When a person is convicted, it is easy to forget they are more than a felon. They are someone’s son or daughter. They might even be someone’s father or mother. They are also someone’s friend. A person ...

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 ...

Just a few days after my article about the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ refusal to provide me and other prisoners with addiction treatment ran in a local paper near United States Penitentiary, McCreary, ...

In prison, almost every part of your life is dictated by someone else. But taking control of your appearance is one way people inside can reclaim some control. Sometimes that’s easier said than done.

In 2000, I started a life sentence at New Jersey State Prison, in Trenton. Over roughly 25 years behind bars, I have learned to love. Yes, that’s right. I went to prison and got soft. To express love ...

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 ...

The Guns N’ Roses message has to be clunkily rewritten to pass through: “Hey Mom! I’m sending you an article I wrote about Axl Rose’s group and their music…” Everyday words that are also used as slang ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...