News
This prison newspaper has been publishing for more than a century
Previous issues of the Prison Mirror, which has been publishing since 1887, sit on display in the Minnesota Correctional Facility – Stillwater.
Kerem Yücel/MPR News
hide caption
toggle caption
Kerem Yücel/MPR News
Inside a state prison near Stillwater, Minn., past the armed guards and the wings of cells stacked one on top of another, tucked in the corner of a computer lab, Richard Adams and Paul Gordon are fervently discussing grammar.
Both men are on staff at the Prison Mirror, a newspaper made by and for the people held at the Minnesota Correctional Facility – Stillwater. Gordon had written a profile on the prison art instructor. He read it aloud to Adams.
“I was curious if there was a certain style or something he preferred to paint. ‘When I get time I like Bob Ross, the guy that does the painting on the TPT channel,’” Gordon recited, referencing the Twin Cities’ PBS channel. Adams leaned in, a confused look on his face, and asked him to repeat the sentence.
“Is that what he said?” Adams asked. “It sounds like you’re saying you like the guy from the TPT channel.” He suggested Gordon add an attribution to the quote, like “he said” or “he replied.”
Conversations like this have been happening in this prison for more than a century. The Prison Mirror is one of the oldest prison newspapers in the country, running since 1887. Publications like this aren’t common, but in an era where many journalism outlets in the free world are struggling to thrive amid scores of layoffs, journalism behind bars is actually growing.
Richard Adams, left, Paul Gordon, center; and Patrick Bonga make up the staff of the Prison Mirror at the Minnesota Correctional Facility – Stillwater. The men say they’re limited in what they can write about, but they still find meaning in the work.
Kerem Yücel | MPR News
hide caption
toggle caption
Kerem Yücel | MPR News
“Overall we do see a growth and a lot of interest in starting publications, starting podcasts even. And so that’s really quite exciting,” says Yukari Kane, CEO of the Prison Journalism Project.
Thirty years ago, she says there were estimated to be only six prison newspapers. Today, there are more than two dozen. That doesn’t take into account the hundreds of incarcerated writers submitting work to publications on the outside, like The Marshall Project’s Life Inside series.
Kane says this kind of work can offer a window into what prison is actually like, one that prison administrators aren’t necessarily going to offer up freely.
“There’s a lot of information that people who are inside prisons see and are experiencing every day. There’s some reporting that can only be done from inside,” she says.
Even if a newspaper doesn’t circulate far beyond the prison yard, it can offer a sense of empowerment for its writers.
“Having a newspaper, it’s beneficial to everybody. It informs the population. It gives you a voice,” Gordon says. “There’s a quote I like: You can either be an agent of destiny or a victim of it.”
Patrick Bonga, a senior editor, works on the layout for the latest issue of the Prison Mirror at the Stillwater prison.
Kerem Yücel | MPR News
hide caption
toggle caption
Kerem Yücel | MPR News
The Stillwater prisoners write book reviews, legal explainers, and summaries of local, national and international events for the monthly newspaper. One man recently submitted an essay on homesickness. Another wrote an editorial criticizing lockdowns. The men on staff — there are only three of them — had to apply for these unpaid jobs, and they’re highly sought after.
Adams says the job requires a lot of reading and research about what’s going on around the world and the prison. There are challenges. They don’t have the internet, for instance, so they have to rely on print media and articles printed out by prison staff.
‘They do have freedom of the press technically, but they’re not free themselves’
The prison also has to approve everything the paper publishes. The men say that can limit what they write about, especially if they want to report on the harsher aspects of their lives.
“I am limited in the sense of, they’re not going to let me print all types of crazy things about the water or the lockdowns or getting restrained or anything like that, which is understandable to a degree,” Gordon says.
Last fall, around 100 Stillwater prisoners refused to return to their cells. Gordon says the disobedience was their way of protesting extreme heat, poor water quality, and staffing shortages, which he says often result in lockdowns. He plans to write about it, but says he has been retaliated against in the past for sending reporting to outside publications.
“I was a lot more aggressive in my writing back then, and that was a learning experience for me,” he says.
Paul Gordon, who has been in prison for nearly 20 years, says he hopes “to write something that matters.”
Kerem Yücel | MPR News
hide caption
toggle caption
Kerem Yücel | MPR News
Brian Nam-Sonenstein, a senior editor at the Prison Policy Initiative, says punishment for doing journalism behind bars is common.
