Lying bare the gritty firsthand accounts and austere imagery from inside the compounds of America’s penal system, All Rise magazine is the first of its kind. Based in Portland, the nonprofit publication launched a crowdfunding campaign Sept. 9, one that allows donors to pre-order copies of the magazine’s first edition.
A publication featuring the art and writing of American prisoners is nothing new, but All Rise exudes an air of professionalism and adept design rarely seen in a prisoner-produced periodical. One reason for this is another factor that sets it apart: It’s designed and published outside prison walls as a collaboration among creative communities both inside and outside the prison system.
The articles in the first issue of All Rise are well vetted, powerfully written and original. Professional photography and gallery-shown prison art contribute to the visually appealing and, at times, jarring spreads, while a stripped-down typeface exemplifies the barren feel of the ubiquitous concrete penitentiaries from which the words were lifted.
“The things that are common in humanity, the universal truths of emotion and love and yearning and passion and tragedy, all come out in someone’s writing or artwork.”
At the front of the inaugural issue, the editorial committee — comprising current and former prisoners — lays out its mission:
“The U.S. prison system is one of the largest, yet least visible human rights and racial justice abuses in modern history. … By touching on universal themes that connect us — fear, pain, love, hope and humor — ALL RISE takes back the narrative around what it means to be imprisoned in the US and lifts the voice of those systematically dehumanized and locked out of our society.”
Through a partnership with Pen America, poems from institutions across the country dot the pages of Issue 1, which is based on the theme “I still exist.” Award-winning photography from Richard Ross reveals the harsh conditions of juvenile facilities nationwide, and narratives about the Oregon prison experience are predominantly featured. The editorial committee has ambitions for branching out to prisons across the United States to increase the diversity of geography among submissions in the future.
Joshua Wright was incarcerated at Columbia River Correctional Institution when he helped co-found the magazine. He has since been released but continues to work with the publication.
Wright said the magazine’s name, All Rise, is meant to take back ownership of the words uttered in every courtroom when the judge approaches the bench.
“We hear it before we’re sentenced or before we take a plea deal,” Wright said. “It’s a dramatic phrase before life changes drastically. It can be triggering for people to hear that. Taking ownership can lessen the damage.”
Reclamation is also why orange — a common color for prison jumpsuits — appears so prominently in the magazine’s design.
But the authors of the essays within its pages allow themselves to reveal a degree of vulnerability not often associated with life in prison.
“The things that are common in humanity, the universal truths of emotion and love and yearning and passion and tragedy, all come out in someone’s writing or artwork,” Wright said. When prisoners are able to show people on the outside that they, too, can evoke emotions through their creative work, it brings to the forefront their humanity, he explained.
“The world needs to know that there are human beings on the other side of these walls,” said Ben Hall, who was also an incarcerated member of the magazine’s founding editorial committee who has since been released. “This work is necessary because it exposed the carceral state for what it is — and the ideologies of human loathing for which it is built.”
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The magazine is the end result of what began as a years-long facilitation effort from Dan Jones and Carlos Arias. They’re co-workers at marketing firm AKQA’s Portland office, and they’ve spearheaded the development of the magazine in their free time — taking input and direction from prisoners at every step, just as they would with any paying client.
“Coming from the U.K. and seeing what was happening in the American prison system, I became really quite disturbed by it,” Jones said. He decided he wanted to understand it better in order to contribute to a solution in some way.
His quest eventually took him and Arias inside Oregon’s prisons to engage with various programs. About four years ago, the two attended a Portland State University-affiliated writing class inside Columbia River Correctional Institution, located in Northeast Portland.
“We walked out,” Arias said, “and there was this sensation like we had witnessed something really special, but it was tucked away — no one was going to know about it, no one was really going to hear about it beyond the folks who were in the room.”
They batted different ideas around, and eventually linked up with several incarcerated people at the Portland correctional facility, which serves as a transitional facility for men approaching their release date, as well as a minimum-security prison for men with shorter sentences. They formed a founding editorial committee, which in addition to Wright and Hall, included Ivan Jaramillo, David Olson, Matt Burda and J Zimmerli (all have since been released). For about a year and half ending this past fall, the committee met every other Thursday inside the prison, working out the details of the magazine.
