By Claire Carlson and Anya Petrone Slepyan for The Daily Yonder.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service for the Public News Service/Daily Yonder Collaboration

After being incarcerated for 19 years, most people would be happy to never step foot in a prison again. But Jesse Vasquez returns week after week, flashing his state-wide security clearance to guards who know him by name. 

Vasquez leads the Pollen Initiative, a non-profit organization that supports the development of media centers and newspapers in prisons. When he was incarcerated, he was sent to 12 different prisons before ending up at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, located just north of San Francisco. There, he got involved with the prison’s long-running newspaper, San Quentin News. He served as the paper’s editor-in-chief before he was paroled in 2019. 

Now, he’s working to bring similar media projects to other prisons in California, especially more rural ones that don’t have the same programming opportunities as San Quentin.

“It’s not necessarily that people don’t want to provide the programs, it’s proximity [to the prison],” Vasquez said.

Vasquez’s sights are currently set on the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF), one of California’s two women’s prisons located just outside of Chowchilla, a small city in the Central Valley. Since March of 2024, Vasquez and his colleague Kate McQueen have made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from the Bay Area to Chowchilla to teach a journalism class to CCWF’s incarcerated residents. 

In mid-September, they printed the first edition of the Paper Trail, a monthly newspaper written and edited by incarcerated journalists at CCWF. 

“We want to have media centers and newsrooms flourish inside these institutions primarily because for the longest time they’ve been closed institutions with no transparency, no accountability, and no exposure,” Vasquez said. 

Geography Matters

For those incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility, San Quentin News has long been a source of both awe and exasperation. 

Megan Hogg is a regular reader of San Quentin News and a member of CCWF’s inaugural journalism class. Though she looks forward to reading the newspaper every month, she said she can’t help but notice the difference between the opportunities available to her at CCWF compared to those at San Quentin.

California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation “has provided so much for San Quentin, but they just ignore us,” Hogg said. “It’s frustrating to open the San Quentin News and see that they have athletes, musicians, and artists coming in. There are no resources like that for the women.”

CCWF is one of the largest women’s prisons in the world, with a population of over 2,100 incarcerated residents. It is one of two facilities for women in California, though it also houses trans men and nonbinary people. 

The nearby city of Chowchilla has a population of 19,000 and is in Madera County. Madera County comprises a small, single-county metropolitan area. 

Although certain programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and basic education are available across all of California’s prisons – rural and urban – access to other educational, vocational, and therapeutic resources varies across institutions. 

Many of these programs rely on support from local volunteers and nearby organizations. For example, San Quentin, which is located in the Bay Area, benefits from 500 active monthly volunteers who implement 160 different programs in the prison, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). 

In comparison, CCWF has 100 monthly volunteers who come in at least once a month.

In more rural prisons like High Desert State Prison, located in Lassen County, a nonmetropolitan county with a population of 32,700, just 36 “long-term program providers and religious volunteers” provide programming to the incarcerated, according to the CDCR. Approximately 10 providers with statewide prison clearance provide services to High Desert “a few times throughout the year,” the corrections department said. 

These differences are not lost on Vasquez. While he’s extremely proud of San Quentin News, he said, he’s also “ashamed that we’re not representing the 32 other [California] prisons, many of which are in rural areas and have fewer resources and programming.” 

The Fourth Estate Behind Bars

The Pollen Initiative’s effort to support prison newspapers builds on a long history of prison publications in the United States. 

The first prison newspaper was published from a debtors’ prison in New York in the year 1800, according to archives from the American Prison Newspapers collection. Printing presses were commonly used for vocational training in prisons during the early and mid-20th century, which allowed for a vibrant prison press to flourish.

Since 1800, more than 700 different newspapers have been published at prisons across the country, with the number of publications peaking in the middle of the 20th century. 

But in the 1970s, attitudes towards incarceration began to shift. Punitive, tough-on-crime policies replaced efforts at rehabilitation, and the prison population exploded from 200,000 in 1973 to 2.2 million in 2009, according to a report from the National Resource Council. 

