The 2024 reporting on incarceration that newsrooms should emulate in 2025

We highlight some of the year's best reporting on incarceration, and offer tips for journalists interested in pursuing similar stories in their states.

by Wanda Bertram, December 11, 2024

As multiple crises — of poor conditions, escalating deaths, environmental dangers, and an aging population — converge in U.S. prisons and jails, investigative journalism is more important than ever to shine a light inside the “black box” of mass incarceration. For journalists interested in investigating issues behind bars in the coming year, we curated 10 stories published this year that are ripe for emulation by other newsrooms.

Best of 2024See Prison Policy Initiative’s best work & biggest wins

Each of these stories concerns an issue endemic to U.S. prisons and/or jails. For each, we’ve included a few questions journalists can ask to start exploring the issue in their state or county.

“Denied: Alabama’s broken parole system,” AL.com

Reporters Ivana Hrynkiw and John Archibald took a deep dive into the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles, which — like most parole systems in the U.S. recently — is granting release to fewer and fewer people every year. Their story series exposes a system that keeps even the elderly locked up for decades, and demonizes people whose convictions were as minor as shoplifting or growing marijuana. And for those with more serious convictions, like the domestic abuse survivor who shot her abuser over 30 years ago, “Denied” shows how the Board has refused to take important context into consideration.

Another excellent parole story came from Bolts and Mother Jones, who collaborated to reveal the nearly-nonexistent chances for approval that people in Virginia prisons face. (This could be helpful for reporters in states that — like Virginia — have formally “abolished” parole but still retain it for people sentenced before the law was changed.)

Questions to jumpstart your reporting on parole grant rates:

• How many people eligible for parole in your state have been granted release in recent years? (For most states, for years 2019-2022, that data is on our website.)
• What are the most common reasons people are denied parole? (You will likely have to submit a public records request for this information. Some states keep this data, while others do not.)
• How many elderly people in your state’s prison system were considered for parole in recent years? How many were approved/denied?

Need suboxone at the Allegheny County Jail? Get up at 3 a.m., PublicSource

As part of a series on the Allegheny County Jail’s expanding medication program for drug addictions, Venuri Siriwardane investigated how the jail delivers medications: by waking up patients in the middle of the night and giving them crushed-up tablets, which is far from the standard treatment recommended by clinicians. Siriwardane’s series explores how MOUD treatment in jail comes with “all kinds of restrictions, weird requirements, or problems with program administration that lead to people not actually getting the treatment that they need,” in the words of a prisoners’ rights lawyer.

Questions to jumpstart your reporting on treatment for substance use disorder behind bars:

• Does your local jail track substance use disorders in the population (for instance, by screening individuals at intake)? If it does keep this information: How many people in the jail in an average month have a substance use disorder?¹
• For individuals who were on SUD medication treatment prior to their incarceration, can they continue that treatment while in jail?
• For individuals not on medication treatment prior to incarceration, will the jail initiate that treatment?

For more context, see our January briefing Addicted to punishment: Jails and prisons punish drug use far more than they treat it.

How New York’s Maximum Security Women’s Prison Has Failed to HALT Solitary Confinement, New York Focus

Incarcerated journalist Sara Kielly reported on how the Bedford Hills prison in New York has found creative — and cruel — ways around the state’s 2023 HALT Act meant to limit solitary confinement. Bedford Hills — the state’s maximum security prison for women — has refused to allow incarcerated people their legally-required representation at disciplinary hearings, even provoking outrage and protests from staff. Meanwhile, prisons across the state continue to hold thousands of people in long-term isolation in so-called “alternative” units.

Questions to jumpstart your reporting on solitary confinement:

• How many people in your state’s prisons are in solitary confinement (often called “administrative segregation” or “secure housing”)? How many are in other forms of restrictive housing (the prison system’s policy manual may list what those are)?
• For people charged with disciplinary violations that could get them put in solitary, what does due process look like? Are people entitled to representation at hearings, and do they get it? Are they allowed to appeal?

Locked In, Priced Out: How Prison Commissary Price-Gouging Preys on the Incarcerated, The Appeal

A team of reporters at The Appeal analyzed prison commissary price lists in 46 states, finding inconsistent pricing, discrepancies in prices for specific goods inside versus outside prisons, and “markups as high as 600 percent.” Fortunately for reporters interested in diving deeper into commissary data in their states, The Appeal has made it easy to get started, compiling all of the data they used for their project in a public database of commissary prices.

Questions to jumpstart your reporting on prison and jail commissaries:

• How many hours would an incarcerated person in your state’s prisons have to work to afford basic items at the commissary, like a toothbrush or a package of ramen? (See the ACLU’s report Captive Labor, page 57, for a table of wages for prison labor by state.)
• How much money did the prison system earn for the last few years in commission payments from its commissary provider? (Tip: These payments typically go into the “inmate welfare fund,” the subject of the next story in this list.)

Prices are going up at the Sonoma County jail commissary, spending on inmate programs is not, Santa Rosa Press-Democrat

The Sonoma County Jail is sitting on $1.35 million in its “Inmate Welfare Trust Fund,” a reservoir of cash from incarcerated people and their families’ commissary purchases. Reporter Marisa Endicott investigated how the money has been used in recent years, finding that the jail has consistently spent less than half of the available money in the fund — and that some local decisionmakers are interested in removing the jail’s markups on commissary goods altogether in order to allow incarcerated people to save money.

Another notable investigation into prison and jail welfare funds came from the Washington State Standard, with reporter Grace Deng finding — similarly — that the Washington DOC is letting $12 million in its welfare fund sit idle.

