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When word got out that I was the next supervisor of an inmate newspaper, and the editor, a man who found God after killing his twelve-year old son with a shotgun, tried to manipulate another staff member into volunteering for the job, then I knew something wasn’t quite right. I knew my job wouldn’t be easy. The previous supervisor, an assistant librarian, had allowed the newspaper staff to make crucial decisions for him. Management observed this and made the pitching change. (Years later, after I had transferred to another joint, I heard that the assistant librarian was fired for bringing marijuana into the facility. Prior to that, custody staff caught him bringing in Polaroids of nude female body parts.)

My major goal as supervisor was to separate the paid subscribers from the inmate population. The newspaper was delivered to each inmate free of charge on a monthly basis. They could read the Warden’s Forum minutes to see if their Housing Unit Representatives were looking out for their best interests, or they could debate the controversial editorial page, or lazily skim the other regurgitated articles. Most of the funding for the inmate newspaper came from the IBF (Inmate Benefit Fund). The IBF’s revenue came from the prison store and visiting room vending machines.

At first I was curious as to who would subscribe to an inmate newspaper. I asked the editor to provide me with a list of paid subscribers. After one week of constantly nagging him for the list, he turned in a twenty-page mess. I saw through his ploy and demanded a paid subscriber list by a certain date, or I’d make sure their paper never made another deadline. It wasn’t long after that that the editor provided a list of names, including the former Governor of Michigan (John Engler) and assorted Detroit newscasters.

“I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck,” I said to the editor, “I know damned well that no one on this list is interested in this paper.” Next, I threatened to take this incident to the Warden’s Forum members, to show them how their money was being wasted. “Why mail a newspaper to someone that’s not interested in reading it? More than likely, it’ll be tossed in the garbage.”

The editor tried to bullshit me about the right to free speech and the right to send the newspaper to whomever they chose. I reminded him that per our institution’s operating procedures they could only send it out to paid subscribers.

Needless to say, I kept digging. Unfortunately, instead of getting the necessary support of management, I was put under investigation for mail fraud. To make a long story short, the editor and layout man had a fake bulk rate stamp printed on the newspapers. For over a year, the mailman would pick up a stack of newspapers in our mailroom and have them delivered.

Armed with a calculator, I approximated the weight of one newspaper, multiplied it by an arbitrary number of fake, paid subscribers, multiplied that total by an arbitrary number of months, and had the IBF pony-up the necessary money owed to the United States Postal Service. The newspaper editor ended up in segregation, and shortly after that, the general prison population referred to me as “the son of a bitch that had our newspaper shut down.” Not that it had anything to do with me, or this particular incident, but within a month, Lansing decided to shut down the remaining prison newspapers statewide.