Everyone has the right to tell their story and share their creativity, including those incarcerated behind prison walls. Despite limited opportunities to express themselves amid prison restrictions and rules, the climate is changing. Prison residents have more access to education, including college; training and mentoring in the creative arts; and the publishing, exhibiting and performing of their works in the outside world.
Leading this change is a dedicated cohort of news outlets, journalists, multimedia creators, academics, activists, funding sources and former and current prison residents. Their collaboration is “freeing” more prisoners to learn, write and create, and often with skills and talents many don’t know they have. More of them can pursue writing and creative careers while they’re incarcerated and after they’re released. They are better prepared to reintegrate with the outside world and find meaningful employment and a better life.
Among them is Benjamin Frandsen, who was incarcerated in California for many years. After he was released, he earned a degree from Merced College. Some of his articles were published in Incarcerated Voices, a publication of the Freeform Radio Initiative, and by the Prison Journalism Project.
After his release, Frandsen enrolled at UCLA, and his life’s journey was a UCLA Magazine cover story. Because of the huge social media response to the article, Frandsen launched the Ben Free Podcast. He and his guests discuss issues related to rehabilitation and recidivism and how to train and mentor prisoners to become better writers and more literate. As his guests and others in restorative justice asked him to collaborate with them, Frandsen created a nonprofit — the Ben Free Project (BFP). He is the executive director.
According to its mission statement, “Through curated education, training, intervention and self-help curricula for system-impacted individuals, our mission is to create social change while centering the voices of those most impacted by the carceral state.”
Becoming a nonprofit allowed Frandsen to apply for grants and bid on contracts to fulfill BFP’s mission. It recently won a contract with the California Arts Council to provide creative arts programming at Lancaster State Prison, which Frandsen has titled Comic Creation.
“We want to establish long-term mentorships with our program participants after their release. I hope that prison residents learn that journalism is not just a powerful way to tell stories, but also a potential career. It becomes much more valuable. It’s not theoretical; the person is learning now,” Frandsen said.
The Vanguard Carceral Journalism Guild
In March 2024, BFP and Vanguard Incarcerated Press (VIP), the publishing platform of the Vanguard News Group, formed the Vanguard Carceral Journalism Guild (VCJG). Founded in 2022 by David Greenwald, the executive director and editor, “VIP seeks to empower incarcerated voices through critical consciousness-raising, professional training and education, and the provision of meaningful community integration.”
“The more prison residents are involved in these programs, the better their lives will be. Once most of the prison residents we work with are paroled, they don’t go back to a life of crime. They’re attending college, working a job and advancing their lives,” said Greenwald.
“The Ben Free Project and Vanguard formed VCJG because we thought it would be much better if incarcerated writers could pick their topics like news on the ground, but from inside. We started publishing directly from inside using Wi-Fi tablets, phone calls and other communications. That changed everything. There are now more than 50 articles on the Witness page on Vanguard’s website. We’ve bypassed the typical requirements that topics must be approved in advance. David is giving these writers carte blanche anonymity to publish,” Frandsen said.
The mindsets of prison officials are changing, and often rapidly, as they now understand that the opportunities BFP, the Guild and others provide residents make administrators’ work easier.
Ghostwrite Mike and The Mundo Press
Developing and conducting various journalism, writing and creative arts programs for prison populations is a collaborative effort, but some people shine brighter in their dedication and passion. He writes under the nom de plume Ghostwrite Mike as a carceral state resident in California. He prompted this Editor & Publisher article and introduced its writer to Frandsen and the Ben Free Project. Ghost said there was a bigger story to write about carceral journalism.
“Benjamin became prolifically published in ways few before him have been from prison, and when he got out and graduated from UCLA, he built a nonprofit that included our voices, ideas and content. He staged our work on campus at the Unchained Voices Restorative Justice Festival at UCLA, which speaks to his generosity and solidarity with those of us who are still in the box,” Ghost said.
Before his incarceration, Ghost was a creative media professional, working as a marketing manager, creative director and recording artist/songwriter. He is a published poet and digital media artist. Ghost contributes articles to Ben Free Publishing, VCJG’s Witness platform, the Prison Journalism Project, Columbia Exchange and many other publications and sites.
