, 1954: 3.
66
“See TV at D,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), October 9, 1954: 1.
67
“Femmes Get TV Set,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), November 20, 1954: 1.
175
criminality that endangered susceptible women, the fact that televisions were first introduced in
Angola’s women’s camp suggests that televisions were believed to serve an appropriately
function in women’s entertainment.
68
Television was believed to instruct imprisoned women into
proper feminine roles of gendered labor. Moreover, the practice of passive television
spectatorship was seen as reinforcing the docility that was expected of women in general, and
imprisoned women in particular. These ideals were thoroughly racialized, as well, and were
filtered through a regime that Sarah Haley has called the “domestic carceral sphere,” in which
black women were more vulnerable to the heavy labor of the chain gang than white women, who
were viewed as more reformable in the carceral spaces of the American South.
69
Resting on these
gendered and racialized presumptions about white women’s passivity and reformability, TV was
introduced into women’s facilities with relative expediency, and quickly became a popular
pastime in the women’s reformatory, women’s prison, and women’s camps or dorms in prisons
that were not yet sex-segregated. As imprisoned women interacted with new mediums, violence
continued to distribute itself by way of pre-reform intersections of race, gender, and labor.
Old Wooden Ear took to the Angolite’s rumor page to debunk the gossip that “movies
[were] to be discontinued and television sets installed instead.”
70
Instead of one medium
eclipsing the other, the two mediums would cohabitate within the 1950s prison. Furthermore, by
Christmas 1958, CinemaScope films such as Tea House of the August Moon (Daniel Mann,
1956) and The Black Shield of Falworth (Rudolph Maté, 1954) were shown at the prison. With

68
In “Media in the Women’s Reformatory: The (Slow) Rise of Entertainment Culture and Anxiety About
Cinema,” Alison Griffiths discussed the exclusion of women from seeing early films at New York’s
Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Presented at the 2016 Society for Cinema and Media Studies
Conference, Atlanta, GA.
69
See Chapter 4 of Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow
Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 156-194.
70
“Rumors,” The Angolite, September 10, 1955: 2.
176
the introduction of widescreen, Angola’s imprisoned spectators would have been able to view
movies in the aspect ratio that had already become popular throughout the country’s theaters.
Despite the modernization that television and widescreen brought to the moving image
capabilities of the prison, however, these formats circulated in a system of structural brutality,
and their technological innovation was presented to the public as a proxy for more meaningful
changes that might have taken place to undo the inherent inequality of the penitentiary.

The Labors of Spectatorship
Despite the modernization that television and widescreen brought to the moving image
capabilities of the prison, these formats circulated in a system of structural brutality, and their
technological innovation was presented to the public as a proxy for more meaningful change.
Film screenings were used by mid-twentieth century prison administrations not only to naturalize
racial segregation and gender divisions, but also to regulate prison labor. In 1953, the Angolite
published a letter-to-the-editor’s request that the prison’s movie programming begin earlier in the
evening. The practice of sharing film reels across the institution’s remote camps caused the
program to run late into the evening, and although attendance at screenings was not mandatory,
the movies were a popular reprieve for people who spent long days working in the prison’s
cotton, corn, and sugarcane fields. Noting that screenings typically ended around midnight, the
letter asked, “Can’t the movies get to Camp E earlier so we can get in some sleep—those of us
who want to see the show but have to work early the next day?”
71
Although it was not unusual
for prison newspapers to publish reader-submitted criticisms that movies were boring or out-of-
date, the anonymous Camp E writer tethered his attendance at the penitentiary’s film screenings
to the necessity for adequate sleep among the imprisoned work force. In doing so, the letter folds

71
“The Mail Bag,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), August 1, 1953: 5.
177
labor and its biological requirements firmly into the domain of film spectatorship, thereby
intimating that the prison’s film screenings were not just amusement, but also a restorative
pastime that maximized the imprisoned workers’ labor.
Viewing moving images was an integral part of all forms of labor at the prison because it
reproduced the capacities of field workers to plant and harvest the penitentiary’s massive acreage
of crops. This was during a decade when, according to reporting in Parchman’s Inside World,
Angola’s workers would “receive from 2 to 5 cents per hour for work on the sprawling prison
farm.”
72
The prison’s movie nights were regularly treated as a necessary diversion from the
drudgery of hard labor, providing the recuperation needed for more work. The Camp E writer
used the penitentiary’s climate of reform discourse to connect his experience of moviegoing to
the physical stresses of heavy labor. The letter-writer’s request for earlier screening times
illuminates how Angola’s labor regimes cohabitated with film spectatorship during an ostensible
era of reform, and demonstrates how prisoners’ entertainment fed into the productive grids of
prison labor. In fact, the ties between work and entertainment were so significant that a remedy
to the letter writer’s complaint was put in place only a week later, when the prison’s head
projectionist C. F. “Catfoot” Hunt announced that the outdoor movies would begin earlier in the
evening at Camp E.
73
In a world so regimented by repressive labor practices, film spectatorship
had extended the workday for the Camp E writer.
In his essay “Free Time,” Theodor Adorno argues that the enjoyment of free time
(Freizeit) becomes less and less distinguishable from work because the pastimes that people use
to fill this time become increasingly commodified. Calling them “shallow entertainment,”

72
“Penal Press in Review,” Inside World (Mississippi State Penitentiary), October 1957: 6.
73
“Shift in Scheduling Brings Earlier Movies,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), August 8, 1953:
8.
178
Adorno believes these pastimes are aesthetically frivolous, and in his estimation, not truly
enjoyable.
74
Writing on the relationship between work and leisure, Adorno uses a carceral
metaphor to insist that “the contraband of modes of behavior proper to the domain of work,
which will not let people out of its power, is being smuggled into the realm of free time.”
75

Although Adorno’s critique is based in his disavowal of popular entertainment, his writing
nonetheless intimates how free time at Angola could be marshalled to reproduce and extend
imprisoned workers’ labor, regardless of any judgments of aesthetic value that the entertainments
occupied by that time may or may not have possessed.
There are limits, however, in extending Adorno’s analysis to the Southern agricultural
prison, particularly when he considers how free time produces conditions of unfreedom
(Unfreiheit). For Adorno, this unfreedom is a way of life ascribed to workers who fill their time
with banal hobbies to mitigate the stresses of their labor. It does not, for him, refer to the
devastating unfreedom of imprisonment, wherein a person is made socially liminal through both
a spatial removal from their community and a temporal measure of this suspension’s duration.
Although the indignities of imprisonment at Angola certainly included coercive labor conditions,
the unfreedom of the penitentiary’s imprisoned men and women was composed of excessive
brutalities that cannot be ascribed to their working conditions alone. In the space of the
penitentiary farm, Theodor Adorno’s worry that free time was “nothing more than a shadowy
continuation of labor” was even more starkly apparent since all time at Angola was regimented
into the calculus of a person’s sentence.
76

74
Theodore Adorno, “Free Time,” in The Culture Industry (New York: Routledge, 1991), 193.
75
Theodore Adorno, “Free Time,” in The Culture Industry (New York: Routledge, 1991), 190.
76
Theodore Adorno, “Free Time,” in The Culture Industry (New York: Routledge, 1991), 194.
179
In the context of the midcentury prison, the practice of viewing moving images was not
labor’s reverse, but a critical form of labor in itself that maintained, reinforced, and sometimes
defied the economies of suffering for which Angola had been made famous. The penitentiary’s
spectatorial pleasures trafficked in what Jonathan Beller has described as an “attention theory of
value,” in which capital is extracted from artistic mediums via “value-producing human
attention.”
77
Although Beller primarily focuses on contemporary media, he points out that even
early cinema was meant to produce value via viewership, writing that “looking was first posited
as productive by capital early in the twentieth century.”
78
In a similar vein, “affectivity” is the
term Kara Keeling uses “to mark the way that a living being’s interaction with other images
involves a form of labor that has to do with affect, with those sensations and feelings that carve
out a subjective perception in things, but that cannot be divorced from the mental operations
required to make sense of the world.”
79
For Keeling, this affectivity also reproduces the world in
which it operates, making it “a form of labor that does not yet register in the economic sense of
labor.”
80
It is this approach to understanding moving images as inherently productive that I
believe to be valuable for interpreting their presentation in a location mired by anti-black racism
and exploitative labor.
Amidst Angola’s complex labor configurations, there are multiple routes through which
we can understand media’s relationship to work. Firstly, viewership held the potential to be
instructive. Albeit a relatively rarified experience encountered by only certain classes of prison

77
Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the
Spectacle (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006), 4.
78
Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the
Spectacle (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006), 2.
79
Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 24.
80
Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 26.
180
laborers, nontheatrical training films were not uncommon in prisons. Although the penitentiary’s
many fieldworkers would not have been trained to do their tasks through films, nontheatrical
training films did find their way into prisons for a variety of other types of labor. In 1954, for
instance, a select group of imprisoned workers attended a “special showing of a film on safety
brought to Angola by the Caterpillar Tractor Company.”
81
Beyond films produced for
nontheatrical purposes, even popular fare could be curated as a pedagogical tool for imprisoned
viewers. Many of the Hollywood movies presented at Angola were crime dramas or wartime
pictures, and it is likely that such movies were selected to teach the lessons of self-discipline
deemed necessary for efficient and orderly work. In recognition of the morals that could be
embedded in the prison’s film screenings, an Angolite advertisement for Roadblock (Harold
Daniels, 1951) described it as “one of those ‘crime does not pay’ films, you know the kind.”
82

In a notice reminiscent of the Angola letter requesting earlier movie times, the Texas
State Prison’s Echo announced that due to “consensus” among the imprisoned cotton harvesters,
special films termed “cotton movies” would be deferred until after the harvest season was
finished. The article reasoned that in addition to the prison’s auditoriums becoming too hot in the
summer months, “pickers [were] too tired to enjoy an extra movie after a day in the field
gathering the ‘white gold.’”
83
Secondly, film spectatorship was instructive. At many prisons,
educational and training films were used to train laborers throughout the 1950s as a reform
method, but even popular fare was curated as a pedagogical tool. At Angola, these popular
movies were often crime dramas or wartime pictures, selected to teach lessons deemed necessary
for efficient and orderly work, such as morality, self-discipline, and citizenship.

