I overcame PTSD after fighting in war, but I had no encounters with other mental illnesses until I helped people in crisis at my prison.

Typically, issues of prison censorship have to do with what is and isn’t allowed into prisons. There are endless stories and studies on the banning of certain books and the major limitations on ...

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.

It is difficult to describe the overwhelming excitement of getting mail while incarcerated. When I started this prison term, in 2015, I felt abandoned. I was sad and angry. Everyone I knew was on the ...

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 ...

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 ...

What to the incarcerated American is the freedom to vote? For most of the nearly 1.5 million people locked up in prisons across the U.S., there is, in fact, no freedom to vote at all. Only two states, ...

For more than half of my life, I have not been free. I was sent to prison when I was 15 years old for second-degree murder, a crime I truly regret. I began my sentence at Thumb Correctional Facility, ...

When you consider the age of New York prisons, the lack of cooling makes sense, in a way. The state has four maximum security prisons that were built in the 1800s: Auburn Correctional Facility (1818), ...

In 2005, I requested a transfer to the capital case unit that housed death row inmates at the State Correctional Institution at Graterford, near Philadelphia, my hometown. Graterford was a progressive ...

May 30, 2024 — The Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and Prison Journalism Project (PJP) have today announced the winners of the inaugural Stillwater Awards. The Stillwater Awards are a joint ...

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 ...