Abu-Jamal and many other prison writers have strongly criticized the prohibition of Pell Grants for prisoners, which was enacted in the 1994 crime bill,68 as indicative of the contemporary pattern of dismantling educational programs behind bars. As creative writing courses for prisoners were defunded, virtually every literary journal publishing prisoners’ writing eventually collapsed. Of the scores of magazines and newspapers produced behind walls, only the Angolite at Louisiana’s Angola Prison and Prison Legal News at Washington State Prison remain. What this means is that precisely at a time
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