Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women

In 2002 a group of women at Oregon’s Coffee Creek Correctional Facility set out to create a zine to stir discussions about the female prison experience, including motherhood, sexual assault, and poor health care. Without access to photocopiers, computers, or other equipment, they needed someone on the outside to coordinate the effort.

They found Vikki Law, who has been involved in prison activism since the mid-1990s, when she started a books-for-prisoners program in New York City. She helped publish the first issue of the luminous, lively Tenacious in 2003, and has since overseen 19 installments of the zine. Most of the contributors send handwritten submissions, which Law deciphers and types, and any back-and-forth between editor and writers takes place through the mail—which can take months.

Tenacious is free to female prisoners who request it (male inmates pay postage and readers on the outside two or three dollars). Law prints and distributes between 50 and 75 copies of each issue, but sometimes fewer make their way into the system, in part because mailroom censors can ban, destroy, or reject the final product. (In Idaho, Tenacious is considered prisoner-to-prisoner correspondence, which is against state regulations.) Still, despite the risk of reprisal, the zines travel, as women slip them onto prison library shelves and pass copies to friends and cellmates.

Reading Tenacious, there’s no way to know how much poetic license any one inmate is taking in an effort to communicate desperation. After reading a few issues, though, one can’t help but see a commonality in the narratives. From institution to institution across the country, petty mind games, abuses of power, and dangerously inadequate health care seem to be the rule, not the exception.

For the full story, go to: Breaking Free: Prisoners Publish Their Stories in Zines

and for 3 pieces by Tenacious contributor and formerly incarcerated writer Lee Savage, see Excerpts from Prisoner Zines