Ghost began as the carceral program developer for BFP and is the most prolific carceral journalist in the country. He has been the single largest contributor to BFP’s journalist efforts and co-created Barz Behind Bars (B3) with another prison resident whose nom de plume is The Mundo Press (Mundo). He is the carceral mentor coordinator for BFP. B3 is a poetry/rap-focused literary workshop. Ghost and Mundo collaborate on a long list of projects and programs, including the Inner Views audio podcast interview series and are program and mentor coordinators, respectively, of the Art of Recovery & Therapy peer-mentored-facilitated creative arts workshops.
“I came to prison with a learning disability. Ghost was my reading tutor, and he used poetry to teach me language, idiom, form and cadence. He mentored me from a functionally illiterate state to a level of emotional intelligence and word mastery,” Mundo said.
Ghost is quick to express his gratitude to Horton, Frandsen, Greenwald, Hinton, Thompson and others. He describes Horton as a part inner-voice confidant, teacher and friend, who invited Ghost to sit on Radical Reversal’s Mellon-funded nonprofit’s board of directors from prison. He credits Hinton and Thompson with “amplifying our right to work and normalize our existence in ways few others can.”
“When I appeared on the Everyday Injustice podcast with David, I articulated a vision that we have since realized. The Witness page features the ecosystem I never had for myself when I looked at the carceral journalism space a few years ago,” Ghost said.
Ghost and Mundo were awarded the first Vanguard Fellowships in 2024. They were also nominated in January 2025 for the Stillwater Awards, co-sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists and the Prison Journalism Project.
To celebrate the work and mentorship of Ghost and Mundo in their prison environment, E&P readers are encouraged to read some of their articles.
A prestigious board and advisers boost the mission of BFP and VCJG
As BFP and VCJG networked with more people in the criminal justice and carceral rehabilitative space and demonstrated proof of concept with the publication of incarcerated journalists’ and writers’ articles, both organizations began to attract a prestigious group who are board members and advisers.
Prominent among those is Elizabeth Hinton, a professor of history and African American Studies at Yale University and a professor of law at Yale Law School. She is also co-director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. She has been widely published in academia and the public market, including her 2016 book, “From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America.”
Of equal accomplishments and respect is Dr. Heather Ann Thompson who is also a VCJG board member. She is a historian at the University of Michigan and, as an author, she received the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize for “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.” Her articles appear regularly in The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, The Atlantic and many other major publications and news outlets. Thompson was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the U.S.
“Along with Elizabeth Hinton and our advisory collective, we have taken and will continue to take VCJG issues into the room at our respective conferences, talks, symposiums, interviews, books, articles, journal papers, op-eds, podcast appearances and classrooms. When appropriate, we will convene and shape conversations about the normalization of this work, build allyships to facilitate interviews and engagements with the exceptional folks in our society to which the VCJG writers might not otherwise gain access from confinement,” Thompson said.
Randall Horton brings a unique perspective to his position on the BFP board as its director of performing arts programs. He overcame seven felony convictions to earn undergraduate and master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in poetry. His works have been widely published, and he has received numerous awards, including two American Book Awards for his poetry. He is also an associate professor of English at the University of New Haven.
Horton is the co-creator of Radical Reversal, an experimental poetry band. It’s also the name of his nonprofit organization, which installs recording and performing labs in detention centers and correctional facilities. In those spaces, the Radical Reversal team “conducts poetry workshops, seminars in music and music production, readings and performances.”
“I’ve seen it happen, especially among younger residents, that our programs give them a boost of confidence. They may not say much and sit in the background when they first visit our space until they realize they can create music. We explain that there’s another way to approach life through the creative process and imagination,” Horton said.
News outlets across the country can help to promote carceral journalism and creative expression outside prison, according to Thompson.
“News outlets like yours, deserve praise for devoting resources to this work — this is precisely what we need, as well as the voices of folks on the inside writing pieces for publications such as Editor & Publisher. They need to be commissioned directly to produce content. It is great to tap into what, say, Hinton or I am doing, but we need more carceral journalists being published, quoted, interviewed, etc. They are doing the work and the heavy lifting. They are the writers that journalists on the outside don’t talk to enough and outside publications don’t commission to write pieces often enough. I'd start there,” Thompson said.
Bob Sillick has held many senior positions and served a myriad of clients during his 47 years in marketing and advertising. He has been a freelance/contract content researcher, writer, editor and manager since 2010. He can be reached at bobsillick@gmail.com.
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