How Prison Newspapers Like 'The Interim' Helped Instigate Change

For Nashville’s The Interim, 1981 was an extraordinary year for news. The October edition broke a big story, issued with a dramatic, all-caps headline: “THREE ESCAPE FROM MAIN PRISON.” 

For The Interim’s staff, the escape itself wasn’t the only drama. One of the escapees, Lloyd McPherson, was the paper’s own editor. The Interim was published inside the Tennessee State Prison. 

Newspapers like The Interim — written, edited and printed by incarcerated people— existed all over the country by 1981. A look at the paper’s news coverage in that eventful year — filled with fires, more escapes and litigation over the inhumane conditions that would lead to the prison’s closing — shows the prominent role The Interim played in this nearly forgotten part of the fourth estate.

Today prison newspapers are growing once more.

From 1965 to 1990, the Penal Press Contest honored top achievements in prison journalism. In 1981, The Interim won three top prizes in the contest, including the Clayton Award for extraordinary journalistic achievement. This contest has relaunched, and on Sept. 19, the Penal Press Contest will announce new winners for the first time in more than 30 years. (For the category of Best Debut, for publications established between 2023 and 2025, the contest received 12 entries — further evidence of new prison newspapers emerging.)

As editor, McPherson frequently leveled strong criticism about the state of corrections in Tennessee. In a 1979 editorial, he derided Gov. Lamar Alexander’s inability to find “credible responses” to problems like overlong sentences, canceling of programs and crime inside the prison itself. McPherson wrote: “I would challenge Governor Alexander to set down face to face and discuss the challenges of Corrections with one who sees it from the inside out.” 

McPherson also used The Interim’s reach to help the prison’s community agitate for group action. In July 1981, he introduced the Coalition for Prison Change. This organization, he wrote, “will aid your loved ones as they strive to deal with the problems your incarceration brings to your lives.” The group would meet in space donated by West Nashville Methodist Church. Besides helping families navigate the complexities of visits and communications, it would aid families with jobs, housing and legal trouble.

But McPherson was on his way out.

Acting associate editor Melvin Cole reported the story of the escape. On Sept. 28, 1981, McPherson and two others scaled a wall with a purloined ladder. They cut through an electric fence and fled, aided by the “dense fog” that shrouded the guard towers.

Even with a nationwide all-points bulletin in place, the three managed to evade capture and dashed north on a route that would take them more than 600 miles. In Pennsylvania, a local newspaper reported that three suspects resembling the escapees held up a restaurant. On Oct. 6, “after eight days of helter-skelter freedom,” the three men were apprehended by authorities, and McPherson returned to prison.

The Interim’s staff issued this story with a headline that reads as a hat tip to their former newsroom leader: “FLAWLESS FLIGHT ENDS IN WISCONSIN.” 

Unsurprisingly, a new editor — Interim staffer John A. Brown — took over for McPherson. Throughout 1981, Brown had reported on many other major news events at the prison. In July, maintenance crews started a fire with acetylene torches. (Brown reported that no supervisor was on duty that day.) That was a big story, but not compared to the one that ran right next to it, issued in a font reminiscent of a Wild West “wanted” poster: “Visitor Shot at Main Prison.”

Prison guards went on strike in September. And escape attempts appeared to be catching on. In October, reporter Bobby Tyler wrote about Ray Gammon’s escape: “Gammon jumped a train in Nashville, but was left behind in Gallatin when the box-car in which he was riding was side-tracked.”

Throughout that year, Brown, McPherson, Tyler and the rest of the staff reported on poor conditions and challenged the Department of Correction culture that led to them. (The week of the visitor shooting, an editorial ran under the headline “A Senseless Murder.”)

But those conditions had begun long before 1981. In 1976, after a riot at the prison in which one incarcerated person died and more than 30 others were wounded, William Trigg, a resident at the prison, filed a complaint that challenged the constitutionality of the prison. The complaint set the stage for the issues to finally be tried under a different suit, Grubbs v. Bradley. In the year’s final issue, the top headline on The Interim’s front page read: “PRISON SUIT BEGINS IN FEDERAL COURT.”

“And thus the adversaries are joined in a legal battle,” Tyler wrote. Tyler ends with a plaintive point: “Tennessee subjects prisoners to conditions which cause them to come out of the state prison … less able after release to live within the law and in a free society.” He likely couldn’t have predicted that it would be a decade before the prison closed. In 1981, the state still packed people inside. The illustration accompanying the article: A little cartoon castle, men flooding inside.

Today, on a quiet sliver of land between Briley Parkway and the Cumberland River, the Tennessee State Prison stands empty — a reminder of the suffering and blight that the prison brought to Nashville. But inside, a handful of incarcerated journalists used the press to sound the alarm about what they faced. They won accolades in the process, and advocated for change.

If The Interim of 1981 is any indication, it’s not a stretch to say Tennessee’s prison press could emerge once more.

Anne Ray is the former managing editor of Reveal Digital, where she helped spearhead the creation of a digital archive of American Prison Newspapers. She’s now the American Penal Press Contest coordinator at the Pollen Initiative. Her debut novel-in-stories, Scenic Overlook, was published in 2023.