This change in attitude also affected educational and vocational opportunities within prisons. For example, the 1994 Crime Bill excluded incarcerated people from using federal Pell Grants, which had previously helped them access college education. Without funding, few prison college programs survived. 

Most prison newspapers met a similar fate. Punitive attitudes and legal challenges over censorship and the first amendment rights of the incarcerated caused the majority of prison newspapers to disappear by the end of the 20th century. 

Now, it seems a revitalization of the American prison press is underway. At least 25 prison newspapers in 12 states are currently published, and incarcerated journalists are increasingly collaborating with outside publications.

The presence of electronic tablets in prisons and jails across America has also drastically increased the distribution of prison newspapers among incarcerated people. For example, the San Quentin News – and now CCWF’s Paper Trail – are available in print at every California prison, as well as digitally in 950 prisons and jails around the country. Both papers have websites that outside audiences can access. 

This reemergence of the prison press could itself be an indication of shifting attitudes toward criminal justice. In combination with state-level reform, federal policies and legislation have reduced prison populations and expanded rehabilitative opportunities over the past 15 years.

While these reforms are promising for the Pollen Initiative’s work, Vasquez says there is no guarantee that such support for prison reform will continue. 

“When you look at the pendulum of criminal justice reform, it shifts so slowly in the way of progress and so quickly in the way of ‘tough on crime,’” he said. “So when you have a prison administration open its doors to you, you have to strike while the iron is hot because you don’t know when that door is going to close.”

At CCWF, it took nine months of meetings with prison officials before they began working inside the prison. That’s because starting a media center requires approval from the prison’s administration and buy-in from the incarcerated population – a trust-building process that takes time. 

In the spring of 2024, McQueen began teaching a weekly journalism class to the first cohort of students. The program held a celebration for the 19 graduates in mid-September, the same day the first edition of the Paper Trail was published. The Paper Trail’s editorial board was selected from members of this class and has directed both the content and vision of the new publication.

McQueen and Vasquez said the enthusiasm of the prison’s warden, Anissa De La Cruz, has made all of this possible. 

“I have made it my mission to give the population of the women’s prison a voice,” De La Cruz wrote in the first print edition of the Paper Trail, which was published September 16, 2024. “Part of that means making space for a newspaper at CCWF, its own newspaper.” 

The Paper Trail in Print

In late August, CCWF’s inaugural journalism class laid eyes on the first physical printing of their newspaper – a mockup that Vasquez and McQueen brought in so the editorial board could finalize the design and layout of the first edition. 

Though it was just a sample draft on regular printer paper, this first look at their newspaper was emotional for many of the writers. Sagal Sadiq, features editor for the Paper Trail, said seeing his first byline was “surreal.” 

“I don’t even know what to say,” Sadiq said, shaking his head. 

The writers hope that in addition to providing information and building community among the incarcerated at CCWF, it will also lead to more attention – and therefore more resources – for the prison. 

One article in the paper’s first edition highlights a peer support program at CCWF for incarcerated people, the first of its kind in the country. The program, which involves 82 hours of training, equips its participants to help new arrivals as they adapt to life in the prison. They’re also trained to facilitate support groups focused on things like personal health and reentry.

Paper Trail contributors say the newspaper is one way to highlight the innovation happening at this rural prison. “We’re doing things that are groundbreaking here, but we don’t have the same coverage as San Quentin,” said Amber Bray, the Paper Trail’s first editor-in-chief. “So we’re leveling the playing field.” 

Bray believes the newspaper can strengthen CCWF’s programming by helping Chowchilla residents see the incarcerated residents as part of their community, which could encourage more volunteers to get involved. 

Everyone incarcerated at CCWF is counted as a Madera County resident in the U.S. Census, Bray pointed out. And the first edition of the Paper Trail includes coverage of one of the many fundraisers put on by CCWF that directly benefits the outside community. Some local publications have shown interest in republishing articles from the Paper Trail, which would further expand the newspaper’s audience and influence.

