Graphic video footage obtained by The Appeal shows 29-year-old Joshua McLemore wasting away and rolling in his own waste in the Jackson County Jail before eventually dying of malnutrition.
Tana Ganeva Apr 12, 2023
I don’t know if I’ll ever receive the resentencing hearing I was once promised, but I do know this system must change.
Christopher Blackwell Apr 05, 2023
Ron DeSantis called in the National Guard to staff Florida prisons. The staffing shortage is hurting incarcerated people.
Ryan M. Moser Mar 22, 2023
South Florida’s political leaders have celebrated their commitment to the unhoused—but won’t admit that those placed on offense registries are increasingly becoming unhoused.
Steven Yoder Mar 21, 2023
It’s been four years since a Phoenix police officer killed Jacob Harris. Records obtained by The Appeal show officials have made inconsistent or false statements about the night police killed him. As Harris’s friends grow up behind bars, his father won’t stop until he gets justice for his son.
Meg O'Connor Mar 14, 2023
America’s largest county has launched numerous initiatives to shrink its jail population and divert people with mental illness from jail entirely. Here’s an explainer on what the major initiatives are and what, if any, progress has been made.
Meg O'Connor Mar 12, 2023
Los Angeles County is imprisoning more people with mental illness than it did a decade ago—but is failing to provide them with basic treatment. The U.S. Department of Justice says the county jail system is decrepit, dangerous, and unfit to house anyone—let alone people with mental illness.
Meg O'Connor Mar 10, 2023
Robert Suttle was required to register as a sex offender in Louisiana after being convicted of exposing someone to HIV. But despite the fact that New York does not require its own residents to register after such a crime, the state is forcing the label on him anyway—and the Manhattan DA’s office is fighting him.
Adam M. Rhodes Mar 03, 2023
In 2015, Los Angeles County created a program to reduce the number of mentally ill people trapped in jail. But since then, the number of people with mental illness incarcerated in LA has instead increased significantly.
Meg O'Connor Mar 02, 2023
Politicians often vilify so-called violent criminals. But the “violent felon” label can mean someone committed anything from a murder to a purse-snatching or verbal threat—and doesn’t line up with what science tells us about violence.
Tana Ganeva Feb 28, 2023
An associate professor of psychology and a clinical lecturer in law at Yale explain how they’ve seen the criminal legal system treat psychopathy as a moral failing—instead of a treatable mental illness.
Arielle Baskin-Sommers, Jorge Camacho Feb 17, 2023
Officials delayed the delivery of critical documents for months, leading to the premature dismissal of at least two appeals filed by incarcerated men. The mistakes underscore much deeper challenges for indigent prisoners.
Christopher Blackwell Feb 15, 2023
Third in a three-part series on a teenager with a tumultuous childhood who was sent to die in prison and where his life would lead. The following narrative was compiled from interviews and court records.
Sylvia A. Harvey Feb 13, 2023
The alleged “fight club” is one of many issues people say plague South Woods State Prison’s “Restorative Housing Unit,” a disciplinary wing that advocates call solitary confinement by another name.
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg Feb 09, 2023
I was lucky enough to get a lot of mail while imprisoned on Rikers Island. Paper mail is one of the few things that keeps prisoners feeling human.
David Campbell Feb 08, 2023
We’re still overcrowded and set up for disaster.
Rahsaan Thomas Feb 07, 2023
Second in a three-part series on a teenager with a tumultuous childhood who was sent to die in prison, and where his life would lead. The following narrative was compiled from interviews and court records.
Sylvia A. Harvey Feb 06, 2023
More than six years into DOJ probes, the conditions inside Georgia prisons have only further deteriorated.
C. Dreams, Aja Arnold Feb 01, 2023
First in a three-part series on a teenager with a tumultuous childhood sent to die in prison, and where his life would lead. The following narrative was compiled from interviews and court records.
Sylvia A. Harvey Jan 30, 2023
Four lawmakers explain why they introduced legislation to finally end felony disenfranchisement in New York.
