In California’s Central Valley sits a 640-acre prison, which is home to more than 2,000 women, nonbinary, and transgender people.
It’s the largest women’s prison in the state — and the world.
But that is not the only thing the Central California Women’s Facility is known for. This past fall, it became home to The Paper Trail, an independent newspaper run by incarcerated writers and editors.
It was all started by Jesse Vasquez, who founded The Pollen Initiative, a nonprofit organization that helps build media centers inside prisons, after he completed his own sentence.
“Before I joined the newspaper, I had lived in silence,” he wrote for CalMatters in December of 2024.
“It’s hard to imagine you aren’t just a data point when every study about prison population presents you as a statistical outcome of a few societal ills.”
For women, he added, it can be even harder to cultivate a voice and identity, as women make up just barely 4% of the state’s prison population.
Now, The Paper Trail is the first newspaper of its kind in any women’s prison in the United States.
“[The Paper Trail] engages with community, promotes hope, creates positive solutions, and amplifies voices rarely heard,” its webpage states.
The newspaper’s team is made up of six editorial board members, seven contributing writers, and two advisers: Vasquez and Kate McQueen, a writer and editor who specializes in narratives of crime and justice.
McQueen began teaching the first cohort of community journalists in a 16-week training program in the spring of 2024, with the first issue published in September.
Support from the prison’s warden, Anissa De La Cruz has made the whole process 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 edition of The Paper Trail. “Part of that means making space for a newspaper at CCWF, its own newspaper.”
Her willingness to give the program a home speaks to Vasquez’s motivations.
“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 told The Pulitzer Center last fall.
Megan Hogg, a writer for the paper, told the Pulitzer Center that programming like this has not been accessible to the women’s facility, pointing to the robust newspaper initiative at San Quentin, a men’s prison, where Vasquez got his start in community journalism.
Programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and basic education are available across all of California’s prisons, according to The Pulitzer Center, but educational, vocational, and therapeutic resources vary.
The Paper Trail is a much-needed outlet for its creators.
“It's been amazing to be a part of something starting here for women that inspired a lot of women,” Hogg told LAist. She has been incarcerated at the facility for 12 years.
“The first issue that came out, people were like ‘Oh, wow, we have a newspaper,’” she added. “You cannot find a copy now. People are like, ‘Can I look at yours?’”
The paper is distributed in print, on tablets available inside the facility, and online. It gets all its funding from The Pollen Initiative.
As for the coverage, articles in the paper include things anyone might see in their local newspaper, like stories about community events such as farmers markets and pickleball games. But other stories highlight the unique experiences of incarceration.
One recent story dove into ice as a hot commodity in the prison, and another profiled a community member who spent 45 years at the facility and finally walked free. Others explore topics like menopause behind bars and state legislation that could impact the justice system.
“The opening of this media center starts a whole new era of women being able to speak their truths,” news editor Delina Williams told LAist.
For future editions, the editorial cohort hopes to distribute the paper outside of the walls of CCWF, too.
“Hopefully the newspaper will motivate people to ask questions, and think about how they can help our community by volunteering and getting engaged,” Amber Bray, the paper’s editor-in-chief, told The Pulitzer Center.
“The Paper Trail will humanize us, humanize this community,” the paper’s layout designer Nora Igova added.
“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.”
Anyone can read digital stories published on The Paper Trail’s website, and the first six print issues have also been digitized and added to the site.
And already, another cohort of contributors has begun their training.
“We are making history,” editor-in-chief Bray said when the first issue debuted.
“We get to show the world who we are and what we are doing inside of CCWF. Our goal is to leave some very big shoes to fill by others that come after us.”
Header image courtesy of The Pollen Initiative
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