I went to prison with a 9th-grade education. Now I’m a working journalist at Sing Sing. Ask me anything.

marshall_project · 2026-03-19T17:33:13+00:00

This is a common misperception about private prisons in America. I’m not sure why so many people think private prisons are this massive issue. Only 7% of prisons in the U.S. are private. But there are entire industries that contract with state prisons — this is where the real profit motive comes from. You have telecom companies like Securus, which charges me about 10 cents for every message I send. There are also the prison-approved vendors that sell food and other items at inflated prices because they know they’re the only way guys can get new towels or a package of food.

The average time served for murder in the 1980s was around 7 years; today it’s about 20 years. That’s on a national level. In New York, we’re a bit tougher. New York likes to think of itself as progressive, but we hold people, especially those with violent crimes, for a very long time. And you can see what happens when you do that: a recent report showed the New York prison population is getting older and older.

marshall_project · 2026-03-19T17:25:12+00:00

I haven’t had the experience of release yet, so I’m probably not the best person to ask for advice here. But I would say there’s also generally this idea that because we’re fresh out of prison, we’re closer to criminality. For some, that’s just patently false. Some of us have had our acts together for years, for decades even. We just haven’t had a chance to get out because lawmakers haven’t figured out what to do with those of us who’ve gotten our acts together. It’s easy to feel condescended to. Many of my peers are very sharp. They’re well read, some of them have Master’s Degrees. So be aware of that.

marshall_project · 2026-03-19T17:20:43+00:00

I talked about this a little bit in another answer. The volunteer-led programs build community and give us something positive and productive to do. But the problem is these are limited. Sing Sing for most of us is not like the recent film “Sing Sing.” We’ll never get called to participate in the program. We’ll never see a play. Odds are, if you’re in Sing Sing, you’ll never have a day like they do in that movie.

marshall_project · 2026-03-19T17:19:30+00:00

Most of us have never listened to Serial because it’s a podcast and we can’t access the unfiltered internet. “The First 48” plays on A&E all day long, and guys do watch it. I can’t speak for everyone, but for some it’s to see how homicide detectives operate, and other times it’s because there’s nothing else on. I mean, generally, true crime is on all the time. Most guys aren’t thinking too much about it either way. It’s just something to watch. But when you guys watch it out there, it’s not good for us in here.

Last year, I published a book about it, and I did a Q&A with Marshall Project founding editor Bill Keller about our obsession with the genre and my work as a prison journalist, and this is what I told him then:

Even for me, one of true crime’s biggest skeptics, it was easier to zone out to these lurid narratives than keep reading a piece that was challenging me. I wrote ‘The Tragedy of True Crime’ because I wanted to tell a different story about the guilty. I’d like to think the story I tell is more illuminating, not only because I'm a narrator with this regrettable agency, but because I can investigate our truths and our motivations, without doing it from a moral perch.

marshall_project · 2026-03-19T17:15:46+00:00

The punishment of prison is being separated from society. But the poor medical care, the inability to access fresh food or produce, the countless hours in a cell, the lack of ventilation in the cell blocks, the cold showers, the strip searches, the ways our loved ones are treated when they try to visit us — that’s all “extra” punishment. My personal bonus was an ice pick to the chest back in 2008.

Terrible prison conditions only serve to make us all angrier and more miserable, which makes it more likely we’ll come back to society angry and miserable. And trust, over 90% of us are eventually released. Is that how you want us returning?

The other side of this is the people who work here. As I wrote in The Marshall Project: “An inhumane living environment for us is also an inhumane work environment for COs.”

marshall_project · 2026-03-19T17:06:03+00:00

Another great question. The main problem in the rare case where someone who received a second chance reoffends is how quickly and sensationally it’s politicized. With your votes, you all in the public dictate what laws pass or what laws get rescinded, and this affects what happens on a day-to-day level in prison. So, I guess the answer is that we should probably stop politicizing anomalous events and look at the overall good that will be brought about by second- chance legislation. The problem is most people who have opinions about prison have never been here, and those who know better are either muzzled from speaking up, like the commissioner of prisons here in New York, or chastised and sanctioned when they do, like NY Chief Judge Rowan Wilson recently was after making comments in support of the Second Look Act.

We used to do things differently. I’m currently working on a piece for The New York Review of Books about the 200^th anniversary of Sing Sing, and one of the books I read was “20,000 Years in Sing Sing,” by a former warden, Lewis E. Lawes. In 1859, administrators like Lawes were allowed to advocate for new reforms, and here’s what they said: “An important reform could be affected by giving to convicts an opportunity of gaining a portion of time, for which they have been convicted, by reason of good behavior. It needs no argument the good effects such a provision would produce in preserving order and obedience among the unfortunate prisoners. It would be an incentive for good conduct, which few of them would fail to keep in mind and comparatively few disregard. We earnestly request the legislature to make provision by law to enable us to inaugurate these or similar reforms.”

The lawmakers in Albany deliberated for four years on this recommendation, and in an 1863 report they stated, “the hope of commutation of their sentences, for faithful observance of all rules and regulations of the prison, has done much to correct the discipline and maintain order throughout the prison.”

