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The Marshall Project
Virginia School Shooting Tests How Young Is Too Young to be Prosecuted
This is The Marshall Project’s Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue. Want this delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to future newsletters here. When news emerged that a 6-year-old had shot and wounded a teacher in a Virginia elementary school Jan. 6, it...
The Marshall Project: Diversity and Inclusion, 2022
Our sixth annual diversity report. Read past years' reports: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 and 2017. The Marshall Project, like many nonprofit news organizations, began as an experiment. Could we fundamentally change the way journalists cover and discuss the criminal justice system? The Marshall Project’s fact-based journalism seeks to elevate the conversation about the current state of criminal justice and incarceration.
In an Effort to Diversify, Cleveland Police Look to HBCUs
Yarnell Rickett wants to see more Black and brown police officers at his police department. He believes Historically Black Colleges and Universities like his alma mater, Central State University in Ohio, are fertile grounds to hire a new generation of officers who have a better understanding of the communities they serve.
After Deadly Prison Fires, Will the Texas Legislature Fund Safety Fixes?
After four deaths, thousands of safety violations and more than a decade of damning state reports, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is finally asking lawmakers to double the agency’s fire-safety spending starting in September. The requested $30 million could help rectify more than 8,000 safety violations that fire...
How Two States Differ on the Injustice of Non-Unanimous Juries
This is The Marshall Project’s Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue. Want this delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to future newsletters here. If you took a break from the news over the holidays, there’s a good chance you missed a ruling by...
Some of Our Best Work of 2022
Midterm elections, reproductive rights and immigration policy were major national stories in 2022. With that as the backdrop, The Marshall Project scrutinized prosecutions of pregnant women with addictions; investigated Texas’ costly and politically-hyped border initiative; and partnered with researchers on a groundbreaking national survey of sheriffs’ attitudes on immigration, race and the sanctity of the Constitution.
The Books Banned in Your State’s Prisons
Book bans are a hot-button issue, with controversies erupting in public schools and libraries around the country. But far more restricted reading environments exist all over the United States: prisons. Over the past year, reporters for The Marshall Project asked every state prison system for book policies and lists of...
Why Would Prisons Ban My Book? Absurdities Rule the System
Censorship kept me from finishing a college essay behind bars. Now, prisons might keep readers from my memoir. My first brush with mailroom censors came when I was in a county jail in upstate New York in the winter of 2010. After almost a decade of struggling with heroin addiction, I’d gotten arrested just a few days before I was supposed to finish my last semester at Cornell. — I’d never been in jail before, and once I realized that the typical cellblock routine included a whole lot of nothing, I told myself I would use the long, empty hours to work on one of the few remaining papers I needed to graduate. I could do something productive to get my life back on track, I thought, while also distracting myself from the enormity of my mistakes and the looming threat of prison time.
Mental Health Care is Broken. Is Police Hospitalizing More People the Answer?
This is The Marshall Project’s Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue. Want this delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to future newsletters here. In late November, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced a controversial policy that will lead to hospitalizing more people...
Federal Prisons Were Told to Provide Addiction Medications. Instead, They Punish People Who Use Them.
Timothy York knows what works to treat his decades-long opioid addiction: Suboxone, a medication that effectively quiets cravings. Since York arrived in federal prison in 2008, he has been held in a series of facilities awash with contraband drugs and violence. He’s spent tens of thousands of dollars buying the medication illicitly from prison dealers because Suboxone enables him to think and communicate clearly, he said. But he hasn’t been able to get it consistently.
How Children End Up in Cleveland’s Adult Courts: A Bindover Explainer
Community members packed the pews at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church Tuesday evening as part of a Greater Cleveland Congregations action to draw attention to the high number of Black children from Cuyahoga County being transferred to adult courts and serving time in adult prisons. The coalition of more than 30...
What San Francisco’s Killer Robots Debate Tells Us About Policing
This is The Marshall Project’s Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue from reporter Jamiles Lartey. Want this delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to future newsletters here. It sounds like something out of a dystopian science fiction thriller — faceless, headless police robots,...
Let Them Tell It
Issue 12 of News Inside brings you news and views straight from people living and working in the system. Welcome to Issue 12 of News Inside. This last edition of 2022 features a range of topics, from how the FBI collects crime stats (“The Problem With The FBI’s Missing Crime Data”) to how America’s sheriffs — many of whom run jails — feel about key political issues (“We Surveyed U.S. Sheriffs. See Their Views on Power, Race and Immigration”).
How Texas Failed To Prevent One of the Nation’s Deadliest Prison Escapes
As soon as he saw the glint of a shank, Michael Wages knew there’d be trouble. From the moment he’d climbed on the prison bus to Huntsville that morning, the man in front of him — a heavily-tattooed loudmouth named Gonzalo Lopez — had been asking bold questions: “How much time do you have left? Have you ever thought about escape?” At first, Wages didn’t think Lopez meant anything by it — and the two guards on board didn’t seem to notice.
Battles Brew Over the Power to Choose Who to Prosecute
This is The Marshall Project’s new Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue from reporter Jamiles Lartey. Want this delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to future newsletters here. Odds are you’ve broken the law this week. Maybe you’ve texted while driving, jaywalked or...
From Crip to Crochet Artist: How an Unlikely Hobby Changed My Life in Prison
As a kid growing up in Southern California in the 1980s, it was no surprise that I became a Crip. I learned how to sell drugs and gangbang, and when I moved to Kingston, New York, at age 18, I carried the same mentality with me. Two years later, I...
Ohio Lawmaker Wants Law Requiring Police to Record Race During Traffic Stops
An Ohio lawmaker says she will introduce legislation requiring police agencies to record race data when making traffic stops, following a Marshall Project - Cleveland investigation into how the village of Bratenahl tickets mostly Black drivers from neighboring Cleveland. State Rep. Juanita Brent, a Democrat from Cleveland, said the information...
A Rikers Officer Had Sex With a Detainee. It Took 7 Years to Fire Him.
Seven years after a detainee at the Rikers Island jail complex in New York City alleged she was in a consensual, but prohibited, relationship with a correction officer who also pressured her to cover up a rape — the guard has finally been fired. The officer, Leonard McNeill, began a four-month-long sexual liaison with a woman incarcerated at the Rose M. Singer Center in the summer of 2015, as she awaited trial on drug charges.
How a Wealthy Cleveland Suburb Profits From Ticketing Black Drivers
Carolyn Quinnie said she’s been pulled over or followed by Bratenahl police on more than one occasion on her short drive home to Cleveland from Bratenahl where she works as an in-home private caretaker. The 68-year-old grandmother takes every precaution she can think of to avoid trouble while driving...
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The Marshall Project is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system.
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