“You can lose what are called good time credits, which are essentially time off of your sentence based on good behavior. You could go to solitary confinement. You could have your privileges revoked,” he says.
“They do have freedom of the press technically, but they’re not free themselves,” says Kane, of the Prison Journalism Project. “So they do face consequences in and potentially with the work that they do.”
Plus, having everything approved by prison administration can undermine the whole journalistic endeavor, though the ability to write freely varies widely across prisons, Nam-Sonenstein says.
“Incarcerated newsrooms are not necessarily fully captured organs of prisons, but we do have to recognize the constraints that are placed on them, especially when we compare it to free world journalism,” he says.
Marty Hawthorne, an instructor at the prison who oversees the paper, says he believes the prisoners have “right to do what they’re doing,” when it comes to publishing the newspaper.
Kerem Yücel | MPR News
hide caption
toggle caption
Kerem Yücel | MPR News
Marty Hawthorne works at the Stillwater prison and oversees the Prison Mirror.
“They have a lot of freedom. My philosophy is: It’s their newspaper. It’s not my newspaper,” he says. “I believe they have a right to do what they’re doing.”
He says if the men plan to publish something critical, he makes sure whoever they’re writing about has an opportunity to respond. But he says he also pushes back when leadership tries to censor stories he believes are fair.
“Because that is my job,” he says. “They’re incarcerated people, right? They don’t have power or authority. Somebody has to speak up for them in these places.”
Gordon, who has been serving a life sentence for nearly 20 years for murder, has been working at the paper only for a few months.
“I believe my job is only to lay out the positions, and then let people come to their own conclusion,” he says. “I hope to write something that matters and through writing, I hope to leave a much different footprint than the one I’ve already left on the world.”
Patrick Bonga, posing in his cell, says practicing journalism has changed the way he thinks about the world and helped him fight against bias.
Kerem Yücel | MPR News
hide caption
toggle caption
Kerem Yücel | MPR News
Patrick Bonga, a senior editor for the paper, says including all sides to a story has changed the way he thinks about the world. He’s been in and out of prison multiple times. Now in for assault, he says the newspaper is helping break that cycle.
“For the first 40 years of my life, any other opinion other than mine did not matter. But now just having to be objective and to put stories together that aren’t one sided, I’m now starting to practice in my own life a lot of fight against bias. And that’s a big thing,” he says.
For Gordon, making the paper isn’t just about journalism. It’s about getting to a turning point.
“When we first come to prison, it’s a journey to figure out how to do this time. We come here and we’re mad at the world, that life didn’t work out. We spend day after day after day trying to figure out and find that one moment where if we would have made that one decision, everything would have went right,” he says. “Then we get mad at the people around us for nobody helping us in that one moment. And it’s a journey to finally get to the point that we take responsibility for our own actions, that we can finally grow.”
Adams says he wants to keep his stories positive.
“I don’t want to bring negativity to the paper because we all know what’s wrong. Let’s bring some more of what’s positive, what’s right,” he says.
He set up a suggestion box in his cell, for other prisoners to weigh in on what they want to read. He also wants to start an advice column. He’s a father, and he thinks other men will have questions about how to be a good dad, even if their relationship with their kids is mostly over the phone.
Richard Adams hopes to write positive stories for the paper the give other prisoners the tools they need to be successful when they leave prison.
Kerem Yücel | MPR News
hide caption
toggle caption
Kerem Yücel | MPR News
Right now, he’s writing about side hustles men can get once they’re released to make a little extra money – things like driving for Uber and DoorDash, or selling flowers.
“You have a choice while you’re here, where you can change or you can go back out there and do the same things that got you in here. You can go back out there and at least try to make a difference,” he says.
After all, most people in prison get out and return to their communities. Adams wants to give them hope and the tools to start over when and if they get the chance.
When Stuart Sepulvida arrives at St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Parish in Tucson, Ariz., for Mass, which he attends most mornings, he passes a display honoring local soldiers and encouraging parishioners to pray for their safety. Hundreds of small cards record their names: Robles, Arenas, Grajeda. A portrait of Pope Leo XIV hangs across the lobby.
