Articles by Emmett Sanders
- Prison Policy Initiative endorses the Extreme Temperatures Injustice in Prisons Act
Nearly 19,000 people in federal prisons experienced heat-related illnesses between 2022 and 2025. A new bill is looking to change that.
Jul 16, 2026 - Caging compassion: Recognizing and resisting carceral humanist narratives in criminal justice reform
Advocates for criminal justice reform are often caught between the immediate need to address the dehumanizing conditions people are subjected to and the need to make....
Jan 30, 2026 - Prison Policy Initiative opposes mail scanning in Illinois
Proposed rule change would make devastating mail restrictions permanent for thousands in Illinois’ prisons
Nov 21, 2025 - Prison Policy Initiative and MacArthur Justice Center’s National Parole Transformation Project release new guiding principles for parole reform
Organizations working to reform parole systems in their states are encouraged to sign on to these 16 principles.
Jul 10, 2025 - WEBINAR: Fighting Jail Expansion: Lessons from the Front Lines
Learn how advocates are responding to shifting arguments for new jail construction.
May 14, 2025 - New data on pregnancy prevalence, outcomes, and programs in prisons are welcome additions, but raise new questions
The Bureau of Justice Statistics published 2023 data on pregnancy prevalence and outcomes in prisons, as well as the prison systems that offer relevant prenatal and postnatal accommodations, supports, and programming.
May 7, 2025 - Rolling back solitary confinement reforms won’t make prisons safer
Thousands of New York prison guards went on strike to demand changes to the HALT Solitary Confinement Act. They claim limitations on solitary confinement have worsened working conditions. Here’s why the decision to return long-term isolation to New York’s prisons won’t fix things.
Apr 11, 2025 - Danger in the water: Report exposes widespread water contamination in Texas prisons
Thousands incarcerated in Texas’ prisons may have been exposed to lead, arsenic, and other dangerous contaminants.
Mar 14, 2025 - Why jails and prisons can’t recruit their way out of the understaffing crisis
Jails and prisons across the country have record-high vacancies, creating bad working conditions for corrections staff and nightmarish living conditions for incarcerated people. Why haven’t pay raises, benefits, and new facilities turned recruitment around, and what does that tell us about the state of mass incarceration?
Dec 9, 2024 - Advocacy Spotlight: The Humanization Project
Advocates in Virginia are leveraging their own lived experience and the voices of thousands of other systems-impacted people and their families to make sweeping changes to the state’s prisons. Here’s how they’re doing it.
Dec 2, 2024 - An Act of Regression: Louisiana takes a giant step backward in parole and sentencing reform
Louisiana lawmakers are eliminating discretionary parole and implementing regressive truth-in-sentencing laws. These billion-dollar “zombie policies” are set to double the prison population in a state that is already a world leader in incarceration and will harm public safety.
Aug 21, 2024 - Advocacy Spotlight: Texas Jail Project
How one small organization in Texas is fighting to get answers for families of people who die in jails and forcing accountability from the jails they die in.
Aug 6, 2024 - Prison Policy Initiative endorses the Environmental Health in Prisons Act
Act recognizes the right to live in a healthy environment and offers much-needed environmental protections for people in prisons.
Jul 18, 2024 - Webinar: In their own words: Organizing legislative testimony from incarcerated people
Learn strategies advocates around the country are using to help incarcerated people be heard at legislative committee hearings.
Jul 1, 2024 - Cautionary jails: Deconstructing the three “C”s of jail construction arguments
Communities across the country have been told that investing in new jail construction is the only way to solve old policy problems, but arguments for new jails can leave them with a billion-dollar case of buyer’s remorse.
Feb 20, 2024 - Watching the Watchers: Vera releases national census on electronic monitoring
A new report from the Vera Institute of Justice finds that the number of people subjected to electronic monitoring in the U.S. increased fivefold between 2005 and 2021 and nearly tenfold by 2022.
Feb 8, 2024 - Going back to Cali: Revisiting California’s parole release system
More than 9,000 people were eligible for hearings in California last year, though the state abolished discretionary parole in 1977. With grant rates among the lowest in the nation and people forced to wait up to 15 years between hearings, the Golden State's parole system is far from glittering.
Dec 19, 2023 - Not an alternative: The myths, harms, and expansion of pretrial electronic monitoring
The expansion of pretrial electronic monitoring across 70 counties threatens to undermine Illinois’ groundbreaking Pretrial Fairness Act, despite both the lack of evidence of EM's efficacy and its well-documented flaws and harms.
Oct 30, 2023 - No Release: Parole grant rates have plummeted in most states since the pandemic started
Among the 27 states we surveyed, only 7 saw an increase in parole approval rate, and almost every state held substantially fewer hearings than in years past.
Oct 16, 2023
Recommended Reading:
50 state incarceration profiles
All of our recent reports about prison/jail growth, racial disparities, and more, re-organized by state.
The rapid & unregulated growth of e-messaging in prisons
It can strengthen connections, but instead has been used to sap money from incarcerated people.
Incarceration and supervision by states
Probation and parole are the leading forms of mass punishment in America.
Prison Gerrymandering Project
We are leading the movement to protect our democracy from the Census Bureau's prison miscount.
Events
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