This database is freely available to the general public via the Internet.

On March 24, 1800, Forlorn Hope became the first newspaper published within a prison by an incarcerated person. In the intervening 200 years, over 450 prison newspapers have been published from U.S. prisons. Some, like the Angolite and the San Quentin News, are still being published today. American Prison Newspapers brings together hundreds of these periodicals from across the country into one collection that will represent penal institutions of all kinds, with special attention paid to women's-only institutions.

Development of the American Prison Newspapers collection began in July 2020 and will continue through 2022, with new content added regularly. The source material for the collection is being provided by numerous libraries and individuals from across the country. The collection was made Open Access in July 2021 thanks to the funding contributions from libraries listed here and a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Reveal Digital will undertake diligent efforts to protect the privacy of individuals depicted in the pages of the publications in this collection, and will take steps to notify the individuals and institutions that have contributed to the publications in this collection. If you are a writer, editor, or other contributor to a publication made available as part of American Prison Newspapers and encounter personal information of any kind that should be removed from view, please write to Reveal Digital to request its removal:

Reveal Digital
101 Greenwich St, 18th Floor
New York, NY 10010
+ 1 212-358-6400
support.revealdigital@ithaka.org

Please include an address or any other contact information at which you can be reached, and Reveal Digital will respond as soon as possible.

Feel free to contact Reveal Digital at support.revealdigital@ithaka.org with any further questions about the availability of the newspapers in this collection. More information about this collection can be found here.

Reveal Digital legal notice:

American Prison Newspapers aims to create a faithful digital reproduction of the collective works as they originally appeared in print and pursuant to 17 U.S.C Section 201(c) of the Copyright Act. Please note that if content items in the American Prison Newspapers collection reference permissible terms of use, such as a Creative Commons license, users may make use of such items in accordance with the stated terms of such license as further detailed in the JSTOR Terms and Conditions of Use.

1800-2020