Hall initially thought he was joining another typical writing group — there are many in-prison publications through efforts such as these. “But it became so much more then that,” he said. “A necessity came forward — a necessity to be heard and in this case, to be the voices who speak for the voiceless.”
Arias was touched knowing the impact this opportunity was having on the magazine’s contributors.
“It felt so sad to know that something as simple as being heard was all that they really wanted out of some of this stuff, and just how isolated they must feel,” he said.
The editorial committee had to work with Oregon Department of Corrections to hold these workshops and produce a magazine in this way. A condition of the arrangement was that the prison’s media manager would approve any content created within the walls of Oregon’s prisons before publication. Nothing was censored in the first issue, Jones said.
In the first issue, stories about an incarcerated mother, a trans prisoner’s experiences navigating toxic masculinity inside and outside of prison, and about how religion helped a Muslim man cope with his sentence are among the articles featured. It also includes editorial committee member Hall’s personal story, which takes readers through the painful stages and endless monotony of his decades-long incarceration, and a member of a fire-fighting crew adorned in inmate-labeled garb describes a poignant moment in the forest when he encounters a stranger.
Jones’ said the publication is intended to serve as a connection between prisoners and the outside world, as well as a tool for social change that will humanize the faces of mass incarceration in order to lighten the crippling stigma prisoners carry with them back into society.
While current and former prisoners create and edit the content, Jones and Arias have facilitated the process and curated the design.
“We’ve had various come-to-Jesus moments with the people we’ve been working with where they’ve seen (the magazine mock-ups) and said, ‘It’s looks beautiful, but it’s straight up too white,’” Arias said. It’s a process that’s taken them back to the drawing board again and again and will likely keep evolving.
Copies of All Rise can be obtained through donations, which will help pay for the first print run of the magazine. A donation of $20 comes with a digital copy of the magazine; donors giving $30 will receive a print copy, mailed out starting in November; and for $50 All Rise will send the donor a copy and a copy to an American prison. Donations can only be made through All Rise’s crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, which will run for 60 days.
The magazine’s website and Instagram have already debuted, and while the printed magazine is annual, new articles from incarcerated writers are published periodically on the website throughout the year.
All Rise hopes to raise $20,000. While the nonprofit won’t have to reach that goal to print magazines pre-purchased by donors, it’s possible it will have to issue refunds if it doesn’t raise enough money for a substantial print run.
Once the magazine is off the ground, subscriptions will be available and there are plans to partner with magazine retailers where physical copies can be sold.
Proceeds will fund the nonprofit’s operations, pay for magazines to be printed and shipped to correctional facilities, and to pay currently and formerly incarcerated contributors for their work. Profits beyond that will go to fund the printing of the next volume, an issue focused on juvenile prisons slated for release in 2021. If revenue eventually grows beyond the cost of production and contributor payments, funds will be used for prison reform advocacy work, Jones said.
The incarcerated and formerly incarcerated contributors and editorial committee members of All Rise are not a monolith in terms of their view of the penal system.
Jones said that among those involved with the magazine, “we have (prison) abolitionists, and we have people who say, ‘I’ve shared a cell with people I would never want to see out in the street.’”
Jones, a former Street Roots board member, said he took inspiration from the journalism-advocacy structure of street newspaper organizations and the connections among community members that he’s seen newspaper sales make.
“The public perception of people who’ve been to prison is something that we hope this can be a small part of eventually changing,” he said.
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Wright hopes that through storytelling, a shared view of what it means to be an incarcerated person might spread to readers on the outside, and that the recognition of their humanity will help lead to tangible change, perhaps even abolition. “Together, true freedom is possible,” he said.
Former prisoner Jarell Lambert echoed this desire in the conclusion of his article about growing up in gentrifying Portland neighborhoods before serving a long sentence behind bars. He wrote, simply, “Hear me don’t fear me.”
Executive Editor Joanne Zuhl contributed to this report.