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This story was originally published at Prism.

When news of the Epstein files first broke, I watched it unfold on a television I do not own, in a room I cannot leave, on a TV channel I did not choose. The framing I received about Jeffrey Epstein — the financier convicted of soliciting sex from a minor and who was later found dead in jail following his arrest on charges of prolific child sex trafficking — came from Fox News.

This, of course, is the same Fox News that has spent years shielding, celebrating, and amplifying President Donald Trump, a sexual abuser and a man whose name appears throughout the Epstein files. The same Fox News that was built by Roger Ailes, a man who ran a serial sexual harassment operation out of one of the most powerful media companies in America. Ailes was removed from Fox News in 2016 after more than 20 women came forward with accounts of sexual harassment and coercion. He died the following year, reputation destroyed but fortune intact. The values of the network also remain, and so, too, does the ultraconservative channel’s influence in Texas prisons.

Fox News is the media I am required to consume, and it is not an accident.

I am a survivor incarcerated in Texas, where the television you have access to in state prisons is not determined by your curiosity, your education, or your hunger to understand the world; it is determined by your security classification. My classification dictates that I only have access to Fox News, so the men who run the racist machine that exploits women are the same men whose network explains Epstein to survivors in my prison.

What we are fed is not information. It is a carefully constructed unreality designed to ensure that survivors never fully name what happened to them, or to women more broadly, or to the system that put us here. Fox News’ framing of the Epstein files, which routinely minimizes Trump’s relationship to the pedophile, is what women in this building receive as truth.

Visuals Help Expose the Realities of Mass Incarceration to a Wider Audience

The state’s decision to subject women to Fox News is political architecture designed to control what we understand about the world, about power, and about the violence that has been done to women like us.

“Free” Media Indoctrination

At the lowest security levels in Texas prisons, incarcerated people vote on which channels to watch. This may sound like democracy, but it is only a simulacrum of it — and this choice is not extended to all. As your classification rises, the small autonomy that allows you to vote is stripped away. At the highest security levels that include restrictive housing and mental health programs, which together can represent up to half of a prison’s population, there is no vote. Fox News is mandatory during the one hour a day people in higher security areas can watch television.

Keep in mind that Texas holds nearly 150,000 people in state prisons, and some studies show that up to 95% of incarcerated women have experienced domestic or sexual violence at some point in their lives. We are talking about thousands of women,........

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