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.

I don’t know if I’ll ever receive the resentencing hearing I was once promised, but I do know this system must change.

Ron DeSantis called in the National Guard to staff Florida prisons. The staffing shortage is hurting incarcerated people.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We’re still overcrowded and set up for disaster.

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.

More than six years into DOJ probes, the conditions inside Georgia prisons have only further deteriorated.

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.

Four lawmakers explain why they introduced legislation to finally end felony disenfranchisement in New York.

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.

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.

Incarcerated writers reflect on the pain, joy, and other complicated emotions associated with getting in the so-called “holiday spirit” in prison.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Women told The Appeal they found the routine practice degrading and dehumanizing. Prisons around the country have long humiliated people for menstruating.

The medical examiner who helped put Tasha Shelby in prison has since said her son’s death was not a homicide.

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.

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.

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.

An upcoming court ruling could decide the fate of a plan to detain “problematic youth” at a facility that previously housed prisoners awaiting execution.

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.

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.

County officials agree that conditions have deteriorated at L.A.’s Inmate Reception Center. But they’re resisting calls for substantive change.

Prison officials allegedly used solitary confinement to get the plaintiff to submit to an invasive examination prohibited under federal law.

“They were destroying me,” said one person placed in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s “Program for the Aggressive Mentally Ill Offender.”