Donald Trump’s second term, with its abundance of authoritarian words and deeds, has also popularized numerous recastings of Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem about the Nazi’s, “First They Came.” One of them goes like this: “First they came for the journalists. We don’t know what happened after that.” 

Although American journalism has never been a complete stranger to censorship—especially the kind of censorship by omission in which some stories and some people are simply not deemed newsworthy—there is no doubt that in recent years, “the country is experiencing a significant and prolonged decline in press freedom,” as Reporters Without Borders (RSF) puts it. 

Each year, on the eve of World Press Freedom Day (today), RSF publishes an index that evaluates and ranks countries on their levels of press freedom, using five indicators: political context, legal framework, economic context, sociocultural context, and safety. The United States has lost ground on all of these indicators, falling in rank over the past decade from 41st to 64th out of 180 countries.

Much—though not all—of this decline can be traced to Trump’s two terms in office. Within the broader context of media consolidation, vanishing local news, and reduced legal protections for journalists, “Trump is waging an all-out war on press freedom and journalism,” states RSF’s North America director. “Trump, along with his advisors and allies, has dealt devastating blows to journalism, setting dangerous precedents and inflicting enduring harm.” (Read the full statement for a detailed rundown of the evidence.)

While taking nothing away from the gravity of this moment and this threat, it’s worth acknowledging that for incarcerated journalists, none of this is especially new. In all the areas measured by the index—political, legal, economic, sociocultural, safety—reporters working from behind bars have faced enormous obstacles and daunting disadvantages, relative to other journalists, in creating and disseminating their work.

Incarcerated writers live their daily lives in deprived and toxic environments, overseen by forces that are tremendously invested in making sure that what happens in prisons stays in prisons. In other words, by the very act of reporting on their surroundings, they are acting as enemies of the state. Add to this the fact that they are disproportionately Black and Brown, poor and undereducated; that they have been stripped of a large slice of their legal rights; and that they are subject to arbitrary retaliation at the hands of prison staff. 

Given this context, it seems like a miracle that anyone in prison can even manage to (literally) put pen to paper, much less produce the kind of brave, brilliant, groundbreaking journalism that those of us who live and/or work among them know they do.

Just among the writers we have worked with—recipients of support from our Ridgeway Reporting Project for incarcerated journalists—several have been thrown in solitary as retaliation for reporting or publishing stories exposing prison conditions. They have lost hard-won privileged housing status. They’ve had their typewriters or their handwritten manuscripts seized. And they’ve been cut off from all phone and written contact with the outside world, including their own families. 

And still, they write. Even without computers and the internet, they write. Even if their work goes ignored or unpaid, they write. Even when prison publications are censored, and when free world publications pigeonhole their work, they write. Even under threat, they go on writing. 

So if—or perhaps when—things get worse for non-incarcerated journalists in the United States, they would do well to draw inspiration from the courage and doggedness of their counterparts behind bars, whose shows readers on the outside a world they were never meant to see; exposes policies and practices they were never meant to question; and insists upon the humanity of people they were never meant to care about.