81
“27 See Maintenance, Safety Film,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), July 31, 1954: 10.
82
Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), October 31, 1953.
83
“Majority Opinion Votes to Postpone ‘Cotton Movies,’” Echo (Texas State Prison), July 1955: 1.
181
Perhaps more significant that their instructional role, however, prison administrators
appreciated film spectatorship for being recuperative, replenishing the faculties of imprisoned
workers who spent arduous hours in Angola’s fields, thereby allowing them greater productivity.
Spectatorship at Angola blurred the divide between “leisure” and “work,” since pleasure and
enjoyment were recruited into the process of production. When entertainment no longer assisted
in this purpose, it could be halted. In a notice reminiscent of the Angola letter requesting earlier
movie times, the Texas State Prison’s Echo announced that due to “consensus” among the
imprisoned cotton harvesters, special films termed “cotton movies” would be deferred until after
the harvest season was finished. The article reasoned that in addition to the Texas prison’s
auditoriums becoming too hot in the summer months, “pickers [were] too tired to enjoy an extra
movie after a day in the field gathering the ‘white gold.’”
84
Like film, television was also
professed to make imprisoned workers better. A writer for Tennessee State Prison’s Inside Story
acknowledged the popular belief that prisoners were “being coddled and that they lounge around
all day lapping up entertainment.”
85
In contradiction to concerns that television might make
prisoners lazy, the Inside Story journalist rebutted, “There are definite hours during which TV
cannot be viewed. Work goes on just the same. According to observers, TV actually brings forth
greater production effort among [prison] factory workers.”
86

Shifts in moving image exhibition in 1950s Angola, such as the introduction of
televisions and the renovation to widescreen film formats, should be understood within the
complex role that penitentiary labor played in modernizing the Southern economy during
Angola’s reform era. These practices met the goals of Angola’s reform era to provide

84
“Majority Opinion Votes to Postpone ‘Cotton Movies,’” Echo (Texas State Prison), July 1955: 1.
85
“Tennessee Pioneer TV Prison,” Inside Story (Tennessee State Prison), February 1953: 5.
86
“Tennessee Pioneer TV Prison,” Inside Story (Tennessee State Prison), February 1953: 5.
182
“wholesome amusement” in the words of Maurice Sigler, but they did not fundamentally reshape
the labor arrangements on the penitentiary’s expansive cotton fields. Prisoners’ leisure time was
heavily surveilled and prescriptively folded into the capacity of prisoners to become more
productive in their fieldwork. In this context, spectatorship was also a thoroughly gendered and
racialized form of labor, meant to reproduce the labor faculties of field hands and instruct them
in how to acquire the “proper” behaviors of industrial workers in the postwar economy.

Conclusion
“Historically,” writes Avery F. Gordon, “imprisonment serves two major ordering
functions—to manage socioeconomic crises and to suppress actual and potential political
opposition.”
87
Angola Prison is an institution that has terrifyingly embodied these two “ordering
functions,” and moving image technologies assisted in justifying these aims, broadcasting them
to the public, and coding them as reform. Entertainment reproduced agricultural and
manufacturing labor in Angola’s reform era. As Angola’s “reform warden” Maurice Sigler
promised, many of Angola’s 1950s improvements centered around its moving image culture: the
training of imprisoned film projectionists, the installation of movie screens that could
accommodate the industry’s new aspect ratios, and the introduction of televisions. Nonetheless,
Angola’s reform era kept intact some of the most troubling aspects of prison spectatorship;
namely, racially segregated viewing of film and television that accompanied the broader
segregation of the penitentiary’s labor camps. Moreover, reforms in film and television
spectatorship facilitated more productive labor, as in the case of moving screenings earlier to
allow field workers to wake up earlier. More pressingly, these entertainment reforms did not

87
Avery F. Gordon, “Notes for the Breitenau Room of The Workhouse,” dOCUMENTA 13 (Ostfildern,
Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2011), 7.
183
guarantee the end of corporal punishment or the abolition of isolation cells, and they did not
prevent the shooting of Wesley Alton Allgood by a guard during a movie screening.
Because of the disruption caused by Allgood’s shooting, Angola’s imprisoned audience
likely didn’t see the end of the movie they were watching. The end of Brute Force, for instance,
features the protagonist Joe Collins lifting Captain Munsey over his head and throwing him off a
guard tower into a crowd of rebelling prisoners [Image 4.2]. Because film—its production,
exhibition, and reception—cannot stand outside of the economies that give birth to it, cinema
cannot hold any liberatory potential that is not already nascent in the world itself. Prisons’ most
substantive changes emerge through the collective energies of imprisoned people, and not the
imposed reforms of prison administrations. The lively culture of spectatorship documented in
Angola’s prison newspaper is testament to the fact that entertainment reforms could coexist with
persistent administrative violence. We should not mistake the pleasure of spectatorship—which
resonates loudly throughout the archive of prison journalism at Angola and elsewhere—with the
forms of emancipation that imprisoned people most deserved. The reforms brought by new
visual technologies were not anathema to prison brutality, and even provided an occasion for the
continuation of lethal punishment, inspiring demands for the cultivation of a profoundly different
social and economic landscape.
184

Image 4.1. “The Angol-Worm,” etiquette education from the front page of the Angolite (August
1, 1953).

185
Image 4.2. Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster) throws Captain Munsey (Hume Cronyn) off a guard
tower in Brute Force (1947).

186
Chapter 5
The Innovated Cage: Television and Widescreen in the Midcentury Prison

After nearly half a century of cinematic exhibitions held in prisons, the mediums of
prisons’ moving images fundamentally transformed when prison administrations introduced
television sets and widescreen movies into North American penal institutions. Nevertheless, the
social concerns and public anxieties surrounding moving image exhibition in prisons persisted
even after television and widescreen were installed in institutions across the two countries.
Discourses regarding midcentury prison spectatorship can be observed in a small cartoon that
appeared in the mimeographed newspaper the Reflector at Minnesota’s State Reformatory for
Women, drawn by an artist using the pseudonym Lu Nacy in her “Car Tunes” page [Image 5.1].
1

The cartoon depicts a group of the reformatory’s African American and white women huddled
around a television set to watch The Lone Ranger (1949-1957). On screen, the Lone Ranger’s
sidekick Tonto (Jay Silverheels) is drawn in profile with a stereotypical headband and single
feather, declaring, “Me, Tanto [sic]!” to the television audience, whose reactions range from
excitement to boredom. In her terror at the sight of the Native character, one of the women has
dashed behind the TV, her legs and skirt flailing as she is trailed by a “SWOOSH” caption to
denote her quick movement out of her chair. Another woman, standing in her robe and slippers
behind the other TV watchers, calls after her, “Jeanette!! Come back! It’s only T.V.!”
The cartoon’s ostensible humor operates both through Jeanette’s fear of the racialized
Tonto, as well as through her inability to register the difference between a televised character and
an actual Native man. Accounts of motion picture spectators terrified by what they viewed on
screen, many of them likely apocryphal, have inspired film studies debates about viewers’ ability

1
Lu Nacy, “Car Tunes,” Reflector (State Reformatory for Women, MN), Winter 1958-1959: 19.
187
to distinguish between image and reality in the early twentieth century. Tom Gunning has
disputed repeated accounts that the audience watching Auguste and Louis Lumière’s 1895
exhibition of Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station in Paris were so fearful of the approaching
train on screen that they fled the theater, arguing that spectators were more likely delighted by
the cinematograph’s scientific achievement. Gunning posited that rather than being mistaken
about the authenticity of actualities such as Arrival of a Train, audiences likely “[recognized]
that the film image combined realistic effects with a conscious awareness of artifice,” and
experienced any shock or surprise with full awareness of the medium’s capabilities.
2
“Rather
than mistaking the image for reality,” writes Gunning, “the spectator [was] astonished by its
transformation through the new illusion of projected motion.”
3
Similarly, it is improbable that
“Jeanette” or any other imprisoned spectator would have confused televised images with their
referents. However, like the early cinematic entertainments that parodied the provincial spectator
who could not distinguish the line between physical reality and cinematic representation,
emblematized in films such as the Edison Company’s Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show
(1902), Jeanette the imprisoned TV spectator is portrayed as comically stupid in her failure to
differentiate Tonto from an actual person.
We know from Penal Press newspapers that at least some imprisoned TV watchers
encountered their first televisions within prison walls, and like the early days of cinema, jokes
about viewers being unable to separate reality from televised images signaled the newness of the
medium and viewers’ need to adapt to its conventions. Combining the novelty of the medium
with the source of Jeanette’s outburst, the racist cartoon illustrates three aspects of prison

