This is a story, not so much of forgiveness, but of something richer, more complicated, and even more deeply human.

Vicarious trauma is the trauma you absorb working with traumatized people, especially when you're both inside of already traumatizing systems. Treatment not jail, diversion from harmful system-contact... Making justice reform work on the ground relies on an abundance of frontline staff: from mental health counsellors to peer mentors. But many of those staff, at our organization and at others like us, are hurting: navigating human suffering—trauma—on all sides.

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What is probation—and the ethos of drug testing that is at its heart—actually testing?

Hear from the winner of this year's Inside Literary Prize, the first major U.S. book award to be judged exclusively by people who are incarcerated.

A behind-the-scenes portrait of a day of judging for the Inside Literary Prize, the first major U.S. book award judged exclusively by people who are incarcerated.

"Even in the clients we serve, anti-Blackness is the reason why they show up in harmful ways in the community."

Morgan Godvin was at the frontlines of Oregon's decriminalization fight. She says progress towards a health-based approach to drug use "has fallen prey to fear-based policy."

Vincent Schiraldi used to run probation in New York City; now he’s asking whether probation should even exist. Schiraldi says some of the roots of mass supervision—and its connection to mass incarceration—can be found in a surprising place: the Supreme Court’s 1963 Gideon decision. It recognized, but failed to adequately support, a poor person’s right to a lawyer.

Hear the final episode in our “Gideon at 60” series.

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A profile of the fight to secure lawyers for people facing eviction and the radical impact that is having in Housing Court. With its 1963 Gideon decision, the Supreme Court guaranteed a lawyer to any poor person facing prison time. For criminal cases, the decision was both sweeping and critically incomplete. On the civil side, the campaign for a right-to-counsel is taking a different approach—it's slow and piecemeal, but it's also working.

This is the second episode in our series on the legacy of the Gideon decision. Hear the first episode here.

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Sixty years on from a landmark Supreme Court decision, how can public defenders organize for genuine change?

Rather than arrests and incarceration, what do young people who commit harm actually need?

A recent training for Manhattan prosecutors was a drumbeat on the harms of incarceration; hardly the typical message prosecutors receive. It was part of a wider effort by D.A. Alvin Bragg to expand the use of alternatives such as treatment and restorative justice. But in a newly-cramped climate for criminal justice reform, can that effort become a reality?

Housing is a human right. What if we designed our systems—beginning with Housing Court—to embody that?

What if much of what is packaged today as "reforms" to the criminal legal system are extending, not countering, that system's harmful effects?

Data makes a powerful case against the criminal justice status quo, but who's listening?

NYC has pledged to close its notorious Rikers Island jail by 2027, but obstacles abound.

Have we placed people working to offer mental health treatment behind bars in a situation where it's impossible to practice ethical care?

Can a treatment-first approach be brought to scale inside of the same system responsible for mass incarceration in the first place?

An audio snapshot from an emergency rally demanding immediate measures to release people from NYC's Rikers Island jail. Eleven people have died in the custody of the city's jail system this year.

I made my own choices, Marlon Peterson says, “but I also did not choose to experience the type of things I experienced.”