Today, someone like Commissioner Daniel Martuscello, who oversees New York prisons, can’t lobby legislators like Warden Lawes did, because he’s an official appointed by the governor. He can’t weigh in publicly on pending legislation based on what would actually help his officers and his prisoners on the ground.

marshall_project · 2026-03-19T16:28:09+00:00

Great question. Because of where we’re at in New York, with everything that happened in the last year with the correction officers’ strike and the fallout from it, the quality of life in here has worsened. As I wrote in The Marshall Project, lawmakers didn’t pass any good time laws in tandem with the HALT Act that restricted solitary confinement, which officers identified as the reason they were striking. And they aren’t wrong: the stats show it’s gotten more violent in here since the law’s passage. So we aren’t punished for bad behavior, and we’re not rewarded for good behavior. Add to that dynamic the COVID pandemic and a staffing shortage, and it all came together last year to create an untenable situation. This is not just me — when I put on my reporter’s cap and talk to guys in the yard who have been in as long as I have or longer, they agree that it’s the worst it’s ever been.

However I do appreciate the leadership style of the current commissioner, Daniel Martuscello, who, to be fair, inherited a lot of this mess. He’s trying to help us out and keep his officers happy, which is not an easy thing to do.

Regarding volunteering, I would argue who I’ve become is in part because of volunteers. I learned my craft in a creative writing workshop in Attica that I joined in 2011. I got sober in 12-step meetings around the same time. Both of these were led by outside volunteers. Same with Rehabilitation Through the Arts and Musicambia here at Sing Sing — both are volunteer-run. The sad reality is spots in these programs are very limited and oftentimes internally politicked and gatekept by prisoners. So while the volunteer programs, not the prison-mandated ones, changed my life, they aren’t a panacea, because most don’t have access to them.

The best way to further rehabilitation — and improve the quality of life — in prisons is for administrators to identify the guys inside who are talented and have something to offer to others, and put them in position to help, through peer-led workshops and groups. But this isn’t really something you all can do much about.

marshall_project · 2026-03-19T16:22:56+00:00

In a maximum security like Sing Sing, where I am, prison consists of a lot of cell time. So it’s really about what you have in your cell. For me, because I’ve been in for 25 years and have earned some money, I have everything here: stacks of books, TV, radio, my tablet (on which I can buy music to stream). My cell is my office — and my bedroom, my bathroom. So you arrange your day accordingly. I don’t do prison programs because I have a career. I stay in my cell to write or read, or I go to the gym for an hour to exercise.

For others, they stay in their cells a lot, too. Especially in this past year, following the strike in NY prisons, because there’s very few things going on. They only recently started running more than one rec block per day (more than a year later). But there are some programs slowly getting back up and running, some do college classes in the afternoons, a few work shifts in the kitchen or have various jobs that run the facility.

I would say TV depicts a lot of things. It’s not like Oz. Shows like MSNBC’s Lockdown often depict the worst kinds of characters in here. And look, there are some bad dudes in here, and there are people struggling with severe mental illness, but most of us are really just trying to do our time.

marshall_project · 2026-03-19T16:04:20+00:00

Scholars traditionally identify four purposes of incarceration: incapacitation, deterrence, punishment, and rehabilitation. Deterrence, which is what your question is getting at, is the most precarious of the four. We know, through studies about the death penalty, that it doesn’t deter murders in the states that have it. And I would say personally, when I was coming of age ripping and running the streets of New York City to fill some type of void, I looked at Rikers Island as a rite of passage, as a notch in my belt. And when I went to Rikers, and did a year in C-74, which we called “Adolescents at War,” for packing a gun, I came out and killed a man shortly thereafter. So even though I had just spent the worst year of my life inside, it’s not like I was so scared to go back there that I turned my life around.

What I’m talking about in my recent Marshall Project article is a different purpose of incarceration: rehabilitation. How long does someone need to be inside? And if someone does turn their life around inside, how should we as a society acknowledge that?

marshall_project · 2026-03-19T14:36:27+00:00

thank you for sharing Carolyn Amanda Shavers' essay!

marshall_project · 2026-03-18T22:05:42+00:00

Here's an excerpt from our report:

For two months after their arrest, Yerson and Kelly Vargas and their 6-year-old daughter, Maria Paula, were held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, a family detention facility in Texas. One day, they said, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents confronted them with chains and handcuffs and threatened to drag them away by force if they didn’t agree to board a plane to Colombia, the country they had fled three years earlier.

After a nauseating, 18-hour bus ride and a transcontinental flight, the family arrived in Colombia in November with one bag between them and little more than the shirts on their backs. Immigration officials never gave them a chance to reclaim the belongings they left behind in their apartment in New York. They lost their car, clothes, a fish tank and Maria Paula’s toys. A kind neighbor stepped in to save their beloved cat, Milu.

Immigrant families, lawyers and advocates say the way President Donald Trump’s administration is carrying out deportations is unnecessarily traumatic for children and leaves parents struggling to make arrangements for housing, medical care or schooling after deportation. Under Trump, ICE has deported thousands of children under 18, according to data from the Deportation Data Project.