2
Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing
Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 118.
3
Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” in Viewing
Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 118.
188
entertainment during the 1950s: the adoption of new forms of spectatorship behind bars (in
response to television, but also widescreen), the gendered dispersal of new entertainments in
officially sex-segregated environments, and the racist logics that prescribed out not only the
limits of filmic and televisual representations, but also the distribution of leisure within prisons
more broadly.
The 1950s were a period in which moving image entertainment simultaneously became
more privatized as televisions entered the domestic space of the home, but also continued to
operate as public spectacle as widescreen films mesmerized audiences. This private-public
division of moving image technology would gain specific meaning in carceral spaces as the two
mediums were acquired a part of midcentury reform efforts. In the enclosed space of the prison,
television and widescreen promised two distinct modes of viewership. Widescreen was alleged
to make prisons feel more like a “theater,” whereas televisions were professed to make prisons
feel more like a “home.” These promises, regardless of their fulfillment, appealed to both
prisoners and prison administrations, who hoped to wield greater authority over imprisoned
people at a time of social scrutiny regarding the treatment of prisons. Despite these mediums
providing amusement for many imprisoned spectators, discerning viewers pushed back against
narratives that imagined the prison as tolerable in either its supposedly theatrical or domestic
avatars. In recognition of this, this chapter examines the administrative goal of using widescreen
and television to foster the sense of a “theatrical prison” and a “domestic prison,” respectively. In
doing so, I mark the impressionistic goals of administrations, rather than real achievements in
making carceral institutions more habitable. I also catalog the range of prisoners’ responses to
these new methods of viewing moving image, as documented in the pages of Penal Press
newspapers.
189
Much of the literature on early television situates it as a product intended for domestic
consumption that facilitated private viewership within the home, in distinction to the publicness
of theatrical cinematic spectatorship. On the topic of why television sets became fixtures in the
middle-class home, Deborah Chambers has argued, “The new technology of broadcasting
offered a connection between private and public sphere, and a vital sense of community to
isolated family units living far from kin.”
4
Because of the particular place that institutionalized
people held in relation to the state and the rest of society, however, the midcentury introduction
of widescreen and television into prisons frustrates the distinction between public and private life
on which widescreen and television consumption might be understood. In opposition to TV
consumers who viewed their devices in the enclosed spaces of their homes, imprisoned people
were categorically stripped of their privacy through intense institutional scrutiny, rigid
classification systems, and surveillance by administrative regimes. Spectatorship in the prison
fundamentally destabilized the posited relationship between television and the domestic sphere,
and reconfigured the imagined audiences who collectively engaged in public cinematic
spectacles.
Given that televisions are a common (and controversial) feature in today’s prisons, it is
remarkable that we know so little about how they first got there. This chapter charts a history of
TV’s first introduction into the fabric of the carceral sphere, focusing on the attitudes of both
administrations and imprisoned people in their first contact with the medium. To achieve this, I
begin with the history of widescreen cinema in prisons, partly because the two mediums were
both introduced into prisons in the decade of the 1950s, but also because they engaged markedly
different forms of viewership. This struggle between widescreen and TV viewership—coded as

4
Deborah Chambers, “The Material Form of the Television Set: A Cultural History,” Media History 17,
no. 4 (2011): 360.
190
theatrical and domestic, respectively—tell us much about the objectives, strategies, and
outcomes of prison administrations in the postwar era, as prison populations began to swell and
administrations debated methods of reform. After historicizing the incorporation of each medium
into North American prisons, I end by describing how women’s institutions in particular adopted
televisions for the professed purpose of instilling racialized and gendered conceptions of labor,
morality, and conduct in captive women.

The Theatrical Prison: Introducing Widescreen

From a technological perspective, cinema has held the capacity for widescreen exhibition
since the end of the nineteenth century. Widescreen cinema even experienced a brief and
ultimately failed attempt to gain commercial viability in the 1920s, as studios shifted from silent
pictures to those with synchronous sound. Because of this history, John Belton has insisted,
“Widescreen was not born in the 1950s nor even in the 1920s but was the product of the first
‘large-screen’ projections of motion pictures in 1896.”
5
From the perspective of popular
spectatorship, however, widescreen did rise to become a widespread production and exhibition
format in the 1950s, and postwar viewers were able to participate in the expansion of cinema
with broadened aspect ratios that captivated viewers in this decade.
35mm gauge film stock and a 1.33:1 (also known as 4:3) aspect ratio became the
industrial standard after Thomas Edison’s assistant W. K. Dickson set them as the format for the
Edison company’s Kinetograph camera and Kinetoscope viewing device.
6
Edison and
photography entrepreneur George Eastman used these standards to out-compete their rivals who
were using different dimensions for film stock. As nickelodeons rose to prominence in the early

5
John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 5.
6
See Chapter 1 of John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
191
twentieth century, they helped set 35mm and 4:3 as standard because they used those dimensions
to exhibit their motion pictures. A brief window of experimentation opened as synchronous
sound film was invented in the late 1920s; in response, studios posited wider formats to make up
for the dimensions lost to printing an optical sound track on the filmstrip.
7
Widescreen would not
emerge again until the 1950s, first with Cinerama, and later with CinemaScope.
8
CinemaScope
was the product of Twentieth Century-Fox, and it made a big leap toward popularizing
widescreen as other companies began using CinemaScope. In 1953, CinemaScope broadened the
standard aspect ratio from the Academy’s then-standard of 1.37:1 (similar to the silent era
standard of 1.33:1) to 2.66:1 by using an anamorphic lens, which allowed cameras to capture a
greater distance. In addition to the anamorphic lens, at the level of exhibition, CinemaScope
required theaters to use broader screens on which to project their films.
9

When CinemaScope was put on the market in 1953 to exhibit widescreen films, theaters
across North America quickly adopted the format. It would be several years, however, before
prisons would adapt to the new exhibition format. To accommodate CinemaScope pictures,
prisons would need to update both their screens and their projectors. This process could be
costly, and whereas theaters could profit from showing CinemaScope pictures to their patrons,
the installation of widescreen in prisons was not remunerative. Before CinemaScope, midcentury

7
John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 43.
8
The question of what counts as “widescreen” is valuable and widely debated. My intention in this
chapter is not to debate how wide a picture must be to be constituted as widescreen. Instead, I use
“widescreen” as a synonym for the projection of Fox and other companies’ CinemaScope pictures, which
were the films most anticipated by those journalists writing in the Penal Press. Because widescreen is a
relative term used in comparison to industrial standards at a given moment, I use the term to denote the
accommodation of a new aspect ratio in prisons’ cinematic exhibition across the U.S. and Canada.
9
For more on the history of widescreen cinema, see John Belton, ed., “Widescreen,” special issue of Film
History 15, no. 1 (2003); Harper Cossar, Letterboxed: The Evolution of Widescreen Cinema (Lexington:
University of Kentucky Press, 2011); and Guy Edmonds, “Amateur Widescreen; Or, Some Forgotten
Skirmishes in the Battle of the Gauges,” Film History 19, no. 4 (2007): 401-413.
192
prisons hosted a variety of projection equipment for the movies screened at prisons. In 1952, for
instance, the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, owned two 35mm Brenkert
projectors from the RCA Corporation that were estimated to cost $25,000.
10
In another case,
when the sound quality was inadequate in the dining halls where movies were shown at
Mississippi State Penitentiary, the prison ordered a Bell and Howell projector that the prison
paper Inside World reported to be “a marvel of engineering.”
11
In 1945, one of Indiana State
Prison’s projectionists, Roland Rogers, was said to be familiar with “Simplexes, with R.C.A.
Sound Heads, Peerless Lamp Houses and a Dual Operator Sound Amplifier.”
12
This broad range
of projection equipment shows the technological fluency that imprisoned projectionists were
trained to possess even before the introduction of widescreen. This level of acumen would still
be required of prison projectionists after widescreen was installed, as well.
Whereas 1953 was the year that CinemaScope was inaugurated, and the year that it was
exhibited in many North American theaters, 1955 and 1956 were the most popular years for the
introduction of widescreen into American prisons. The renovation of prisons to accommodate
CinemaScope movies included an expanded screen. It also required either an updated projector
or a new projector lens that could adapt the image to widescreen proportions. In addition,
widescreen installation in prisons was often accompanied by the installation of an improved
sound system. Ohio Penitentiary was one of the institutions at which CinemaScope caused an
uproar in reporting in the pages of the Penal Press. In an announcement that CinemaScope would
soon be installed at the Ohio Penitentiary, Warden R. W. Alvis took to the pages of the Penal

10
Thomas A. Oates, “Projection Room Hi-Lites,” Periscope (United States Penitentiary, PA), Spring-
Summer 1952: 26.
11
“New Projector Arrives,” Inside World (Mississippi State Penitentiary), November 1952: 24.
12
Nick Kowalsi, “Available Manpower,” Lancer (Indiana State Prison), March 1945: 4.
193
Press to “wish you men of Pentown many enjoyable hours in your local theater.”
13
This
statement conformed to the trend of prisoners and prison administrators calling their institutions
“theaters,” attempting to rhetorically position carceral exhibition as theatrical exhibition. The
imprisoned author of the Ohio Penitentiary announcement viewed CinemaScope as a metaphor
for the potential of imprisoned people to expand their own consciousness, writing that while
some prisoners might take the new technology for granted, others would “think back over the
years and form a Cinema-Scope of their own, showing the forward progress, to better the ways
of inmates who live on Spring Street, Columbus, Ohio.”
14

