UC Irvine’s PrisonPandemic: Digitizing and Amplifying Stories of Incarceration During COVID-19

FAIN: PW-285183-22

Regents of the University of California, Irvine (Irvine, CA 92617-3066)
Keramet Reiter (Project Director: July 2021 to April 2025)
Naomi Sugie (Co Project Director: May 2022 to April 2025)
Kristin Turney (Co Project Director: May 2022 to April 2025)

A Foundations project to plan for the preservation and access of a multimedia collection chronicling the experience of incarcerated people in California during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The University of California, Irvine (UCI) is fast becoming a center for incarcerated voices in the United States. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, UCI’s PrisonPandemic collection has received thousands of letters and hundreds of phone calls from incarcerated people describing their experiences in prison during this global crisis. With this Foundations proposal, UCI faculty and librarians seek planning support to develop processes for both ethically preserving this collection of stories (protecting incarcerated contributors from any risk of identification or retaliation) and maximizing public accessibility of these stories for research and public programming. If successful, UCI’s PrisonPandemic collection and digital interface will be the first university-based portal providing ongoing access -- and a model for continued acceptance and processing -- of these typically hidden and marginalized voices.

Associated Products

PrisonPandemic: Navigating the Ethics of Honoring and Protecting Incarcerated Voices. (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: PrisonPandemic: Navigating the Ethics of Honoring and Protecting Incarcerated Voices.
Author: Keramet Reiter
Author: Alexis Rowland
Author: Joanne DeCaro
Abstract: UCI PrisonPandemic is a digital archive built to preserve the stories of people incarcerated in California prisons during the COVID-19 pandemic. PrisonPandemic amplifies the often inaccessible or silenced voices and experiences of the incarcerated. This presentation will discuss some of the complex ethical issues related to digitizing our collection of testimonials from people incarcerated in jails and prisons, including redaction, authorship, and metadata and language use. A chief goal of this project is creating a neutral and impartial repository for real-time testimonial collection and preservation. As an archive (rather than a systematic research project), our story collection was exempt from IRB review, so we have sought other ethical frameworks to guide our work. We created ground-up principles of access that combines ethical norms and practices from the humanities, social science, and library science, avoiding both partnership with (and the associated co-optation by) prison systems. In the presentation, we will discuss how these different ethical models come into contact with each other and the blended model we subsequently produced—a model that is driven by the needs of the community it serves. We will discuss the many challenges and adjustments the project has made as we negotiated ethical issues during collection and archival preservation. Finally, we will discuss some of the project’s current and future community and educational outreach efforts to broaden access to the archive, such as community art events, lesson plan creation, a play, and a podcast.
Date: 02/04/2023
Conference Name: Western Society of Criminology

PrisonPandemic: Voices From Behind the Walls (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: PrisonPandemic: Voices From Behind the Walls
Author: Keramet Reiter
Author: Joanne DeCaro
Author: Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez
Abstract: In the listening session, members of PrisonPandemic will share a selection of story excerpts from our archive and then discuss the project with the audience. PrisonPandemic started in response to incarcerated people and prison staff members reaching out to individual members of our team (faculty and graduate students involved in research and advocacy around the criminal legal system) to ask how they could share their stories of living through the COVID-19 crisis in California prisons. The people who initially reached out to us were scared, alone, and silenced, looking for any way to connect with people beyond the prison walls. Our team created a hotline staffed 5 days a week for 4 hours each night to listen, record, and share the oral histories of those behind bars during the crisis. We also have collected letter and artwork submissions. We’ve collected 450 oral histories and close to 4,000 submissions in total. For many incarcerated people, PrisonPandemic offered the first opportunity in six months, or a year, to communicate with the world beyond the prison walls. Many of the oral histories we’ve collected make very real the terror and the betrayal people inside were feeling, as well as their strength and perseverance in the face of these horrors. Through shared interpretation of interviews, we will discuss how we navigated ethical challenges and security concerns during these processes. In the face of the challenges and limitations of collecting oral histories from currently incarcerated individuals, we will discuss the protocol model we have developed for outreach, collection, consent, redaction, anonymization, and sharing of stories, with the goal of future projects being able to replicate our successes and learn from our setbacks. We will invite the audience to discuss with us the challenges and rewards of collecting narratives from incarcerated people and other vulnerable populations.
Date: 10/21/2022
Conference Name: Oral History Association

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