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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

This story is part of Locked Out, a special series from PJP about voting, politics and democracy behind bars. Click here to read more. When I arrived at the Central Treatment Facility of the ...

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, ...

When most people in the U.S. seek professional help, they expect the provider to improve the situation. Anybody would hold the service provider accountable for ineffective care. Yet that’s not the ...

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 ...

In her nine years working in a mental health unit of the Washington State Penitentiary, S. Acosta has seen some horrific things. She has worked with prisoners who have cut off their own body parts, ...

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.

I remember Dad once found a rare wooden cradleboard wedged between two rocks, likely left more than a century before. He made his discovery known to what was then called the Southwest Museum of the ...

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 ...