“Hopefully the newspaper will motivate people to ask questions, and think about how they can help our community by volunteering and getting engaged,” Bray said. 

Nora Igova is the Paper Trail’s art and layout designer. She shares Bray’s hope that the newspaper will bring the inside and outside communities closer together. 

“The Paper Trail will humanize us, humanize this community,” Igova told the Daily Yonder. “There is still an instilled fear in the outside community around prisons. We want people to not be afraid to believe in transformation and rehabilitation, and to see us as potential neighbors.”

For Vasquez, the Paper Trail is an example of something he’s always known: every incarcerated person has a story to tell. 

“There are thousands inside the prison system who are brilliant thinkers, writers, artists,” he said. 

Vasquez knows he was lucky – when he ended up at San Quentin, the resources that were already there allowed him the opportunity to flex his own writing muscle. “I just happened to be at the prison with the most exposure, with the most proximity,” he said. 

No matter where a person is incarcerated, he wants them to have similar access to this opportunity. Vasquez and McQueen hope the Paper Trail can serve as a model for what could be possible at other prisons, rural and urban alike. 

“We want to show people that it is possible, and this is how you can do it,” Vasquez said.


Claire Carlson and Anya Petrone Slepyan wrote this article for The Daily Yonder.


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President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have proposed privatizing the United States Postal Service by selling it off to a corporation such as FedEx or UPS.

A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies showed which ZIP codes in Colorado and across the nation would likely pay higher parcel rates to cast ballots or receive medicines and other essential items.

Sarah Anderson, program director at the institute and the report's co-author, said more than 100 million Americans in rural areas, small towns and even suburbs on less profitable routes would take the biggest hit.

"Without competition from a public service that has a mandate to provide affordable delivery to every address in America, people in these areas in particular might lose their delivery at their homes altogether," Anderson pointed out.

Efforts to sell off the nation's postal service come as the Trump administration makes good on promises to reduce the size of government and programs it sees as inefficient or wasteful. Proponents of privatization have long argued corporations do a better job, at a lower cost, compared with government agencies.

Currently, U.S. Postal Service parcel rates are between 25% and 60% lower than rates charged by FedEx and UPS. Anderson noted to keep prices down, a private company would likely use more part-time workers who would get lower wages, fewer hours, benefits and less job security. She said the Postal Service has historically provided good-paying jobs in Colorado and across the country.

"Doing work that really helps bind the nation together," Anderson contended. "That was the original vision of the Postal Service. It's in our Constitution that it should help connect rural to urban areas and level the playing field."

Americans across the political spectrum have voiced strong support for the Postal Service and its public mission, and Anderson added there are currently bipartisan resolutions against privatization in the U.S. House and Senate. She hopes the president is listening to the people in his own party.

"Who are speaking out in support of keeping the Postal Service public, and keeping its mandate to provide universal service to every American no matter where you live," Anderson concluded.


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By Claire Carlson and Lane Wendell Fischer for The Daily Yonder.
Broadcast version by Isobel Charle for Washington News Service for the Public News Service/Daily Yonder Collaboration

When students in rural Trinity County, California, gaze out their classroom windows, they see the tree-filled landscape of Shasta-Trinity National Forest, which spans more than 2 million acres in the northeast corner of the state.

The expansive forest might inspire dreams of outdoor adventure for locals, but for Trinity County and other rural forest communities across the U.S., it also represents a fraught cycle of inadequate public school funding.

That’s because these schools rely on the Secure Rural Schools and Communities Act (SRS), a federal program that allocates money to counties that overlap National Forest land. 

Because public land cannot be used or taxed for local interests, the SRS program offsets this loss of local revenue by allocating federal funds to support essential community infrastructure like roads and schools. SRS requires regular reauthorization, typically every three years and is often accompanied by reductions in funding.

The law temporarily expired in 2016 and rural school districts missed out on a year’s-worth of SRS payments. At the Trinity Alps Unified School District, this budget shortfall prevented the district from fixing a dangerous outbreak of toxic mold. Multiple buildings in the district were closed, disrupting school for months.