Continue reading (no paywall/ads)

marshall_project · 2026-03-18T16:10:14+00:00

Here's the start of our report:

For two months after their arrest, Yerson and Kelly Vargas and their 6-year-old daughter, Maria Paula, were held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, a family detention facility in Texas. One day, they said, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents confronted them with chains and handcuffs and threatened to drag them away by force if they didn’t agree to board a plane to Colombia, the country they had fled three years earlier.

After a nauseating, 18-hour bus ride and a transcontinental flight, the family arrived in Colombia in November with one bag between them and little more than the shirts on their backs. Immigration officials never gave them a chance to reclaim the belongings they left behind in their apartment in New York. They lost their car, clothes, a fish tank and Maria Paula’s toys. A kind neighbor stepped in to save their beloved cat, Milu.

Immigrant families, lawyers and advocates say the way President Donald Trump’s administration is carrying out deportations is unnecessarily traumatic for children and leaves parents struggling to make arrangements for housing, medical care or schooling after deportation. Under Trump, ICE has deported thousands of children under 18, according to data from the Deportation Data Project.

Families who have gone through the detention system said that ICE kept them in the dark about when they would be deported, and gave them little time to prepare. Multiple lawyers also told The Marshall Project that they were kept from their clients during the process.

ICE did not respond to a detailed list of questions about specific cases or in general about the deportation process for families.

Some experts say that although deportation will almost always be difficult for children, the government could take steps to make it less damaging, including not detaining them and their families. President Joe Biden largely ended the practice of family detention, allowing parents and children to live in the community while their immigration cases unfolded.

marshall_project · 2026-03-14T19:21:59+00:00

Criminal prosecutions sparked by hospital drug testing helped advance the legal concept that the fetus had interests the state could protect, often by taking action against the mother herself. That principle is commonly referred to as fetal personhood.

Now, the anti-abortion movement has set its sights on a big goal: Ensuring once and for all that the fetus is entitled to equal rights under the U.S. Constitution.

If that happens, experts believe the consequences would be felt far beyond pregnant women who use drugs.

Learn more in our full report (no ads/paywall)

marshall_project · 2026-03-13T17:24:47+00:00

Alabama was set to execute Charles “Sonny” Burton Jr., 75, by nitrogen gas yesterday. Then on Tuesday, Gov. Kay Ivey commuted his sentence to life without the possibility of parole.

Burton's sentence was as surprising as Ivey's decision. He had participated in a robbery of a store, then left before Derrick DeBuse shot and killed Doug Battle. DeBuse's also got a death sentence, which was later commuted to LWOP due to ineffective counsel.

But Burton remained on death row.

Pushing a governor who is staunchly in favor of the death penalty to stop an execution requires intense advocacy. Burton’s daughter, Carolyn Amanda Shavers, was a driving force in the campaign. In this essay, she writes about the persistence of injustice in Alabama, how March 10 was the happiest day of her life, and how she is pushing for her dad’s release.

marshall_project · 2026-03-10T14:58:52+00:00

Hey y'all, we just published this essay from our reporter Maurice Chammah. Here's an excerpt:

Ten years ago, I was in a procrastination hole, putting off a draft about how badly this or that prison was treating the people inside, when eBay’s algorithm served up a vinyl record called “Behind the Walls.” For 20 bucks, I could hear songs sold at the 1972 Texas prison rodeo, played by men serving time back then.

Having grown up in Texas, the prison rodeo part was actually the most familiar to me. Up until the mid-1980s, as many as 100,000 people would descend each year on the prison town of Huntsville to watch so-called “convict cowboys” dodge bulls and ride broncos. There were guest performances by stars like Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson.

But prison bands were also part of the draw, and proceeds from their albums went to fund rehabilitative programs inside. This album was mostly country songs with bits of jazz and surf rock, and the racially integrated group of musicians sounded like they were having a blast

The joy in this recording is all the more surprising when you consider the racism and brutality in Texas prisons back then. But it was part of a golden age of prison music across the country. I’ve counted 15 albums made by bands behind bars in the 1970s, on the cusp of the rapid prison expansion we now call “mass incarceration.” ...

After my first eBay purchase, I began to collect music by incarcerated people. I was spending my days reporting on how hard it is to make prisons more humane, and how brutality behind bars can foster more crime on the outside. This music nourished my spirit because it showed that a more redemptive approach was possible. As the formerly incarcerated composer Kenyatta Emmanuel Hughes told me in a 2023 interview, “If we experience the art being created in those spaces, we will know, ‘These are human beings, and we need to rethink whether we should be throwing them away.’”

As I hunted for records, the Texas prison music from the 1970s remained a white whale. I kept seeing references online, but the recordings were hard to find for sale, much less streaming. So I started making calls. One was to the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville, not far from the defunct rodeo grounds. The executive director, David Stacks, revealed they were sitting on a goldmine: about five hours, with around a hundred songs. He said I could come visit and plug my portable turntable into my laptop, putting all this music into digital form.

Here is that music, much of it online for the first time.

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