Family Life Behind Bars launched on Sept. 26, 2008 with a site that incorporates content from professional journalists and community collaborators. So far, three community columnists have been trained in video: Makeba Lavan, Davian Reynolds and Emani Davis. The goal is to get the work of one of them posted on the site each week.
Family Life Behind Bars is a news and social networking site for people whose lives have been affected by the incarceration of a family member. With more than two million Americans in prison, and many others with experience in the criminal justice system, this new site holds tremendous promise for capturing human stories and overcoming stigma.
Sandeep Junnarkar, the CUNY journalism professor who is shepherding the project, said most of his outreach has been to younger people, who seem especially interested in learning the tools of production.
“A lot of these young people have no one to guide them, so the training helps make them media literate and gives core skills that can be used for something positive. It resonates with them,” said Junnarkar. He added that he hopes to attract contributions from the diversity of people affected by imprisonment, such as a grandmother who has sons in prisons.
“As in any reporting project that involved communities who are stigmatized, I have had to build trust within the communities affected by incarceration of a family member,” said Junnarkar. He has attended meetings with the Osborne Association, which provides assistance to families of prisoners, and CASA NYC, which provides court-appointed special advocates for children in foster care.
From these connections, Junnarkar has gathered a team of columnists who will tell their own stories in their own words. He said they have provided helpful feedback on the project and recommended that the site aggregate news on prison issues from around the world which would be of great interest to that community.
“I’ve gotten e-mails from around the U.S., Reston, VA to Texas, inviting me to come do a workshop to teach people these tools,” said Junnarkar, with some surprise. “Because the U.S. has the biggest prison population in the world, this could become more of a national thing.” While chat forums exist for families of incarcerated people, Junnarkar’s project offers them journalistic training. “Once they finish a workshop, I give them a certificate.”
Family Life Behind Bars has also set up a ning, a social networking site. A month after launch, the ning has 16 members. Junnarkar is strategizing ways to boost that participation, and community involvement in general. He’s creating flyers for students and community columnists to hand out, inviting conversation, and has purchased a Skype phone number which will allow people to call in and leave voicemails about their lives and concerns. The professor’s work-study students have compiled a list of blogs on incarceration issue and are posting comments inviting conversation and links back to Family Life Behind Bars.
Junnarkar is thrilled with the tremendous interest from students at CUNY. He said 20 attended a meeting in September, which turned into a pitch session for multimedia stories for the site. Some CUNY faculty have agreed to allow their students to produce features for the site for class credit. Two graduate students working on their master’s degree capstones will also create content for the site.
Building relationships will be key to this project’s success. “I’m in the process of getting permission to go to Bedford Hills, a maximum security facility in New York that offers a college training program. It’s up to the warden to decide what kind of equipment we can bring in and which graduates of the program we can speak with,” said Junnarkar.
He said he is monitoring traffic on the site carefully and has noticed that the site is busier earlier in the week, so he’s rethinking his posting schedule.