While SRS funding has served as a lifeline for school districts in forest counties, advocates and economists say the cyclical struggle for ever-shrinking funds makes SRS an unsustainable way to support rural students, especially when budget shortfalls can hurt student performance and health.

“This every three-year thing, it’s brutal,” said Jamie Green, superintendent of Trinity Alps Unified School District, in an interview with the Daily Yonder. “Absolutely brutal.” 

The law was up for reauthorization in 2024 but died last December without a vote from the House of Representatives. The Senate had already voted unanimously to approve it. 

Advocates have continued to fight for reauthorization in the new year. But Congress’ failure to include the legislation in March’s federal spending package raises concerns about another lapse in funding, similar to 2016, that could jeopardize school budgets and leave their futures in flux.

“We can continue advocating,” Green said. “But I don’t know where it goes from here.”

In 2023, Trinity Alps Unified School District received $600,000 from SRS. These funds accounted for 5% of the district’s budget and were essential in paying for teachers, programming, and maintenance work. With no clear path toward reauthorization, Green’s current goal is to do what he can to cushion Trinity Alps for the looming shortfall.

“You don’t buy the new bus that you need. You don’t fix a leaky roof. You don’t replace people that have just retired,” Green said. If the bill isn’t passed, he said the district may have to cut seven jobs, which could lead to larger class sizes, likely hurting the students who need help the most.

“I can’t tell you how stressful it is when I go down to the elementary school and I’m looking at people that I might have to let go that we desperately need,” Green said.

A Century-Old Promise — A Century-Old Fight

The history of federal support for rural schools in forest communities extends far beyond the SRS program’s inception in 2000. 

In the late 1800s, large swaths of the country’s forest land were placed under reserve, later designated as National Forest land, by the U.S. government. About 80% percent of the land in Trinity County, for example, is owned by the federal government. 

The mass federalization of forest lands prevented rural communities from developing or taxing the land to support local governments and public schools. 

“Rural communities were pretty much up in arms…they were concerned by the federal government coming in and taking massive amounts of their land,” said Lonnie Hunt, head of the National Forest Counties and Schools Coalition, a group of community volunteers who advocate for forest counties across the country. 

In response to these rural concerns, Congress designated a portion of these forests harvestable for timber. In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt and chief of the Forest Service Gifford Pinchot introduced a bill that specified that 25% of the revenue raised from National Forests would be shared with the counties that overlapped this forest land to pay for local infrastructure. 

For a few decades, this plan worked: Rural counties could fund their schools, roads, and essential services with the revenue gained from logging. 

But by the late 20th century, the revenue share proved too volatile for local government and school budgets. Between 1985 and 2000, National Forest payments fluctuated by an average of 30% year-to-year, according to the Congressional Research Service. Regulations like the Northwest Forest Plan that were meant to protect old-growth forests from overharvesting in California, Oregon, and Washington, made it even more difficult to depend on timber revenue.

“For various reasons totally outside the control of these local communities, timber harvesting just pretty much ground to a halt for environmental reasons, challenges, lawsuits, what have you,” Hunt said. “And of course that meant that these local communities suffered a big economic loss.”

This volatility led to the creation of two reforms, which are still in effect today. 

The first, Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILT), are federal payments to counties to offset the local property tax lost from nontaxable public land. PILT funding can only be used for county budgets, not for schools.

The second is a set of transition payments to help counties move away from timber-dependent economies. These payments came from the Northwest Forest Plan and the eventual SRS legislation, passed in 2000.

SRS allocated counties payments based on the average of their three highest timber revenue years between 1986 and 1999. The law was originally authorized through 2006, at which point counties were expected to find new ways to fund their schools and roads. 

While some counties successfully pivoted to other industries, more timber-dependent communities had a harder time transitioning, according to Mark Haggerty, a senior fellow at the independent nonprofit research institute Center for American Progress. 

