In the early fall of 2020, my phone meeting with the op-ed and politics editors of the New York Times went great. After presenting pitches for several articles, the editors settled on one about the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) of 1996 as it relates to populist politics and the spate of federal executions in 2020. As an incarcerated journalist, publishing an article from prison in a legacy newspaper would be a huge break.

The opportunity came about when a friend reached out to a journalist I’ll call “Dee,” who previously worked at the New York Times and wrote about the death penalty. My friend also sent Dee some of my previously published work about the politics and policies of mass incarceration written for the publication Scalawag. Dee liked my work and helped coordinate a meeting with two editors from the newspaper to potentially provide an opportunity to publish from prison.

Two weeks later, we sent the op-ed over to the politics editor, who acknowledged receiving the piece.

Then we waited.

A week went by and my friend followed up. The editor assured her they’d get back to us in time. Another week went by, and subsequent emails were ignored. It became clear to us that the editors for some reason changed their minds about publishing the piece. Dee was likewise unresponsive to emails.

Both Prisons and the Publishing Industry Uphold Barriers for Incarcerated Writers

About a month later, another friend alerted me to an article Dee published with the New York Times. The piece was similar to my AEDPA pitch, except Dee’s version skewed death penalty statistics and misinformed readers likely unfamiliar with the nuances of capital punishment. I tried to excuse it as a coincidence. However, several months later, Dee published another article with a prestigious magazine that also mimicked one of the pitches she heard me present to editors at her newspaper. Ostensibly the article was about innocent people on death row, but it was offensive to anyone trying to prove a wrongful conviction. Like the AEDPA article, Dee’s conservative slant parroted tough-on-crime talking points.

What frustrated me more than having an opportunistic parachute journalist “borrow” my ideas to create misinformation—and what discouraged me more than my inability to do anything about it—was how I thought I’d finally made it in the publishing industry and would be able to publish from prison, only to discover that success was still out of my reach.

Read the full article about the barriers to publishing from prison by Lyle C. May at Prism Reports.