Mr. Sepulvida, 81, is a Vietnam veteran whose patriotism and Catholicism are deeply intertwined. He voted for President Trump three times but has never felt more betrayed by an American president than when Mr. Trump denounced Pope Leo as “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”
“It was very disturbing to me to hear both of them clashing like they did,” Mr. Sepulvida said, standing outside the church one morning this week. Now, he is reconsidering whether he will vote Republican this year.
The Republican Party is struggling to hold onto the support from Hispanic voters who helped propel Mr. Trump back into the White House in 2024. Yet as many party leaders have acknowledged the urgent need to stop the backsliding among Latinos, the president has enraged many of even his strongest supporters by clashing with the pope.
On Easter Sunday, Pope Leo, the first U.S.-born pontiff, spoke of the need to “abandon every desire for conflict, domination and power, and implore the Lord to grant his peace to a world ravaged by wars.” Within days, Mr. Trump, who has led the United States into a war with Iran, said the pope was “catering to the radical left” and posted an AI-generated image portraying himself as a Jesus figure. Mr. Trump later deleted the image, saying he thought it depicted him as a doctor.
“It just isn’t what a president should do,” Mr. Sepulvida said. “The pope speaks for his people. He is beyond politics.”
Mr. Trump won 55 percent of Catholic voters in the 2024 election, compared to 43 percent who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris, according to Pew Research Center. The most sizable gains came from Hispanic Catholics. While Joseph R. Biden Jr. won their votes by a 35-point margin in 2020, the Democratic advantage shrunk to 17 points in 2024. Now, just 18 percent of Hispanic Catholics said they support most or all of President Trump’s agenda, according to a poll from Pew released earlier this year.
If the president’s quarrel with the pope sours more Latinos on the Republican Party, it could affect midterm races across the country, including in South Florida and South Texas, where Republicans have notched important victories in predominantly Hispanic districts in recent years.
In Arizona’s Sixth Congressional District, which stretches from north of Tucson to the Mexican border, voters were still grappling with the fallout this week.
The district is roughly evenly divided among Republicans, Democrats and independent voters. Nearly a third of the district is Hispanic, and there is a significant population of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as a large Catholic community with deep history in the region. It also has one of largest numbers of military veterans of all congressional districts in the country.
“The president is looking for a lot of attention from everything,” said Maria Ramos, 60, who regularly attends weekday Mass at St. Francis. A registered independent, she usually votes for Democrats but often declines to cast a ballot if she views a candidate as too liberal. “He believes he can put God in his place. He’s meddling in countries that he’s not in control of — he wants to control the world.”
“It is not just a very serious lack of respect — it is a mortal sin,” she said, shaking her head. One word comes to her mind again and again, she said: disgust.
Like so many others in southern Arizona, Ms. Ramos has several relatives who serve in the military — a path they saw to both serve the country and as an entry into the stable middle class. Many of them, she said, voted for Mr. Trump for president.
The Tucson district is now widely seen as one of the most competitive in the country. Republican Juan Ciscomani narrowly won the district in 2022, in part by emphasizing his biography as a Mexican immigrant and a devoted father of six children. He is also an evangelical Christian, a group that has driven much of the growth among Hispanic Republican voters in recent years.
Mr. Ciscomani declined a request for an interview, but when a local radio host asked Mr. Ciscomani what he thought of Mr. Trump’s comments “as a man of faith,” the congressman declined to criticize the president but said, “You can trust that you won’t see any meme like that coming out of my account.”
JoAnna Mendoza, the Democrat challenging Mr. Ciscomani this fall, has made her 20-year career in the U.S. Navy and Marines a key aspect of her story on the campaign trail. While she rarely speaks about her religious background and no longer considers herself a practicing Catholic, she said she briefly considered becoming a nun as a teenager. She criticized Mr. Ciscomani for not condemning the president’s remarks.
“You can’t make faith a central part of your campaign and then allow this to stand,” she said in an interview.
Across Tucson, Latino Catholics, regardless of their past voting preferences, were similarly quick to condemn the president’s remarks.
When Cecilia Taisipic, 71, heard about it, she said, she winced with shame about her vote for him in 2024.
“I thought he would make the country better, but apparently it’s the opposite,” she said as she left Mass at St. Francis earlier this week. She is so fed up with politics, she said, that she is unlikely to vote at all this year. “When it comes to my faith, I don’t like anybody to challenge it. Now I don’t want to hear anything on the news. I just want to pray.”