Questions to jumpstart your reporting on inmate welfare funds:

• What is the welfare fund called in your local jail system, and how is the money allowed to be used?
• What is the balance of the welfare fund? (You will likely have to submit a public records request for this information.)
• Who oversees the welfare fund and how is the money spent? Do incarcerated people and their loved ones have a voice?

For more context, see our May 2024 report Shadow Budgets, and our companion guide to reporting on welfare funds.

Idaho jails withheld details about dozens of detainee deaths, InvestigateWest

Idaho is one of a number of states allowing sheriffs to “opt in” to jail inspections, and also lacks consequences for jails that don’t report deaths to the state government. As a result, many deaths go unreported, with the state officials that handle death data forced to “search for media coverage of deaths that were not reported” to get an accurate count. Reporter Whitney Bryen’s findings skillfully illustrate the absence of data and accountability around deaths in local facilities.

There was a wealth of other journalism this year about jail deaths. For more of the best, check out investigations by the Cincinnati Enquirer, Chicago’s Injustice Watch, The Arizona Republic, and CalMatters.

Questions to jumpstart your reporting on deaths behind bars:

• How many deaths occurred in your local jail last year?
• What kinds of records does the jail keep around deaths in custody? (Posing this question to the public information officer at the jail will help you decide what records to request.)

For more tips on investigating in-custody deaths, see our June briefing about health privacy laws and submitting effective public records requests.

We also recommend building relationships with family members of people who have died in jail. All too often, jails fail to produce accurate counts, and family members can help fill in the gaps.

Be a Jail Watchdog, New York Focus

On its face, New York State has a robust jail oversight system, with a state agency tasked with inspecting local jails and even empowered to shut jails down. But the agency reveals very little of its findings about jails to the public. Chris Gelardi and Eliza Fawcett at New York Focus used public records requests to bring jail oversight records into public view — records that reveal widespread problems in locally-run facilities and ineffective (or nonexistent) state attempts to fix those problems.

Questions to jumpstart your reporting on jail oversight:

• What agency oversees local jails in your state? Who staffs that agency, and how often do they actually meet? (This table we prepared of state agencies that set local jail standards may be helpful.)
• Can jail oversight officials in your state require jails to submit to inspections or is it an “opt-in” system? If officials find problems in a jail, can they require jails to fix those problems?

People behind bars grapple with relocations, disruptions caused by Helene, North Carolina Health News

Reporter Rachel Crumpler investigated the North Carolina Department of Public Safety’s response to Hurricane Helene: While incarcerated people made it through the storm safely, several hundred were relocated to already-crowded prisons in non-impacted parts of the state. Ignoring demands from advocates that prisons release some incarcerated people to alleviate overcrowding, the department continues to house people in prisons that are already short-staffed, revealing the dire shortcomings of standard emergency response plans.

Questions to jumpstart your reporting on how environmental disasters impact prisons and jails:

• What climate-related risks do prisons and jails in your state face? (The Intercept‘s Climate and Punishment mapping tool has data that may help with this question.)
• Do the facilities most at risk have written guidelines for handling a weather emergency? If so, what do the guidelines say about when incarcerated people should be evacuated?

Tip: For prisons in several states, the Toxic Prisons Mapping Project has published stories from incarcerated people about their experiences with environmental hazards.

Has Prison Programming Recovered from Covid?, Mother Jones

From inside Washington state prisons, writer Christopher Blackwell, collaborating with reporter Khawla Nakua, exposed “another kind of long Covid: how the aftermath of pandemic cuts have lingered” behind prison walls. In Washington, the 7,000 volunteer instructors inside the state’s prisons pre-Covid have dropped to 1,500, leaving incarcerated people without critical programming — including programs helpful or necessary for earning early release. Even staff shortages, which were exacerbated by the pandemic, cannot fully account for the nationwide shrinking of in-prison programming.

Questions to jumpstart your reporting on prison programming:

• How many volunteer instructors, counselors, and service providers were in your state’s prison system in 2019? In 2021? Today?
• What percent of incarcerated people were participating in educational programs in your state’s prisons in 2019/2021/today?

‘Rebellion’ at Idaho prisons: Here’s why men in maximum security joined a hunger strike, Idaho Statesman

As lockdowns and lockdown-type conditions become more frequent and prolonged throughout U.S. prisons, Alex Brizee at the Idaho Statesman investigated how protests by men at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution — where rehabilitative programming and recreational time have been largely suspended for years — are both winning concessions from prison officials and leading to punitive crackdowns. Responding to the Statesman‘s inquiries, DOC officials talked out of both sides of their mouths, saying staff shortages were to blame for conditions while also claiming incarcerated people could earn back these “privileges” through better behavior.

Questions to jumpstart your reporting on lockdowns:

• Were prisons in your state under prolonged lockdowns at any point in 2024? How many times? (We recommend cultivating incarcerated sources and asking them this question in case the prison system is not forthcoming.)
• How do lockdowns impact incarcerated people’s access to family visits? To commissary? To recreational time?

This piece only scratches the surface of the excellent journalism we saw in 2024 — other stories dealt with the criminalization of mental illness, kids prosecuted in adult court, prison phone contracts being violated by telecom companies, and much more. As state prisons and local jails continue to warehouse the vast majority of people incarcerated in this country, local investigative journalism remains a core piece of the movement for reform.

For more story ideas, subscribe to our newsletter, where we deliver briefs on important issues behind bars on a mostly-weekly basis. And if you’d like to talk about a story concept with us, get in touch.