After widescreen was installed at the prison, Ohio Penitentiary screened the folkloric
CinemaScope picture Knights of the Round Table (Richard Thorpe, 1953), which had opened
theatrically three years earlier, soon after the initial release of the CinemaScope format, and
Jupiter’s Darling (George Sidney, 1955), a newer CinemaScope picture featuring Esther
Williams. In response to seeing these films, a journalist for the Ohio Penitentiary News reported
that he overheard an anonymous spectator say, “First time I’ve seen cinemascope, looks like I’ve
been missing something” to his neighbor in the darkened auditorium.
15
Moreover, the installation
of CinemaScope allowed the paper’s journalists to research a retrospective on the history of film
exhibition at the penitentiary, reporting on the first film screenings twenty-five years earlier. The
paper remarked that in contrast to the current forms of prison spectatorship taking place in 1955,
Ohio Penitentiary spectators had not been allowed to smoke cigarettes during the exhibition of

13
R. W. Alvis, quoted in “CinemaScope Comes to Pentown,” Ohio Penitentiary News (Ohio
Penitentiary), August 20, 1955: 1.
14
“CinemaScope Comes to Pentown,” Ohio Penitentiary News (Ohio Penitentiary), August 20, 1955: 1.
15
“CinemaScope Conversion,” Ohio Penitentiary News (Ohio Penitentiary), September 10, 1955: 1.
194
So This is London (John G. Blystone, 1930) 25 years earlier, and silence had been enforced
during film screenings.
16

The arrival of widescreen projectors and screens created reverberation across the Penal
Press circuit, and journalists could use their weekly and monthly papers to comment on the
installation of widescreen at other institutions. At Louisiana State Penitentiary, for instance, the
Angolite’s editor Old Wooden Ear reported that CinemaScope screens had been erected at the
Indiana State Prison.
17
Similarly, the Menard Time (Illinois State Penitentiary) commented on
CinemaScope at the Ohio Penitentiary, which they had learned about by reading the Ohio
Penitentiary News. The article was titled “Ohio Cons See 3-D; Among First in Nation,” premised
on the erroneous belief that widescreen would present three-dimensional images.
18
In response to
the write-up in the Illinois paper, the Ohio paper wrote, “Thank you for the kind words on
Cinemascope. Would like to see all institutions adopt this new type [of] picture. Let’s hope it
happens.”
19
In examples such as this one, journalists could use Penal Press papers to dialogue
about the potential benefits of widened aspect ratios for their movie screenings, which could
create excitement in an imprisoned readership that spanned the continent.
In fulfillment of the wish that had been expressed in the Ohio paper, the Illinois State
Penitentiary would soon follow Ohio Penitentiary in adopting widescreen technology. In 1955,
the prison’s paper the Menard Time wrote, “[U]ntil last year [our prison auditorium] was as
modern—though perhaps not as plush—as any in the country. Now the situation has changed:

16
“CinemaScope Marks 25
th
Anniversary,” Ohio Penitentiary News (Ohio Penitentiary), October 1, 1955:
1.
17
“Movies Go Moderne!” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), April 14, 1956: 5.
18
“Ohio Cons See 3-D; Among First in Nation,” Menard Time (Illinois State Penitentiary), September 15,
1955: 2.
19
“Penal Press Picking,” Ohio Penitentiary News (Ohio Penitentiary), November 5, 1955: 8.
195
the era of three dimension and stereophonic sound is upon us.”
20
In this editorial, the author
laments that it was becoming difficult to secure entertaining “two dimensional” movies for the
prison’s film screenings, and expresses his support for installing widescreens in the auditorium
that could show CinemaScope films. In January 1956, the paper reported that two companies had
placed bids to perform the installation to widescreen.
21
Once the widescreens had been installed
several months later, two prisoners stood in front of the new screen they had installed to
demonstrate its size [Image 5.2].
In the following months and years, CinemaScope continued to be a sensation in North
American prisons. After a renovation of the film equipment in 1956 to accommodate
CinemaScope films, Texas State Prison boasted “king-sized” screens and Simplex projectors that
would brighten the films’ picture quality.
22
In the months following this update, Texas screened
CinemaScope films such as Love Me or Leave Me (Charles Vidor, 1955), Interrupted Melody
(Curtis Bernhardt, 1955), and Judy Garland’s A Star is Born (George Cukor, 1954). It was in
June 1956 that Nebraska State Penitentiary installed a 13x30 screen in its chapel, but was not
able to immediately show widescreen movies because the institution still had “contracts with
distributors for the old type movies.”
23
After the widescreens were installed, the penitentiary
showed films in CinemaScope, its direct widescreen competitor VitaVision, and the non-
widescreen format.
In Penal Press reports of widescreen’s arrival, many of the papers reported that prisoners
provided the labor to build and install the broadened screens. The change to widescreen was

20
“Entertainment Problems Arise,” Menard Time (Illinois State Penitentiary), October 21, 1955: 2.
21
“CinemaScope Coming to Both Local Theatres,” Menard Time (Illinois State Penitentiary), January 25,
1956: 3.
22
“Movie Screen Change Completed,” Echo (Texas State Prison), January 1956: 7.
23
“CinemaScope Comes to NSP,” Forum (Nebraska State Penitentiary), June 1956: 5.
196
initiated in part because, according Indiana State Prison’s paper the Encourager, “good small-
screen movies became increasingly hard to find,” so 10 imprisoned builders installed the
equipment to accommodate CinemaScope over five days in 1956.
24
CinemaScope installation
was not always accomplished at once, and the necessary equipment could be acquired piecemeal.
In 1958, for instance, the Sagebrush in Nevada announced that the “CinemaScope lens arrived
several weeks ago,” but that “Gene, the projectionist, is now awaiting for the wide screen to
arrive.”
25
Despite missing this screen, the paper advertised the upcoming film to be Ten
Thousand Bedrooms (Richard Thorpe, 1957), a CinemaScope film with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1.
At the administrative level, widescreen was deemed to be a reform that would aid in
rehabilitating imprisoned people from their criminal behavior. For instance, CinemaScope was
reported to be part of what was deemed “Indiana’s New Penology,” marking a larger set of
reforms that included the widened movie screens.
26
A major part of this reform narrative was that
widescreen transformed prison auditoriums, cafeterias, and chapels into spaces that more closely
resembled theatrical exhibition, thereby providing a more “real world” entertainment. In fact,
prison exhibition spaces were regularly called theaters, regardless of the fact that many of film
nights would repurpose buildings that had been designed for other purposes. Penal Press papers
regularly advertised movies as showing at the “local theater” to reinforce the impression that
prison exhibition was akin to theatrical forms of exhibition. Therefore, it was seen as a public
good that the prison could mimic theatrical spaces, since this “outside” recreation was believed
to correct criminal behavior.

24
“CinemaScope Movies Here,” Encourager (Indiana State Prison), Spring 1956: 32-33.
25
“CinemaScope Lens Arrive,” Sagebrush (Nevada State Prison), April 15, 1958: n.p. [15].
26
“CinemaScope Movies Here,” Encourager (Indiana State Prison), Spring 1956: 32.
197
To compete with the growing popularity and consumer interest in televisions, the 1950s
saw the widening of movie screens and the expansion of films’ aspect ratios. John Belton’s
Widescreen Cinema, for instance, argues that “postwar changes in the average work week,
leisure time, disposable income, and consumer interest disrupted the loyal partnership that
existed for more than twenty years between the motion picture industry and its audience.”
27
The
factors that Belton lists as contributing to the popularization of widescreen were greatly
circumscribed among imprisoned populations, however, since the “average work week” for
prison labor did not provide economic flexibility, and prison management carefully controlled
prisoners’ leisure time, which included sports, clubs, and other hobbies in addition to film
spectatorship. Nonetheless, imprisoned spectators would be among those who would interact
with the widescreen technologies that were thrust into popularity in the 1950s.
Just as theatrical spaces transitioned to widened movie screens, the nontheatrical sites of
prisons followed the film industry’s shift to wider aspect ratios, although much later than the
process occurred in theatrical venues. This delay was particularly characteristic of Canadian
prisons, which initiated entertainment reforms more trepidatiously than prisons in the United
States. Prisoners at the Manitoba Penitentiary in Canada, for instance, noted as late as 1959 that
their “movie projectors, once converted, [would be] adaptable to either Cinemascope or regular
films,” and were particularly eager to see the CinemaScope films The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953)
and Quo Vadis (Mervyn LeRoy, 1951).
28
It was also in 1959—long after CinemaScope had
saturated movie theaters in 1953, and had even become common in American prisons—that
Canada’s Kingston Penitentiary announced that it would update its screens and projector lenses

27
John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 70.
28
“Inmate Welfare Report,” Mountain Echoes (Manitoba Penitentiary), May 1959: 4. Accessed at
www.penalpress.com.
198
to accommodate CinemaScope. “Heretofore the choice of films has been hampered greatly,” one
Kingston prisoner wrote, “because only standard films could be shown with the equipment
provided.”
29