Matilde Robinson Bours, 63, teaches a weekly Spanish Bible study class at St. Thomas the Apostle Parish, and like nearly all of the women in her class, she immigrated from Mexico decades ago. She has voted for Republicans in nearly every election since she became a citizen. Though she has never liked President Trump, she said, his comments about the pope enraged her more than anything else he has said or done in the past.
“This surpassed everything, every social and political norm — this is personal to all Catholics,” she said. “The arrogance and ego is disgusting. To think that he is God? The pope has every right and responsibility to talk about peace.”
Still, Ms. Robinson Bours said, nothing will stop her from supporting Republicans again this year. She has been delighted that her adult children have stopped supporting Democrats in recent elections.
“Almost everyone I know thinks the way I do,” she said.
Patricia Martinez, 86, who has attended the same Bible study as Ms. Robinson Bours for years, shook her head in disagreement. She said she cannot imagine voting for a Republican who supports Mr. Trump.
“This is different — this shows he is out of his mind,” said Ms. Martinez. “We have to have basic respect and teach that to people in this country.”
Patrick Robles, a 24-year-old native of Tucson, spent years alienated from the Roman Catholic Church, but returned to his faith more recently. “The craziness of the world sort of caused me to seek some sort of answers,” he said. Now, he attends Mass at the St. Augustine Cathedral in downtown Tucson, a few blocks from the office where he works as an aide to Representative Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat.
Mr. Robles said he saw Mr. Trump’s battle with the pope as both a personal affront and a political opportunity.
“The president is basically trying to draw a line between Catholics and what we perceive to be patriotism,” he said. “I believe we can be both.”
Last week, he texted one of his uncles who has supported Mr. Trump in every election asking him what he thought.
“I’m afraid we need divine intervention,” the uncle replied.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., takes questions at a news conference at the Capitol on Tuesday.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Speaker Mike Johnson, R.-La., is forging ahead with his latest proposal to renew a key American spy power. His bill, revealed Thursday, is largely unchanged from a previous plan which failed in a series of overnight votes earlier this month.
The program at center of the debate, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), is set to expire on April 30.
FISA 702 allows U.S. intelligence agencies to intercept the electronic communications of foreign nationals located outside of the United States. Some of the nearly 350,000 foreign targets whose communications are collected under the provision are in touch with Americans, whose calls, texts and emails could end up in the trove of information available to the federal government for review.
For almost two decades, privacy-minded lawmakers from both parties have sought to require specific court approval before federal law enforcement can conduct a targeted review of an American’s information gathered through the program. The lack of any such warrant requirement helped sink an effort last week to extend the program for 18 months, as well as a separate vote on a five-year renewal.
Trump officials, like those in past administrations, have argued that such a warrant requirement would overburden law enforcement and endanger national security. Johnson’s latest proposal would reauthorize the program for three years, but does not include a warrant requirement. Instead, the bill calls for the FBI to submit monthly explanations for reviews of Americans’ information to an oversight official as well as criminal penalties for willful abuse, among other tweaks.
“I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country,” the president wrote on Truth Social last week, advocating for the program to be extended without changes. “I have spoken with many in our Military who say FISA is necessary in order to protect our Troops overseas, as well as our people here at home, from the threat of Foreign Terror Attacks. It has already prevented MANY such Attacks, and it is very important that it remain in full force and effect.”
Glenn Gerstell, who served as general counsel at the National Security Agency during the Obama and first Trump administration, says Johnson’s reforms look like an attempt to find a middle ground.
“There’s not a lot of really substantive changes to the statute, but some gestures are made to people who are worried about privacy and civil liberties,” Gerstell said. “It seems like a pretty reasonable compromise that is going to be satisfactory to the national security agencies and yet at the same time represents some gesture to the privacy advocates.”
“This is not a reform bill and it’s not a compromise,” Elizabeth Goitein, a privacy advocate and senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, wrote on X. “It’s a straight reauthorization with eight pages of words that serve no serious purpose other than to try to convince members that it’s NOT a straight reauthorization.”
A bipartisan reform deal is still out of reach
Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, told NPR on Wednesday, before the release of Johnson’s new proposal, that lawmakers were working on a bipartisan solution. He said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., was in touch with Johnson on the issue.
“There’s a lot of work being done here,” Himes said. “We’re sort of working out a process that will be inclusive rather than exclusive.” Himes said he was negotiating with Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and constitutional law scholar, on a reform proposal they hoped could preserve and reform the program — reauthorizing it with bipartisan support.