“The reason those [counties] were growing is because they were either close to a city, so they were actually participating in the new economy, or they became recreation and retirement destinations because they had a national park or some kind of amenity,” Haggerty said. 

“But the rural, isolated timber-dependent communities effectively didn’t recover, no matter what kind of transition assistance was provided.”

This was the case in Skamania County, Washington, which saw a huge change in the amount of money made through timber-related jobs from the 1970s to the 2010s. Between 1970 and 1989, timber earnings accounted for 37% of Skamania County locals’ income, according to a report from the independent research group Headwaters Economics. 

By 2014, timber accounted for just 1% of total earnings. 

While the U.S. Census Bureau defines Skamania County as a metropolitan area because of its proximity to the large cities of Vancouver and Portland, Oregon, the county has a lot in common with other rural counties that have benefited from SRS. Eighty percent of the county is public land, and 90% is forested. The Columbia River borders it from the south. Its total population is just over 12,000. 

“The goal of [the original SRS funding] was very, very admirable,” said Tom Lannen, former Skamania county commissioner and Stevenson resident. “Depending on where you were at, some counties did a marvelous job and had all kinds of resources that allowed them to transition from a timber based county to a much more diverse one.

“Unfortunately, Skamania County and a number of other ones didn’t have that luxury,” he said. 

Without other industries to fall back on with the decline of timber, the county could not sustain itself without help from the federal government. That means SRS payments have remained vital in paying for Skamania County’s infrastructure and schools. 

But its year-to-year volatility has still left the county scrambling. Over the past 15 years, the amount of money has decreased precipitously, affecting the job skills training programs offered to students. 

“We’re trying to hang onto as much of that as we can so our students can stay and have the skills and the abilities that they need to go out and have living-wage jobs in our community,” said Ingrid Colvard, superintendent of the local Stevenson-Carson School District, at a press conference about reauthorizing SRS in late February. 

The funding pays for welding and carpentry programs, a post-high school counselor, and a therapist, among other things. “This extra money, this additional 5% – it’s in our budget, and we have to have it to continue these things,” Colvard said. 

Some folks in the county say that opening up more of the National Forest to timber harvest could get the community back on the path to economic success and rid them of the need for SRS.

But that would require overturning the decades-old Northwest Forest Plan – no easy feat. And there’s no promise timber harvests would ever be as profitable as they were at the height of production in the 20th century.

And even if timber harvesting were to return, it’s a largely mechanized industry today powered by automated equipment and high-efficiency mills. Timber doesn’t provide the number of jobs that it did before automation, and companies also benefit from large state and local tax incentives. 

A mechanized economy doesn’t work for rural places, said Haggerty from the Center for American Progress, leaving behind rural communities that no longer benefit from the timber industry. 

“Companies are able to come in and extract wealth from the rural economy without leaving benefits behind,” Haggerty said. “The industry doesn’t support local communities or schools anymore.”

The Search for A Permanent Solution

Haggerty advocates for a new approach — a permanent trust to stabilize funding for rural forest communities. 

“A trust makes sure that communities have the resources they need to provide essential services and to plan for the kinds of assets and amenities that they need to help grow their economies and diversify again,” he said. For rural communities, the ability to provide basic services like public schools and nutrition programs is essential. Without it, they risk falling deeper into poverty, with less ability to escape.

An endowment model would establish a permanent trust funded by ongoing receipts from commercial activities on public lands, including the traditional revenue sharing. Under this model, the money earned from timber revenues would be held in perpetuity and invested to generate income, which would then be paid to the rural forest counties from which the resources are being extracted.

The idea behind the endowment model is simple: to invest the existing wealth from non-renewable resources in a way that continues to support these communities without further depleting the land or relying on inconsistent government funding. “It’s not asking the taxpayers for permanent appropriations, and it’s not adding to the debt. But it gives counties and schools predictable payments that they can rely on,” Haggerty said.

To guard against corruption or mismanagement, Congress could authorize an independent entity to establish and manage the trust, one managed by a board that includes the county representatives who rely on the funds, Haggerty said.