There was a great deal of joy and playfulness that could accompany the arrival of
widescreen into a prison in Penal Press reportage. The San Quentin News, for instance, published
a humorous cartoon after their CinemaScope screens were installed in 1957 to comment on the
new perceptual experiences available to the imprisoned audiences of the California prison. The
cartoon shows an imprisoned spectator sporting comically wide glasses with onlookers captioned
as saying, “Yeah. He had ‘em sent in special for the new wide screen” [Image 5.3]. Throughout
the 1950s, Louisiana State Penitentiary’s Angolite announced the construction of new movie
screens, either as replacement for screens that had been destroyed or as renovations to
accommodate the industry’s new aspect ratios. When outdoor screens were installed at two
camps in May 1955, Angolite editor Old Wooden Ear’s characteristically lighthearted movie
announcement included a blurb that read, “See our new Paranoic [sic] Screen.”
30
Clearly a spoof
on the panoramic screens that were becoming more popular in mainstream movie theaters as well
as prisons, the “paranoiac” screen was likely as much a commentary on the quality of the
prison’s movies as it was a humorous play on words. In short, the wide screen altered not only
the practices of filmmaking and spectatorship in mainstream exhibition spaces, but also in the
less studied exhibition space of the penitentiary.
As I will show in the following two sections, the introduction of televisions into prison
was a heavily gendered practice, as women were prioritized in the technology. CinemaScope, on

29
Tedi Fryer, “Sports and Entertainment,” K.P. Telescope (Kingston Penitentiary, Ontario), March 1959:
22.
30
“Movies,” Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary), May 7, 1955: 9.
199
the contrary was not widely reported in women’s-only institutions, and I have found no incidents
of it being installed in a women’s reformatory or prison. This is likely partly due to the fact that
women were a much smaller fraction of imprisoned people in the midcentury, and their
institutions lacked the financial resources and architecture required to accommodate widescreen
technologies. However, it is also notable that the perceptual qualities supposedly made capable
by CinemaScope were deeply gendered, as well. The ostensible “all-seeing” gaze of
CinemaScope was popular in pictures that featured landscapes, such as the Western. Therefore,
whereas CinemaScope did not enter theatrical venues through gender-exclusive marketing of the
medium, the unevenness of resources in carceral spaces did often preclude imprisoned women
from viewing widescreen pictures. The importance of this fact is brought into relief by the
relatively quick introduction of television into women’s institutions, which I describe in greater
detail below.

The Domestic Prison: Introducing Television

Widescreen would spread across U.S. and Canadian penitentiaries, theatricalizing the
types of spectatorship that an institution’s filmgoers could experience by mimicking the
spectacle of widescreen movies that swept exhibition in North American movie theaters.
Widescreen, however, was not the only 1950s technological innovation that would reshape
spectators’ viewing experiences in prisons. In fact, the televisions installed in recreation rooms
(and occasionally individual cells) would preserve a smaller aspect ratio for imprisoned viewers
while widescreen simultaneously broadened the parameters of cinema in prison auditoriums and
other makeshift exhibition spaces. As the two mediums competed and cooperated for viewers’
attention, widescreen was expanding the dimensions of film exhibition in prisons as televisions
were retaining those dimensions for imprisoned TV watchers. Television, in particular, was
200
believed to offer imprisoned people a more domestic (and ostensibly “home”-like) experience of
viewership, at a time when prisons were experiencing unprecedented growth.
31

The first television witnessed in a prison may have been built by Will Mason, a man
serving a life sentence at Indiana State Prison who assembled a TV from a factory kit with funds
from the prison’s administration in 1948. The administration also provided a large 8x10-foot
screen, allowing prisoners to view television programming in a format that resembled cinematic
spectatorship, since it rejected the small screen and encouraged collective, rather than private,
viewership.
32
Another early occurrence of television in a prison was staged later that year at
Minnesota State Prison, where 80 of the approximately 882 men watched a televised sporting
event. A reporter for Minnesota’s Prison Mirror wrote that “[a]t least a bushel of orchids” were
owed to the individuals who loaned and installed the R.C.A. Victor sets.
33
In the decade that
followed, prisons across the U.S. and Canada adopted a number of different methods for
introducing television into their recreational programming. The nature of these methods
depended on a prison’s recreation budget, its architecture, and the rigid systems of gender, race,
and health that regulated prison populations.
In her work on early cinema in prisons, Alison Griffiths has shown that a frequent
narrative about prison movie-watchers was the prisoner who had never seen a moving image
before his incarceration, and whose first encounter with the medium occurred within the confines
of the carceral space. This prisoner was situated, according to Griffiths, as a “pristine spectator

31
On the nature of this growth, see Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
32
Associated Press, “Convicts See World Daily—by Television,” New York Herald Tribune, June 23,
1948: 1.
33
“First Television Program,” Prison Mirror (Minnesota State Prison), October 7, 1948: 1.
201
first encountering cinema and the depicted marvels of modernity while locked up.”
34
A similar
“first encounter” sometimes shows up in stories about prisoners seeing their first televisions
while incarcerated. Certainly Jeanette from Minnesota’s reformatory in Shakopee, who confused
a television character for an actual person in this chapter’s introduction, is a parody of this
occurrence. “You know never have I yet laid my eyes on a TV set,” wrote the editor of Inside
World at Mississippi’s Parchman Farm. “I’ve seen pictures of them, yes,” he continued, “but
none in reality.”
35
Similarly, when the Menard Time in Illinois reported that the prison’s
auditorium was converted to a “tele-theater” so prisoners could watch the World Series in 1955,
the author wrote, “it was the first time many of us had an opportunity to see television.”
36

Although formal responses to television varied from institution to institution, many
prison managers and administrative personnel believed that TV could satisfy a variety of
utilitarian goals, which ranged from education to therapy. Many also believed that TV could play
a role in mollifying those individuals who had been characterized as disagreeable by prison staff.
In 1953, the New York Times picked up a story from the Spectator, a Penal Press paper from the
State Prison of Southern Michigan, regarding the implementation of television sets for the
institution’s mentally ill. The Times piece reported that the prison’s psychologist Gregory A.
Miller noticed that “[p]atients who had been disinterested and withdrawn and oblivious to their
surroundings [had] begun to perk up and take notice of the TV programs.”
37

34
Alison Griffiths, Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 136.
35
Jesse F. Durham, “Rambling with the Editor: Television Bug,” Inside World (Mississippi State
Penitentiary), September 1955: 15.
36
“Entertainment Problems Arise,” Menard Time (Illinois State Penitentiary), October 21, 1955: 2.
37
Sidney Lohman, “News and Notes from the Studios: TV Therapy,” New York Times, January 18, 1953:
X13. Reporting from the Spectator (State Prison of Southern Michigan).
202
The types of programming allowed to prisoners would have greatly depended on a
specific prison’s institutional goals. At the Stateville Prison in Illinois, for instance, prisoners
were allowed to watch any program on their televisions “except crime shows” because they were
believed to the spoil the rehabilitative potential of the medium, and guards supervised all
television activity to enforce this rule.
38
Sporting events were extremely common TV spectacles
for prisoners in the 1950s, and many prisons’ first televised programming came in the form of
baseball games such as the World Series, or other sporting events. These televised sports would
have accompanied the sporting events that occurred in carceral spaces that were played among
prisoners themselves, and were believed by administrations to provide the same sorts of
recreational comforts as playing the games oneself.
Despite the popularity of both mediums, television actually preceded widescreen at a
number of institutions. For example, TVs were first introduced to the Federal Reformatory in El
Reno, Oklahoma, in March of 1953, where the TV set “was passed from dormitory to dormitory
on a contest basis” until another set has added several months later.
39
Meanwhile, it would not be
until February 1957 that the reformatory’s spectators would be able to see the institution’s first
CinemaScope feature, the religious drama A Man Called Peter (Henry Koster, 1955), in their
auditorium.
40
The relatively quick emergence of televisions in comparison to widescreen is likely
due to the fact that many television sets were acquired by donation, whereas widescreen was
typically funded by prison administrations or prisoners’ recreation funds.
Many prisons’ first television sets were donated. In October 1956, the newspaper of
Canada’s Kingston Penitentiary published a thank-you to six local businesses (electric,

38
Anton Remenih, “Warden Favors Video to Build Prison Morale,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 9, 1953.
39
Cecil E. McCoy, “With the Editor: T.V. Statistics,” Outlook (Federal Reformatory, OK), December
1953: 3.
40
“In and Around El Reno,” Outlook (Federal Reformatory, OK), Spring 1957: 14.
203
appliance, and sporting goods stores) that donated television sets so that Kingston’s prisoners
could watch the World Series.
41
Because so many TVs were acquired in this way, prison
journalists would sometimes take to the pages of the Penal Press to solicit local readers on the
outside to donate their TVs. In another example of this, the American Legion donated a
television to Tennessee State Prison in 1952, where it was placed in the library as other TVs
were donated to the prison.
42
Minnesota State Prison received a Zenith television directly from a
sales manager at the electronics company, which one writer acknowledged, “makes us feel like
we are not entirely forgotten.”
43

