Inside Edition

It’s aimed at America’s fastest-growing market--an audience with lots on its mind and plenty of time to read. Prison Life is the first magazine edited for men and women behind bars.

Guiding its in-your-face brand of journalism is a husband-wife team, both ex-convicts, who knew little about the economics of publishing before pooling their money and talents to put out their bimonthly magazine, which frequently gets banned by prison officials.

“Prison Life presents the prisoner’s side of crime and punishment problems and issues,” says Editor and Publisher Richard Stratton, 50. He admits that editorial agenda is intended to counter the spin of many prison public relations bureaucrats who he says weave a distorted reality of what goes on within their walls.

In addition to de-mythologizing life behind bars with articles that frequently expose alleged human rights violations, each issue offers news about the latest legal decisions, a guest editorial, fiction and nonfiction stories by convicts, advice on where ex-cons can look for reintegration help after their release, plus such standing features as the tattoo of the month, recipes for in-cell cooking, addresses of pen pals and several pages of letters that pull no punches.

“We’re the only publication that addresses the needs of our readers with information they can’t get from any other single source,” says Kim Wozencraft, 41, the magazine’s executive editor.

She’s a former undercover narcotics agent who served time after getting strung out on drugs and caught up in an entrapment investigation. Stratton is an ex-drug smuggler who says he could have escaped a lengthy prison term by falsely implicating author Norman Mailer in one of his operations.

An early editorial stated the magazine was about “Giving the system a fight. We’re striving to change a few things. We’re building a forum, but we’re not seeking to overthrow the government, burn flags, open the prison gates. Prison Life is the voice of the convict, not the gun.”

Less than 2 years old, with a $19.95-a-year paid circulation of 25,000 but a pass-along readership vastly higher, the magazine has a staff of 10--all ex-cons--divided between editorial offices in Stone Ridge, N.Y., and a business office in Houston. Prison Life earned an Alternative Press Award from the Utne Reader for service “with courage and integrity” to its readers.

But that “courage”--and its bare-knuckles attitude--have led to run-ins with prison officials. Typical was an incident with the California Department of Corrections. The officials banned the October 1994 issue from all 32 of the state’s prisons, saying it contained an escape plan.

What it contained was a two-paragraph news story, reprinted from the Associated Press, about a convict who braided dental floss into a rope and used it to climb a wall and escape.

Tip Kendel, the department’s assistant director of communications, says the issue was banned because, “It described an escape plan and escape methodology. Articles that are contrary to prison policy--like how to make a bomb, or escape, or attack a guard--are the kinds of stories we do not let into the prisons.”

Stratton believes that was a typical over-reaction and excuse to suppress the magazine.

There are more than 1.6 million people in prison in America, the most in history, and that number is climbing.

“Prisons are the hottest growing form of public housing,” Stratton says. It is estimated that one out of every 200 citizens will go to prison at least once in their lifetime. About 90%--all but the most hard core and those on death row--are likely to reenter society someday.

Wozencraft and Stratton first met in February 1991 at a PEN writing awards ceremony in New York City.

“It wasn’t love at first sight,” says the soft-spoken Wozencraft. “It took awhile to warm up to each other, but when we did, things took off very quickly.”

Decisive action always has been a part of her public persona. She joined the Tyler (Texas) Police Department at 22, but soon got caught up in the drug world she was helping to investigate.

As she remembers it, “My life was a mess,” spiraling downward after she becoming hooked on cocaine and amphetamines, bottoming when she and her police partner were shotgunned by an unknown assailant. After resigning from the police department and joining the Air Force, she was indicted, along with her partner, supervisor and chief of police, in an entrapment case. Wozencraft ultimately served 14 months in federal prison for perjury.

In 1983, she entered Columbia University and received a master’s degree in its Master of Fine Arts writing program. Her 600-page thesis was a novelization of her experiences. Published in 1990 by Random House, “Rush” received glowing reviews, and Wozencraft, a $1-million advance for movie rights. Lili Zanuck made her directorial debut with the film and Jennifer Jason Leigh played Wozencraft’s character.

Her second novel, “Notes From the Country Club,” (Houghton Miflin, 1993) also received outstanding reviews but, like “Rush,” did not sell well. Optioned by Demi Moore, it is in limbo. Her third novel, a story about drug smuggling, is being written for Doubleday.

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Stratton, a descendant of the blue-blooded Massachusetts Lowells, also turned his experiences into a novel. “Smack Goddess” was published after his release from prison by Birch Lane Press in 1991. However, unlike Wozencraft, he had always had an itch to write.