Julia Salazar, Zellnor Myrie, Harvey Epstein, and Latrice Walker Jan 17, 2023
After a wave of tabloid coverage about pregnancies involving a trans prisoner at a women’s facility, officials gave themselves more power to deny housing placements consistent with gender identity.
Adam M. Rhodes Jan 17, 2023
Last year, the Louisiana Office of Juvenile Justice began transferring children to Angola, the state’s most notorious prison. Since then, kids say they’ve suffered through horrific conditions and routine mistreatment.
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg Jan 13, 2023
Incarcerated writers reflect on the pain, joy, and other complicated emotions associated with getting in the so-called “holiday spirit” in prison.
Chris Blackwell, Antoine E. Davis, Jonathan Kirkpatrick, Aaron Edward Olson & Raymond Williams Dec 22, 2022
I was arrested in 2011 after engaging in sex work to survive and later forced to register as a sex offender. Since then, social stigma, footage laws, and crushing monthly court debts have made it difficult to get back on my own two feet and succeed after prison.
Christina Lynch Dec 08, 2022
Deaths at the Fulton County Jail have quadrupled compared to last year. Despite this, county commissioners are threatening to cut funding to one of the Atlanta area’s main pre-arrest diversion initiatives.
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg Dec 07, 2022
In September, an Iowa judge sentenced Pieper Lewis, a Black teenager who was trafficked and sexually assaulted, to community supervision after she pleaded guilty to stabbing one of her abusers to death. Some hailed the sentence as compassionate. But facts about supervision say otherwise.
Mon Mohapatra Dec 06, 2022
A soon-to-be-released report reveals that metal “four-point” restraints are often used for multiple days in a row, including on one person who was held for 39 straight days. A new state bill would set stricter parameters.
Daliah Singer Nov 22, 2022
New restrictions have made it harder to send food to incarcerated people. Advocates say the policy is doing disproportionate harm inside women’s prisons, and to women on the outside who often serve as caretakers.
Molly Hagan Nov 15, 2022
On Election Day, voters in Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon, Tennessee, and Vermont will decide whether to close loopholes in their state constitutions allowing the forced labor of incarcerated people.
Bryce Covert Nov 07, 2022
Women told The Appeal they found the routine practice degrading and dehumanizing. Prisons around the country have long humiliated people for menstruating.
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg Nov 03, 2022
The medical examiner who helped put Tasha Shelby in prison has since said her son’s death was not a homicide.
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg Oct 19, 2022
Detainees at New Mexico’s Torrance County Detention Facility recently launched a hunger strike, motivated in part by the August death of a 23-year-old asylum seeker in custody.
Eduardo Campos Lima Oct 13, 2022
New York’s landmark solitary confinement reform law created a new, “rehabilitative” type of isolation unit. State prisons aren’t on board with the changes.
Chris Gelardi Oct 05, 2022
Data obtained by The Appeal show nearly 2,000 people in Mississippi and Louisiana are serving long—and sometimes life—sentences after they were labeled “habitual offenders.” But most are behind bars for small crimes like drug possession.
Tana Ganeva Sep 26, 2022
An upcoming court ruling could decide the fate of a plan to detain “problematic youth” at a facility that previously housed prisoners awaiting execution.
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg Sep 22, 2022
Patrick Stephens, a formerly incarcerated writer, explains how arbitrary, byzantine, and punitive visiting rules tear apart the families of the incarcerated—especially after the pandemic.
Patrick Stephens Sep 22, 2022
Thousands of deaths in jails, prisons, and police custody have gone uncounted in recent years. Now the DOJ is calling for changes to federal law.
Ethan Corey Sep 20, 2022
County officials agree that conditions have deteriorated at L.A.’s Inmate Reception Center. But they’re resisting calls for substantive change.
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg Sep 13, 2022
Prison officials allegedly used solitary confinement to get the plaintiff to submit to an invasive examination prohibited under federal law.
Chris Gelardi Aug 31, 2022
“They were destroying me,” said one person placed in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s “Program for the Aggressive Mentally Ill Offender.”
Daniel Moritz-Rabson Aug 22, 2022