In at least some circumstances, prisoners were allowed to have private televisions in their
cells to enhance this “domestic” ambience. We know this because in 1953 the Echo at Texas
State Prison reported, “When asked about the rumored carte blanche given the purchase or
reception of TV sets here at the Main Unit, Warden Moore stated that it was true. Anyone
wishing to order or have a television set sent to them may do so.”
44
Even though there were
televisions in individual cells, they were not always provided free of charge. In Seattle’s King
County Jail, metered televisions were placed in individual cells, and prisoners could pay 25 cents
to watch half an hour of programming on a 21-inch set. Although the sets were introduced on a
provisional basis, the county’s sheriff was quoted as saying, “If the prisoners behave, we will
probably keep them.”
45
One photograph from the jail shows three King County women—two
standing, one seated—attentively watching an indistinguishable show on a television placed on a

41
Telescope (Kingston Penitentiary, ON), October 1956: 21.
42
“Tennessee Pioneer TV Prison,” Inside Story (Tennessee State Prison), February 1953: 5.
43
“A Television Set Donated,” Prison Mirror (Minnesota State Prison), September 22, 1949: 1.
44
“Walls Cellhouse Wired to Run Fans All Night,” Echo (Texas State Prison), June 1953: 1.
45
Associated Press, “Seattle Jail Installs TV Sets In Cells to Entertain Prisoners,” St. Louis Post-
Distpatch, January 23, 1954: 1.
204
wooden table faced away from the cell’s bars [Image 5.4].
46
This photograph shows that even
though televisions were sometimes placed in individual cells, there could still be a collective
experience of TV viewership.
As I will explain more in the following section, women were viewed by administrations
as prime candidates for prisons’ new television sets. In addition to women’s divisions, prison
hospitals were seen as most deserving spaces for a prison’s first television set. Because it was
Angolite editor Old Wooden Ear’s goal to get television into Louisiana State Penitentiary’s
tuberculosis ward, a tuberculosis patient writing for Iowa State Reformatory’s Hawkeye wrote to
Old Wooden Ear to describe the TV situation at his own institution. “Although we don’t have
movies,” the Hawkeye journalist wrote, “we do have a great big console-model T.V. set. It helps
immensely.
47
Television, for all its potential as a leisure activity, was not strictly implemented
for the enjoyment of imprisoned viewers [Image 5.5]. For example, staff at the Butler County
Jail in Hamilton, Ohio, warned that it would disallow its prisoners from seeing a televised
basketball game after they “learned that a club had been hidden somewhere in the cell blocks,”
according to a report in Canada’s monthly Penal Press paper the Telescope.
48
According to the
Penal Press news item, when posed with the threat of withholding TV, the jail’s captives
uncovered multiple clubs, as well as other contraband, in hopes that they would be able to view
the game.

Domesticating the Prison: Television and the Female Prisoner

The midcentury television has been analyzed as a method of instructing women into the
ostensibly proper feminine roles of gendered labor. In Housework and Gender in American

46
Associated Press Wirephoto, Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky): 28.
47
“Around the Circuit,” Hawkeye (Iowa State Reformatory), February 1954: 30.
48
“New Use for TV Jail,” Telescope (Kingston Penitentiary, Ontario), June 1959: 8.
205
Television: Coming Clean, Kristi Rowan Humphreys argues that television “[a]dvertisers sought
not just to target the housewife, but to create her as an ideal consumer—to use television to
convince her of her own needs and desires for the family.”
49
Moreover, the activity of passive
television spectatorship was seen as reinforcing the docility that was expected of women in
general, and imprisoned women in particular. There ideals were thoroughly racialized, as well,
and were filtered through a regime that Sarah Haley has called the “domestic carceral sphere,” in
which black women were more vulnerable to the heavy labor of the chain gang than white
women, who were viewed as more reformable in the carceral spaces of the American South.
50

Resting on these gendered and racialized presumptions about white women’s passivity and
reformability, TV was introduced into women’s facilities with relative expediency, and quickly
became a popular pastime in the women’s reformatory, women’s prison, and women’s camps or
dorms in prisons that were not yet sex-segregated.
Women’s reformatories or camps held many fewer prisoners than their male counterparts,
and for that reason, the interactions of individual women with their television sets are often
recounted in the women’s papers of the Penal Press. These papers occasionally made jokes with
their readers about what certain women enjoyed watching, and the terrified Jeanette who opened
this chapter may have even been a parody of an actual woman. We see this intimate relationship
between women prisoners and their televisions in the poem “Lament to T.V.” from California
Institution for Women’s paper the Clarion:
Now that Sonny’s way down thar
Awhoopin’ it up in Texas;
We still have Myrt to adjust the set,

49
Kristi Rowan Humphreys, Housework and Gender in American Television: Coming Clean
(London: Lexington Books, 2016), 31.
50
See Chapter 4 of Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow
Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
206
So it really doesn’t perplex us
51

The journalists in the Clarion introduced this poem by writing, “In all seriousness, our television
sets bring us many hours of fun and entertainment and we will never stop saying thank you.
Willard wishes to take this time to apologize to Miss Mann for the way she found some of us
reclining on the floor. Won’ happen again!!”
52
This provides a hint at the types of spectatorial
decorum that women were expected to employ when watching television, and this behavior
around spectatorship was enforced by the reformatory guards. Only a month after Kingston
Penitentiary’s Telescope published a thank-you to local businesses who donated television sets,
the paper featured a women’s column in which the columnist wrote that the women incarcerated
at Kingston had handled the TV with “kid gloves.”
53
In cases such as these, we learn how
impactful televisions could be in stimulating the regimented lives of imprisoned women.
According to Lynn Spigel, television was promoted to women as a “catalyst for renewed
domestic values” in home and lifestyle magazines.
54
Examining these magazines, Spigel shows
how broadcast companies organized daytime programming to fit the perceived domestic work
schedules of women viewers. Although women prisoners were not included among projected
female “homemaker” viewers that broadcasters hoped to count among their audience, they were
nonetheless instructed to fill gendered roles of domesticity that were intended to approximate
this ideal viewer. As Joy V. Fuqua argues concerning the introduction of televisions into
hospitals, advertising attempted to capitalize on the “willful passivity offered by the TV [as] a

51
“Lament to T.V.” Clarion (California Institution for Women), April 1951: n.p. [7].
52
“Lament to T.V.” Clarion (California Institution for Women), April 1951: n.p. [7].
53
Gail Western and Muggs Harley, “Feminine Features,” Telescope (Kingston Penitentiary, Ontario),
November 1956: 7.
54
Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 2.
207
selling point for a homemaker eager to relinquish her domestic duties.”
55
For certain, in addition
to women’s reformatories and women’s sections of state prisons, prison hospitals were common
places for the introduction of televisions, and in 1955 the tuberculosis ward at Angola’s prison
hospital received a television set as a gift from a New Orleans donor.
56
The perceived “willful
passivity” described by Fuqua was especially relevant because women’s prisons and
reformatories were attempting to instill the virtues of domestic femininity both through academic
courses and through recreational activities such as the television. Even though imprisoned
women could not participate in the consumptive postwar practices often associated with
television spectatorship, imprisoned women were encouraged to demonstrate the domestic
aspirations advertised in postwar programming. At the California Institute for Women in
Tehachapi, the Clarion reported on the introduction of a television in 1951, writing that the new
entertainment was popular enough to take precedent over other activities: “Regardless of parties,
programs and picnics, the T.V. is never without an audience.”
57

One of the central arguments of Fuqua’s study is that the television was advocated as a
method for turning the hospital room into proxy for the home; the corollary for this is the
introduction of s television sets first into women’s camps as a scheme for transforming the prison
dormitory into a “home” where imprisoned women could practice televisual receptiveness. This
is made evident by the types of TV “addiction” that imprisoned women would report among
their ranks. After the curfew for television was changed from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m., for instance, one
of the women at Canada’s Kingston Penitentiary joked that the women would get “‘perma-
pleats’ in their jeans” from the resting positions they took while watching the TV set for hours at

55
Joy V. Fuqua, Prescription TV: Therapeutic Discourse in the Hospital and at Home (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2012), 87.
56
“Escape from Monotony: T-B Shut-Ins Get Long Awaited T-V,” Angolite, May 14, 1955: 1.
57
“On and About the Campus,” Clarion (California Institute for Women), March 1951: n.p. [6].
208
a time.
58
As Regina Kunzel has shown in her survey of sociological studies done in women’s
prisons, deep kinship structures formed among imprisoned women, and were often encouraged
by reformatory staff. Complex extended family structures centered on husband-wife relations
structured the cultures of many women’s and girls’ institutions, inflecting daily interactions
among imprisoned women.
59
One of the midcentury studies Kunzel cites, Rose Giallombardo’s
Society of Women, which focused on the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderson, West
Virginia, noted that “[i]n the cottages one can see the family groups sitting together in the living
room watching television or playing cards. Whenever possible, these inmates also attended
scheduled functions together, such as movies, dances, and ball games.”
60
In short, television was
among the leisure activities that women-only families were able to share within prisons and
reformatories, and strengthened familial bonds among women. It was at this same institution that
one woman, when prompted by the question of what she would do if she were the reformatory’s
warden for a day, responded that she would make Coca-Cola machines more accessible and “let
the girls watch TV when they stayed home from the movies.”
61

The choice of using the women’s camp as the laboratory for television’s introduction
rested on thoroughly gendered ideals of women’s passivity, and in particular, the perception that
television spectatorship was inactive. In fact, although women prisoners were often excluded
from early film screenings in the 1910s for fear that the film medium carried connotations of
criminality that endangered susceptible women, the fact that televisions were first introduced in