In 1965, Stratton enrolled at Arizona State University in Tempe. It was the Age of Aquarius and he soon immersed himself in the drug culture, making runs to Mexico to bring back bricks of “Acapulco Gold” to sell to fellow students. At the end of his freshman year, he quit college and went to Europe with the intention of becoming a writer, but where, with friends, he began putting together hash deals in Morocco.

“The adventure was more important than the money,” he says. “I was seeing it as material for the novel I wanted to write some day.”

Stratton took a writing course at Harvard in 1969 and won a fellowship at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. It was there, on Cape Cod, that he met and built a lasting friendship with Mailer, who saw promise in the brash young man who had talent but became sidetracked running an international smuggling operation.

Thailand, Nepal, Mexico and Lebanon were Stratton’s ports of call as he built a multimillion-dollar, 65-man operation that brought in tons of hash and marijuana.

“I didn’t traffic in hard drugs,” he says, for moral reasons. He had no qualms about importing marijuana because he believed it eventually would be legalized.

In 1982, more than 17 years after Stratton brought back his first brick from Mexico, federal agents busted him, seizing more than $1.5 million worth of marijuana and hash, part of which the government believed had been stored on a farm Stratton jointly owned with Mailer.

Immediately the government began pressuring Stratton to implicate Mailer, but Mailer wasn’t involved. Still, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the prosecutor made it clear to Stratton that he would walk if he gave them Mailer, the headline and career maker.

Stratton refused. He was prosecuted for operating a continuing criminal enterprise, that 10-year term added to the 15 years he had received for the smuggling case. While in prison, Stratton became his own lawyer, drafting a writ that argued you can punish a man for his crimes, but cannot enhance his sentence for refusing to cooperate with the government. An appeals court agreed with him in 1987, and the sentence was vacated. He was paroled in 1990, eight years after entering prison, and met Wozencraft seven months later.

Wozencraft was attracted to Stratton by his kindness, she recalled, “and his energy. He was trying to make positive changes in the world.” They married in 1992 in New York City.

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The vehicle for that change has been Prison Life magazine, which had originally been a short-lived, “People-type publication, without a strong point of view,” Stratton says. “When it went under, we bought the name and changed the editorial mission.” That was two years ago.

Advertisers are beginning to embrace Prison Life’s editorial policies and rapid growth, and Stratton expects it to show a profit by the end of the year. Howard Antman, an executive with Prism Optical’s advertising agency in Miami, says, “We’ve been so satisfied with the response from the readers for our clients’ eyeglasses that we are now looking for other quality products to sell to prisoners.”

Mailer, too, has been impressed with the magazine’s progress. “It is getting better with every issue--particularly the issue on prison art, which was terrific,” he says. “I may occasionally make a comment on what I like, or don’t like, but I never suppose for one moment that Richard needs my help. It can be said that he stands on his own feet, and Kim is no slouch either.”

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It is all heady stuff for two people who once heard judges pronounce prison sentences that were shattering.

“We put our own money into the magazine, and there were times when I didn’t think we were going to make it,” Stratton says. “But we have, and that--along with our two boys, Maxwell [4] and Dashiell [2]--makes us happier than we ever thought was possible.”

Wozencraft agrees. “Our life now has focus and meaning,” she says. “We’re using a very unpleasant thing that happened in our lives to help those who are going through where we have been.”

Ex-con Danny Trejo, an actor who played a key character in the movie “Heat” and who was on the cover of the March-April issue that featured success stories about him, Tim Allen, Roc Dutton and other ex-convicts making it in Hollywood, believes Stratton and Wozencraft are role models for anyone who has done time.

“The real message here is not to be overlooked,” Trejo says. “They are demonstrating to skeptics that ex-convicts can establish a legitimate business, pay taxes, obey laws and gain the respect of society. To me, those are praiseworthy achievements because the demagogues continue to build ever-higher barriers for ex-convicts to climb over.”

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Behind-Bars Reading

Here’s a sample of the articles in recent issues of Prison Life:

* “From Doing Time to Prime Time,” features on ex-cons who have made it in show business.

* “Art Behind Bars,” winners of magazine-sponsored competition in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama and art categories.

* “Death Row Prisoner’s Right to Interviews Upheld,” an AP report on a legal decision.

* “Going to Meet the Man,” advice on how to deal with your parole officer after you get out.

* “Seeking Reconciliation From Death Row,” a guest editorial by a condemned serial rapist-murderer about his desire to make amends.

* “Sex in Prison,” a report on sexual abuse of female prisoners.

* “In-Cell Cooking,” this month’s recipes include Bodacious Burritos and Slam Down Tamales.