But Johnson’s new bill appears to fall short of the inclusive approach Himes hoped for.
NPR obtained a memo written by Raskin to his colleagues urging them to oppose the bill, which he said “continues the disastrous policy of trusting the FBI to self-police and self-report its abuses of Section 702 and backdoor searches of Americans’ data.”
“FBI agents can still collect, search, and review Americans’ communications without any review from a judge,” Raskin wrote.
FBI agents must receive annual training on FISA and are generally barred from searching for information about people in the U.S. if the goal of the search is to investigate general criminal activity, rather than find foreign intelligence information, and those searches need approval from a supervisor or an attorney.
Republican hardliners — who sunk Johnson’s last reauthorization attempt — also don’t all appear to be on board for Johnson’s latest revision. Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, a past chair of the Freedom Caucus, said “we’re not there yet” in a video he shared to X on Thursday.
“I didn’t take an oath to defend FISA, I didn’t take an oath to defend the intelligence community,” Perry said. “We can’t have them spying on American citizens and, when they do, there has to be accountability and I haven’t seen any that I’m satisfied with yet.”
The House Rules committee meets Monday morning, the first step toward advancing the renewal bill toward a vote.
President Trump announced a three-week extension of a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon that had been set to expire in a few days, after hosting a meeting between Israeli and Lebanese diplomats at the White House on Thursday.
Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group that has been attacking Israel from southern Lebanon, did not have representatives at the meeting and did not immediately comment on the announcement. The prime minister of Israel and the president of Lebanon also did not comment.
A successful peace agreement would hinge upon Hezbollah halting attacks, which Lebanon’s government has little power to enforce because it does not control the militia. Lebanon’s military has mostly stayed out of the fighting and is not at war with Israel.
The cease-fire, which was scheduled to end on April 26, would last until May 17 if it takes effect as Mr. Trump described it. Before the cease-fire was brokered last week, nearly 2,300 people were killed in Lebanon and 13 in Israel. Since then, the number of Israeli airstrikes and Hezbollah attacks have been dramatically reduced, though the two sides have continued exchanging fire.
The Lebanese Ambassador to the United States, Nada Hamadeh, credited Mr. Trump for extending the cease-fire, saying that “with your help and support, we can make Lebanon great again.” Mr. Trump replied, “I like that phrase, it’s a good phrase.”
Asked about the potential of a lasting peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon, Mr. Trump said that “I think there’s a great chance. They are friends about the same things and they are enemies on the same things.”
But Lebanon and Israel have periodically been at war since Israel’s founding in 1948. Israel has invaded Lebanon for the fifth time since 1978, incursions that have destabilized the country and the delicate balance of power between Muslim, Christian and Druze communities.
In the hours before the president’s announcement on social media, Israel and Hezbollah were trading attacks in southern Lebanon, testing the existing cease-fire.
Mr. Trump said the meeting at the White House had been attended by high-ranking U.S. officials, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the U.S. ambassadors to Israel and Lebanon.
Earlier on Thursday, an Israeli strike near the southern Lebanese city of Nabatieh killed three people, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Hezbollah claimed three separate attacks on Israeli troops who are occupying southern Lebanon, though none were wounded or killed.
Hezbollah set off the latest round of fighting last month by attacking Israel soon after the start of the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign in Iran. Israel responded to Hezbollah’s attacks by launching airstrikes across Lebanon and widening a ground invasion of the country’s south.
-
World4 minutes agoMelissa McCarthy Hits on Mariska Hargitay as ‘Law & Order: SVU’ Guest Star: ‘I Know My Way Around a Pair of Handcuffs’
-
News10 minutes agoA New Worry for Republicans: Latino Catholics Offended by Trump
-
Politics16 minutes agoTariffs Raised Consumers’ Prices, but the Refunds Go Only to Businesses
-
Business22 minutes agoPolymarket Bets on Paris Temperature Prompt Investigation After Unusual Spikes
-
Science28 minutes agoCould an Earthly Fungus Contaminate Mars? NASA May Have Found One Hardy Enough.
-
Health34 minutes agoThis Is the Best Time To Eat Breakfast for Weight Loss After 50
-
Culture46 minutes agoBook Review: ‘Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children,’ by Mac Barnett
-
Lifestyle52 minutes agoIt Started with a Midnight Swim and a Kiss Under the Stars