The Marshall Project

A Florida family opted for restorative justice over the death penalty for the man who murdered their mom. What happened next made them question the very meaning of justice.

They Agreed to Meet Their Mother’s Killer. Then Tragedy Struck Again. A Florida family opted for restorative justice over the death penalty for the man who murdered their mom. What happened next made them question the very meaning of justice.

"The first thing I ever believed in, I saw in the eyes of my oldest daughter."

"Today my oldest daughter is 16. Our connection is broken because I made a horrible choice that affected her entire life," Demetrius Buckley writes in this edition of Life Inside.

What Being Estranged From My Oldest Daughter Has Taught Me About Myself “I saw every evil thing lurking from afar. What I didn’t see was that my own behavior problems and my toxic masculinity could cause damage.”

Across the United States, fewer than a dozen states operate prison nursery programs that allow incarcerated mothers to live with their babies, typically for 12 to 30 months. These programs are often limited to women convicted of nonviolent offenses and require participants to comply with strict rules around parenting, behavior and sobriety.

An Indiana Women’s Prison unit gives incarcerated people a place to raise their newborns on the inside, rather than forcing them to give their babies up after birth.

How a Mother’s Journey to Raise Her Newborn Behind Bars Gave Her Hope How a Mother’s Journey to Raise Her Newborn Behind Bars Gave Her Hope

When Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine called on lawmakers to abolish the state's death penalty last week, he wouldn’t tell reporters if he would spare any of the more than 100 people on death row.

Three weeks earlier, however, DeWine quietly did just that for Gregory Lott, a man with intellectual disabilities.

Ohio Governor Quietly Granted Mercy Before Plea to End Death Penalty Weeks before calling to abolish capital punishment in Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine commuted the man’s death sentence to life in prison without parole.

About half of people in U.S. prisons have a child under the age of 18. Nearly 3 million children have a parent behind bars right now.

How can they stay present in their child’s life? Hear from parents who are figuring it out.

We’re launching Sending Kites, a new monthly column exploring the challenges faced by people with incarcerated loved ones. ("Kites" are letters or notes passed between people on the inside.) Readers are identified by only their state to protect their privacy.

🔗 Read more perspectives & sign up for the monthly newsletter: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2026/06/16/prison-life-advice-parenting-fathers-mothers?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=tmp-facebook

✍️: Curated by Tammy Galarza and Aala Abdullahi / The Marshall Project
💭: People incarcerated across the U.S.
📷: Adrian Hanft () for The Marshall Project
📱: Mariam Abaza, with template by Ashley Dye and Elan Ullendorff / The Marshall Project

In the last few years, more voters and legislators have sought to close their states’ constitutional loopholes that allow slavery as punishment for a crime. (The U.S. Constitution also allows it with the 13th Amendment.) Alabama voters did just that by amending their state constitution in 2022.⁠
⁠
But little has changed, according to the Center For Constitutional Rights. In 2024, the group brought a lawsuit on behalf of six incarcerated people, all of whom are Black. The suit claims people behind bars in Alabama who refuse work assignments, or who are fired from work-release jobs, are routinely punished or threatened: everything from loss of telephone and visitation access to solitary confinement and transfer to more violent facilities.⁠
⁠
In Louisiana — where voters rejected a 2022 effort to introduce a slavery ban after lawmakers dithered over ambiguous language in the amendment — slavery as punishment for a crime remains legal. In 2023, a group of men at Angola filed a suit arguing that the work in the summer heat was unsafe. In May 2026, a judge mostly agreed, but ruled that he could not force the state to fix the problems because of a separate but conflicting ruling by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. ⁠
⁠
🔗 Continue reading: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/06/22/prison-slavery-forced-labor-lawsuits-bills?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=tmp-facebook
⁠
✍️: Jamiles Lartey / The Marshall Project (2024 and 2026)⁠
📷: Gerald Herbert / Associated Press⁠
📱: Ashley Dye (2026) and Kristin Bausch (2024) / The Marshall Project

Are U.S. immigration agents sending migrants and asylum seekers to “detention centers” or “internment camps”? Are they being held in “processing centers” or “concentration camps”?

Journalist Andrea Pitzer said in a recent interview with The Marshall Project that each tone serves a purpose for a different audience. One is used to stoke fear among immigrants, while another approach is intended to have a calming effect, to gain the public’s acceptance of the administration’s enforcement practices, she said.

This article was published in partnership with Poynter Institute.

Are ICE Facilities Concentration Camps? Experts Reflect on Language. Concentration camps involve the mass detention of civilians, without due process, based on identity rather than something they have done.

Juneteenth is a celebration dedicated to the end of legal slavery in the United States after the Civil War, but it is important to acknowledge instances where similar practices continued after its abolition. A series of prison plantation photographs by Bruce Jackson – a photographer, filmmaker, writer, and professor – demonstrate treatment starkly similar to slavery.

On the prison farms Jackson photographed, the prisoners, most of them Black, worked much as their forefathers had as slaves, picking cotton, slamming hoes into soil, and singing to standardize the rhythm of their labor. By focusing on sight and sound — taking pictures, recording work songs — Jackson illuminated how these prison farms, a century after emancipation, preserved slavery’s spirit if not its law.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Bruce Jackson took thousands of pictures of southern prisons. Through this project, he captured an intimacy of daily life that reveals how, despite all the talk of politics and policy, these institutions are as much products of culture and society.

Jackson started taking these photographs while still in his 20s. Now he is 90. That such a sweeping transition in the history of American prisons could take place during one man’s working career suggests that our habits of punishment may look timeless and entrenched, but that in reality change can happen quickly. Still, there are always traces of what came before.

🔗 Tap the link to read more.

✍️: Maurice Chammah (2015) / The Marshall Project
📷: Bruce Jackson (1964-1979)
📱: Mariam Abaza / The Marshall Project

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/05/01/prison-plantations?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=tmp-facebook

"I entered prison at 15, lost and illiterate. A lot of the guys I knew were too ashamed to admit that they didn’t know how to read, but I wasn’t. I taught myself how. I would take a novel and look up every word that stumped me. My first year in prison, I read the same book, 'The Last Don,' over and over for about nine months."

"All of that work learning how to read helped me when I went back to school while in prison. It’s also helped me become a successful “jailhouse lawyer” representing myself in court," Andre Jacobs writes in this edition of Life Inside.

I Taught Myself How to Read in Prison. Then I Sued the System and Won “Just like the rest of life, everything about the court system is a puzzle I’ve had to piece together.”