Ban on Women's Prison Writing Comes Undone

BoingBoing steers readers towards the Norwich Bulletin, which reports on how officials at the York Correctional Facility in East Lyme, Connecticut, reacted to one of their inmates winning a PEN American Center award for work she did as part of a creative writing program taught at the prison by bestselling author Wally Lamb: They shut the program down and wiped the hard drives on which Barbara Parsons Lane and her classmates saved their files. (The Bulletin has a timeline explaining the sequence of events.)

The story's been unfolding since that item was published last week. Today, the AP's Stephen Singer writes that those inmates in the program whose writing was published in last year's Couldn't Keep It To Myself will surrender $500 each from their royalties to the state of Connecticut to pay for their incarceration. Fortunately, most of that money will go right back into the writing program, which was revived after much protest from writers and human rights activists. Meanwhile, in USA Today, Bob Minzesheimer considers Lane a bit more closely than most other reporters covering the story.