We Train Prison Journalists to Change the Narrative About Mass Incarceration Prison Journalism Project is an independent, national nonprofit organization that trains incarcerated writers to be ...

On February 8, 2022, about an hour before the 6:30 a.m. morning count, an announcement rang out over the loudspeakers at New Jersey State Prison. It was an emergency code, a “Code 53,” indicating a ...

Prison Journalism Navigator Laws Around Prison Journalism In the United States, journalists enjoy broad freedoms to investigate, author and publish news stories for the public good. There are also ...

Nothing in prison is soft and cuddly. Prisons are concrete and steel and stocked with hard people doing hard time. Toughness is mandatory, brutality a virtue, as we resist — are forced to resist — the ...

This story is a Kite, a special category dedicated to first-person reports that rely heavily on a writer’s first-hand observations and experiences. Read more about why PJP uses this category here.

There is not much I can do to control my situation at my prison. For example, I can’t choose to come and go from my cell when I want. Rather than let these restrictions defeat me, I remain optimistic ...

Next, we were loaded onto a modern white bus with large, tinted windows. It was the size of a touring bus, like those used for musicians and sports teams. The bus was divided into three sections, each ...

Everything was cold, gray and hard. The lights were too bright or too dim, but always tinted in a yellow haze. It would have been easy to mistake being processed in a Los Angeles jail as a dream — no, ...

On any given day, there are nearly 60,000 incarcerated teens in U.S. prisons and juvenile detention centers. The problem begins with what advocates call the school-to-prison pipeline, or policies and ...

Timothy Johnson is the assistant editor for The Nash News, a newspaper published out of Nash Correctional Institution in North Carolina, where he is incarcerated. He holds a bachelor’s degree in ...

If all of this seems overly fastidious, it is. But it is also used as a measuring stick of another person’s intelligence and social learning abilities. If we can trust you to shit in the accepted ...

The weight deck, where we exercise at the Washington State Penitentiary, is not hospitable to vegetation. Sunbaked gravel and decades of dumbbells dropped from prisoners’ hands make it the last place ...