“Many progressives mistrust her for her past as a prosecutor. As an ex-convict — and also the son of a crime victim — I can tell you it’s not that simple.”
mass incarceration
Posted inEditor's Pick
Can We Build a Better Women’s Prison?
Houston Chronicle criminal justice reporter Keri Blakinger — who once served 21 months of a 2½-year sentence for felony drug possession — visits a women’s prison near Austin, Texas, and considers the ways in which women’s prisons don’t take into consideration women’s particular needs. She speaks with those involved in planning a new $97 million building […]
Posted inBooks, Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Science & Nature, Story
A Green New Jail
What does environmental justice look like in a landscape overrun by prisons? Where the incarcerated suffer from unusually polluted surroundings, and prisons are a toxin in their own right?
Posted inBooks, Profiles & Interviews, Story
The Tether Between Two Worlds: An Interview with Sergio De La Pava
His new novel is about mass incarceration, indoor football, and parallel universes. De La Pava says that when “you dig deep, you start seeing the way everything is connected.”
Posted inCrime, Nonfiction, Unapologetic Women
Harvard’s About-Face on Michelle Jones’s Acceptance
The ex-convict, who became a history scholar behind bars, prepares to start classes at NYU instead.
Posted inEditor's Pick
From Prison to Ph.D.: The Redemption and Rejection of Michelle Jones
A feature, produced in a collaboration between The New York Times and The Marshall Project, about Harvard University’s eleventh-hour flip-flop on its acceptance of ex-convict Michelle Jones to its doctoral program in history. Jones, who spent more than two decades in prison for the murder of her four-year-old son, conceived non-consensually when she was 14, […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Price We Pay for Mass Incarceration
Put another way, the supposition on which our mass incarceration is premised—namely, that it materially reduces crime—is, at best, a hunch. Yet the price we pay for acting on this hunch is enormous. This is true in the literal sense: it costs more than $80 billion a year to run our jails and prisons. It […]