58
Tedy Fryer, “Feminine Sports and Entertainment,” Telescope, November 1959: 26.
59
See Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), especially Chapter 4.
60
Rose Giallombardo, Society of Women: A Study of a Women’s Prison (New York: John Wiley and
Sons, 1966), 171.
61
Response of Mary M., “If I Were Warden for a Day,” Eagle (Federal Reformatory for Women, WV),
Winter 1961: 16.
209
Angola’s women’s camp suggests that televisions were believed to serve an appropriately
function in women’s entertainment.
62

The television was by no means an arena in which anti-black violence and the
subjugation of black freedom struggles could be resolved, since institutions used it to reinforce
racial segregation among women. The prison television also sometimes revealed the
predilections of its viewers in regard to black social movements for civil rights. In her article “De
Profundis” for the Iowa Women’s Reformatory’s publication the Lanesdale Newsy News,
Virginia R. recounts watching an episode of ABC Close Up! titled “Walk in My Shoes”
(September 19, 1961) in the reformatory. Reflecting on the Civil Rights Movement depicted in
the episode, Virginia lamented, “I saw a number of young men, who left me with the impression
that their sole aim in life was to annihilate the entire Caucasian population.”
63
Horrified by the
specter of black violence she had viewed on the Iowa reformatory’s television, the author
nonetheless determines that she would feel similarly if placed in the situation of the episode’s
subjects. Considering that at number of women’s carceral spaces were racially segregated in the
1950s, television could provide incarcerated viewers with images that represented the gendered
and racialized practices that shaped their lives within the carceral domain.
64

Conclusion

62
In “Media in the Women’s Reformatory: The (Slow) Rise of Entertainment Culture and Anxiety About
Cinema,” Alison Griffiths discussed the exclusion of women from seeing early films at New York’s
Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Presented at the 2016 Society of Cinema and Media Studies
Conference, Atlanta, GA.
63
Virginia R., “De Profundis,” Lanesdale Newsy News (Women’s Reformatory, IA), October-November
1961: 13.
64
See Sasha Torres, Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2003).
210
In the decades following the 1950s, television in particular has become associated with
the experience of living in a prison in the popular imagination. In today’s TV and movies,
prisons often feature television among the day-to-day activities of imprisoned characters, either
in their cells or a common recreation room. In parody of how the televisual rendering of prison
life has even affected prisoners’ collective sense of their reality, California’s imprisoned
cartoonist Passaro drew two imprisoned men sitting on folding chairs, watching television news
of the 1970 uprising by George Jackson and the Soledad Brothers at their own institution [Image
5.6.]. In the drawing, the television exclaims, “Flash! … Prison Riot … Inmates Out of Control
… Soledad Blah! … Blah … Blah …” Confused by the representation of himself and his
institution presented by the television, one of the men turns to his companion to ask, “Is that
right?” This cartoon satirizes how television participated in constructing dominant narratives of
events in which imprisoned people participated, such as the uprising led by the Soledad Brothers.
In it, we get a sense of how televised images shaped and delimited the types of collective identity
that could be imagined among imprisoned people.
Today, televisions are sometimes used as “evidence” that prison life is luxurious and
indulgent for those who are viewed as undeserving of leisure. In response to a Southern
California Public Radio report on the 2011 prison hunger strikes staged in reaction to the
California prisons’ broad use of solitary confinement cells termed SHU (secure housing units),
one online commenter wrote, “I’m sorry, but free cable television is not a basic human right.
Recreation time is not a basic human right.”
65
The question of taxpayer dollars going to these
technologies features prominently in a great number of these arguments, since many feel they are

65
Comment on Julie Small, “California Prisoners Again Refusing to Eat,” Southern California Public
Radio, September 27, 2011. www.scpr.org/news/2011/09/27/29122/california-prisoners-again-refusing-
eat. Accessed August 1, 2017.
211
subsidizing the leisure time of the people they imagine to be the most violent members of
society. New digital media forms such as touchscreen tablets have begun to make their way into
select prisons, renewing old anxieties but updating them to conform to the most modern
technologies. These concerns recuperate the fears of “anti-coddlers” in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, who insisted that imprisoned people were unworthy of the amusements
and diversions practiced by free people.
However, we can see the television as a more complex and potentially pernicious tool for
administrative management when we study the TV’s first entrance into prisons, reformatories,
and other state and federal institutions. Instead of simply being amenities, both television and
widescreen were introduced by prison administrations for the purpose of controlling imprisoned
people and reinforcing racial and gender hierarchies within institutional settings. The
surveillance that attended these technologies could be overt, such as the early adoption of CCTV,
but the use of broadcast media as a reward allowed administrations to control their populations
using less explicit methods. For this reason, although television and widescreen were introduced
as part of midcentury prison reform mobilization, they were a fundamental component of
systematic regulation from the beginning. Rather than being interpreted as a luxury provided at
taxpayer expense, these media and their contemporary corollaries can be correctly interpreted as
techniques used for governing.

212

Image 5.1. Lu Nacy, “Car Tunes,” The Reflector (State Reformatory for Women, Minnesota),
Winter 1958-1959: 19.

213
Image 5.2. Two men stand in front of a newly installed screen at Illinois State Penitentiary to
demonstrate the screen’s size. One the screen is a projection of Anything Goes (1956). The
Menard Time (Illinois State Penitentiary), April 30, 1956: 1.

214

Image 5.3. Prisoner believes he needs new “widescreen” glasses to view widescreen films.
Logan, The San Quentin News (CA), July 25, 1957: 3.

215
Image 5.4. Women watch television for 25 cents per half hour at Seattle’s King County Jail.
Associated Press Wirephoto, The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky): 28.

216

Image 5.5. Bill Martin, The Telescope (Kingston Penitentiary, ON), February 1958: 37.
217

Image 5.6. Passaro, Soledad Star News (Soledad State Prison, California), September 3, 1971.

218
Conclusion
Abolishing the Prison: A Lesson from Defunct Technologies

This conclusion is a prayer for obsolescence. As moving images increasingly became
unmoored from celluloid with the rise of digitally produced images, film scholars correctly
prophesized that film stock would soon vanish as the primary method of exhibition. Asking
whether the disintegration and displacement of celluloid fundamentally reshaped the viewing
experience, D. N. Rodowick asked the question this way: “What is left … of cinema as it is
replaced, part by part, by digitization? Is this the end of film, and therefore the end of cinema
studies?”
1
The question that emerged from the study of cinema was this: Do we inhabit the era of
film’s ruin? For my purposes in this conclusion and in the larger project itself, I want to restate
the question in this way: Do we inhabit the era of film’s abolition? This restatement pushes the
provocative question of film’s “death” into the purview of language that activists use when they
call for the creation social configurations in which the prison will no longer feasible as a primary
method of confinement, punishment, and social control.
Rodowick’s theorization of film’s death is fascinating in the way he makes it a central
problem for the field of film scholarship. He argues, “The birth of film studies is concomitant
with the death of cinema.” And he goes on to ask the question: “Can any other discipline
characterize its history as rising on the decline of its object?” I’ve become obsessed with this
idea of an intellectual field rising as its object of study wanes. For the best prison studies
scholars, it is in fact the central aspiration: to cultivate a robust scholarly community to better
understand the political and cultural machinations of contemporary regimes of captivity, while

1
D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 8.
Emphasis added. See also, John Belton, “If Film is Dead, What is Cinema?” Screen 55, no. 4 (2014): 460-
470.
219
simultaneously witnessing the weakening of the field’s central object of study (the prison).
Here’s the point: film studies may indeed be exceptional as a field that flourishes as its object
decays. For film studies this has sometimes been a crisis: How do we study film stock after
conservation measures have failed to preserve it? For prison studies, however, the degradation
of the object is not a crisis but a yearning.
In fact, critical prison studies is the contemporary field of study that most robustly
attempts to theorize abolition, and in particular, the abolition of its field of study. As Dylan
Rodriguez has recently written in the online journal Abolition, “Abolitionists are the people who
imagine, practice, wage, and thrill in the radical and irrevocable destruction of things for the sake
of something/anything else, whether it’s the end of things as we know them or some kind of
revolutionary possibility.”
2
As Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have provocatively written, the
object of abolition is “not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that
could have prisons.”
3
This is a bold and auspicious prospect because it would mean an end to the
conditions that made that film culture possible in prisons, and therefore the entire grounds of this
study. I wish for such a possibility not as a means to deprive such culture to marginalized people
as decades of segregated film spectatorship have done, but instead to imagine what fuller and
freer cultural formations might spring forward in the wake of freedom for the nation’s millions
of captives.
Through this lens, I am passionate about the possibility of articulating a technology’s
abolition, even from within a field that takes that technology as its primary object of study, and I