Another concern is market volatility. “If you set this thing up in 2007, you would’ve had a huge crash right away,” Haggerty said. “But that’s why you have an investment strategy and a distribution system to try to protect it.” 

The creation of a permanent trust is not a new concept. States and counties with large national resources economies, especially those dependent on fossil fuels, have implemented similar models with success.

If Congress had established such an endowment in 1908, instead of the revenue sharing program, today it could distribute $3.2 billion to forest communities and schools, a sum three times larger than the largest distributions from revenue sharing in the 1970s — and 213 times larger than the funds distributed in 2017. Even with a more recent timeline, if an endowment had been created in 2000, instead of the SRS program, it would have been worth $1.3 billion by 2018 and would distribute $33 million to these communities.

The idea has been introduced in Congress several times, with bipartisan support from Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mike Crapo (R-ID), as well as endorsements from the National Forest Counties and Schools Coalition and the National Association of Counties. Despite this support, the proposal has not gained enough traction to pass.

“We’re always in a reauthorization crunch [for SRS],” Haggerty said. “But by the time you actually start talking about a permanent solution, it’s time to reauthorize again.”

One of the key hurdles is Congress’ reluctance to create a solution that would reduce their control over the funding process. “Congress likes swooping in every year or two or three and saving the [SRS] program,” Haggerty said. “If you set up an endowment and have mandatory spending associated with it, Congress has less to do.”

Opposition also comes from within the forest counties themselves, some of which, like Skamania County, continue to push for increased timber harvests and a return to the old revenue sharing model. Environmental groups, too, have their concerns, as many oppose using timber revenue to fund an endowment, citing the environmental impact of incentivised logging.

Despite these challenges, the endowment model presents a promising solution to the ongoing struggle for stable, reliable funding for schools in rural forest communities. For superintendents, an alternative to the instability of SRS would be a welcome reprieve.

In the meantime, rural superintendents are doing what they can to support their students and communities. “It’s difficult, but you signed up to lead, you didn’t sign up to be a victim. You don’t make excuses to your community,” Trinity Alps superintendent Jamie Green said. 

“We’re working as hard as we can for our students. We cannot fail.”


Claire Carlson and Lane Wendell Fischer wrote this article for The Daily Yonder.


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Main Street businesses in South Dakota are playing what some describe as a "scramble game" in the fast-changing and challenging U.S. economy. As business owners keep an eye on new tariffs, they hope customers stay loyal.

Economists said the latest tariffs announced by President Donald Trump could lead to higher costs for products like electronics, clothing and food. Coffee is one of the popular items poised to become more expensive.

Deanna Muellenberg, who owns The Purple Pigeon Coffeehouse in Chamberlain, said she has not weighed all the details yet from last week's announcement but noted coffee prices for her have already increased by 40% since opening last year.

"I want to keep prices affordable for people that live in these small towns," Muellenberg explained. "But in order to be able to keep the doors open too, I might have to increase my costs."

So far, she has had to resort to a small price hike, with other popular sellers helping offset budget headaches tied to coffee supplies. The Federal Reserve Chair warned the new tariffs could lead to higher inflation again. Muellenberg recommended when locals do have a little extra to spend, they should keep small businesses in mind over corporate chains, because it benefits the town.

Nathan Sanderson, executive director of the South Dakota Retailers Association, acknowledged President Trump's argument about the need to "reset" the global trade market to establish fairness. But he does agree with other business voices an even bumpier road lies ahead.

Sanderson said with uncertainty almost a constant, policymakers need to set a tone emphasizing buying local.

"(Small) businesses are absolutely the heartbeat of rural communities," Sanderson stressed. "They are the entities that are supporting the local baseball team or the FFA chapter, or the dance troupe or what have you."

Outside of tariffs, Sanderson noted Main Street economies are seeing older business owners nearing retirement without enough younger generations to take over. According to federal data, South Dakota is home to nearly 90,000 small businesses.


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