Thousands of Prisoner Express Newsletters Are Out For Delivery

Twice a year our library does a newsletter mailing to 4,000+ prisoners who’ve signed up in one way or another.

You can subscribe to our newsletter to get it via email, and learn more about how we use the newsletter to foster the exchange of ideas and creative expression through otherwise insurmountable barriers.

Our newsletter (as revealed in the complicated diagram below) is how we foster the exchange of creative expression between prisoners, despite the incredible amount of physical, emotional, and institutional barriers keeping them apart.

I think one of the most amazing things about the PE program is that we’re just facilitating most of this content, not creating it ourselves.

For example our arts, poetry, journal, writing, programs… these are FOR prisoners BY prisoners – because our mission isn’t just about sharing it with you, it’s about bringing people together.

Click here to hear from Prisoner Express from time to time

(it’ll be either me or Gary sending you interesting tidbits, and of course you can unsubscribe anytime)

Here’s the newsletter, and then below that you can see the big picture process on how everything works, starting with our bi-annual newsletter.

The big picture process of Prisoner Express

In the image below you can see our workflow of enrolling new members in our programs, and how everything is based on our bi-annual newsletters.

It’s through the newsletters that members choose the programs that they subscribe to, which informs our team of staff and volunteers what to work on. We rally around the individual programs throughout the year, and likewise we run these programs off small donations from our community of supporters.

You can also see that responding or not responding to the newsletter is how we track whether or not a member is “active” or “inactive”.

And of course, our programs are designed to be interactive, which is why a big part of our workflow here is inviting submissions to the programs. If someone sends a submission they are then sent a compilation of other prisoner work.

Pretty neat right?

If you look this over and have ideas for us on how we can improve our programs, please let us know on our contact page!

Also, if you’d like to support our work, please contribute here.

And of course, you can see all the past newsletters and signup for our programs on our newsletter page.