2
Dylan Rodríguez, “The Production of Freedom and Liberation from Within Collective
Rebellion, Insurgency, and Community,” Abolition (2015): https://abolitionjournal.org/dylan-rodriguez-
abolition-statement/.
3
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York:
Autonomedia, 2013), 42.
220
find inspiration in the plausibility of suggesting that the object of your own scholarly discipline
might soon disintegrate. What is most promising, I believe, is the legibility of such a concern
within film studies. Meanwhile, although the “death of the object” sprang up noisily in film
theory, such a question still cannot yet be posed so legibly within the study of imprisonment. As
a way to learn lessons from defunct technologies (in this case, material film stock), I suggest that
prison studies is making precisely the demand that Rodowick claims has only occurred in film
studies: that is, the demand that your object of study become obsolete (a nod to Angela Davis’s
famous question “Are prisons obsolete?”).
4
In short, the object of film studies is a technology
that is perishing, whereas the object of prison studies is a technology that the scholar actively
wishes to destroy, despite the reality that states of human captivity have an overwhelming
probability to endure in the United States and globally. The plausibility of the prison’s passing
has not yet arrived in public discussions around human confinement, but I hope that film’s
abolition can offer a blueprint for envisioning the obliteration of another medium: the prison.
This dissertation is bookended historically by the introduction of cinema into prisons in
the early 1900s and the introduction of television in in the 1950s. However, moving images and
other entertainment technologies have continued to permeate prison life since the midcentury.
Although the particular mediums and formats have changed depending on the institution, its
administration, and the desires of its imprisoned users, prisons have begun experimenting most
recently with the introduction of tablets with limited features for use by imprisoned people. The
goal of this initiative has been to connect imprisoned people with the outside world through
technology, but criticisms of the practice have emerged, both from advocates on behalf of
prisoners as well as from those who believe that prisons should be free from comfort and

4
Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002).
221
diversion. Nonetheless, by 2018, nineteen states had offered tablets in some form to prisoners,
creating a new interface between imprisoned people and a technology used prominently by
people on the outside. What’s more, new accounts of prisoners’ “first encounters” with the
prison tablets are remarkably similar to those of earlier stories of prisoners first encountering
television and cinema.
One of these prison tablet companies is GTL (Global Tel Link). The company website
describes its product as such: “GTL Inspire inmate tablets have revolutionized the corrections
space—both behind the bars and in administrative areas. Deployed in facilities across the
country, tablets offer more than just entertainment. They can help modify behavior, enable
communication, and increase facility security, control, and operational efficiencies.”
5
Within a
jail or prison, the tablet is referred to as an ICD (Inmate Communication Device), and it has been
adopted by numerous prisons and jails across the country.
6
It is notable that the device’s function
is “more than just entertainment,” since its value to the consumer (prison administrations) is
through its more pernicious uses “modify behavior” and “increase facility security.” Of course,
similar arguments were made about the exhibition of cinema. As we have seen, movies were
shown in excess of their ability to entertain, and prison administrations very much wanted them
to pacify a prison populace and make their institutions more “secure” from the rebellions that
could result from prisoners’ grievances.
In many instances, however, the services provided by prison tablets come with a cost,
despite the fact that they are often given to prisoners as a “free” activity. Since the tablets do not
provide widescale Internet service, imprisoned users “have to pay for the services they use,

5
GTL, “GTL Tablet Solutions,” www.gtl.net/gtl-tablet-solutions/
6
“Inmates Testing Tablets at the Pima County Jail,” KGUN9 (Tucson, Arizona), January 15, 2016,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AStxTPx6Nw0.
222
which include email, video calls, downloads of games, music, movies and books from a limited
selection.”
7
The costs of these services can be astronomical, as shown by this an article by
Michael Waters, who comments on JPay, one of the prison tablet providers:
JPay charges an additional $4.15 service fee to transfer $20 from the outside to an inmate
[sic]. Sending one email costs $.35, double that to include a photo, and quadruple to
include a video. A song can cost up to $2.50, and an album can be—somewhat
inexplicably—as much as $46. Chat with a loved one? That’ll be $18 per hour. But even
these prices fluctuate during busy seasons. For instance, WIRED reported that the price
of an email might increase from $.35 to $.47 around Mother’s Day, when inmates [sic]
most want to communicate with loved ones.
8

Of course, these costs are compounded by the fact that imprisoned men and women are not
properly remunerated for their labor, often making only a few cents for an hour of work. Add to
this the enormous economic pressures that are placed on imprisoned people and their families
through exorbitant court fees, the costs of losing an income, and the expenses to travel to visit for
incarcerated people in remote locations, and the prison tablet has high value as a money-making
venture to capitalize on imprisoned peoples’ desire to communicate. As Human Rights Defense
Center executive director Paul Wright sees it, “This is just a means to monetize human contact.”
9

One of the most alarming outcomes of the prison tablet, however, has been its use as a
proxy for in-person contact between prisoners and their loved ones. In some circumstances, it has
replaced face-to-face contact so thoroughly that some institutions have ended the in-person
visiting hours entirely, such as at the Jefferson Parish correctional center in New Orleans, where
free in-person meetings between prisoners and their loved ones have been entirely supplanted by

7
Diana Kruzman, “In U.S. Prisons, Tablets Open Window to the Outside World,” Reuters, July 18, 2018,
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-prisons-computers/in-u-s-prisons-tablets-open-window-to-the-
outside-world-idUSKBN1K813D.
8
Michael Waters, “The Outrageous Scam of ‘Free’ Tablets for the Incarcerated,” The Outline, August 10,
2018, https://theoutline.com/post/5760/free-tablets-in-prison-nightmare.
9
Quoted in Diana Kruzman, “In U.S. Prisons, Tablets Open Window to the Outside World,” Reuters, July
18, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-prisons-computers/in-u-s-prisons-tablets-open-window-
to-the-outside-world-idUSKBN1K813D.
223
video calls that cost $12.99 each.
10
In short, this new communication technology—which has
been heralded as a convenient way to connect imprisoned people to their families—is actually
playing a role in an increasing number of institutions’ decision to end the only face-to-face
interaction that prisoners may have with loved ones on the outside.
As with film and television, there is an ambivalence in these technologies, as the prison
tablets are of course used and enjoyed by many people.
11
Like earlier entertainment technologies
in prison, however, these tablets serve to delimit the possibilities of what life might look like in
other circumstances, in which the human body could interact with technological innovation free
of the structures of incarceration. This is the goal of a critical prison studies project: to unmake
the carceral world so that what once seemed enjoyable is sunk by an explosion of new joys.

10
Shannon Sims, “The End of American Prison Visits: Jails End Face-to-Face Contact and Families
Suffer,” Guardian, December 9, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/09/skype-for-
jailed-video-calls-prisons-replace-in-person-visits.
11
For instance, see a review of the GTL tablet by a formerly imprisoned musician who used his tablet to
listen to and compose music. Work Harder Productions, “GTL Tablets in Pa. Prisons,”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LudeerlmYhc.
224

Primary Sources

Penal Press Periodicals

Arizona
Cactus Blossom (Arizona State Prison)

California
Bulletin (San Quentin Prison)
Clarion (California Institution for Women)
Folsom Observer (Folsom Prison)
Represa Sports-Telegram (Folsom Prison)
Rock (United States Disciplinary Barracks)
San Quentin News (San Quentin Prison)

Hawaii
Paahao Press (Oahu Prison, Hawaii)

Illinois
Joliet Prison Post (Joliet Prison)
Menard Time (Illinois State Penitentiary)

Indiana
Encourager (Indiana State Prison)
Hill Top-ic (Indiana State Farm)
Lancer (Indiana State Prison)
Reflector (Indiana State Reformatory)

Iowa
Anamosa Prison Press (Iowa Men’s Reformatory), also known as Reformatory Press
Hawkeye (Iowa State Reformatory)
Lanesdale Newsy News (Women’s Reformatory)
Presidio (Iowa State Prison)
Tattler (Iowa Training School for Girls)

Louisiana
Angola Argus (Louisiana State Penitentiary)
Angola News (Louisiana State Penitentiary)
Angolite (Louisiana State Penitentiary)
225
Rebel News (Louisiana Correctional and Industrial School)

Manitoba
Mountain Echoes (Manitoba Penitentiary)

Michigan
Hill Top News (Michigan Reformatory)
Marquette Inmate (Michigan State House of Correction and Branch Prison)
Northlander (State House of Correction and Branch Prison)
Spectator (State Prison of Southern Michigan)

Minnesota
Prison Mirror (Minnesota State Prison)
Reflector (State Reformatory for Women)
Reformatory Pillar (Minnesota State Reformatory)

Mississippi
Inside World (Mississippi State Penitentiary)

Nebraska
Forum (Nebraska State Prison)
Monocle (Nebraska State Reformatory)

Nevada
Rainbow (Nevada State Prison)
Sagebrush (Nevada State Prison)

Oklahoma
Outlook (Federal Penitentiary)

Ohio
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Ohio Penitentiary News (Ohio State Penitentiary)

Ontario
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226
Tennessee
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227
Archives, State Libraries, and Historical Societies

Arizona
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California
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Government Publications
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Indiana
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Minnesota
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228
Special Collections

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Nevada
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Ontario
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Douglas Library
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Texas
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Wisconsin
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Creator Mitchell, Joshua Anthony (author)

Core Title The prisoner's cinema: film culture in the penal press before 1960

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 07/26/2019

Defense Date 02/08/2019

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag film audiences,film exhibition,nontheatrical film,OAI-PMH Harvest,Prison,race and ethnicity

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Keeling, Kara (committee chair), Serna, Laura Isabel (committee member), Shah, Nayan (committee member)

Creator Email joshua.anthony.mitchell@gmail.com,mitc153@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-193343

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Legacy Identifier etd-MitchellJo-7634.pdf

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Document Type Dissertation

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Rights Mitchell, Joshua Anthony

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