January 28, 2025
Filter Magazine »On January 23, Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman authorized several Justice Department agencies to arrest people suspected of entering the country without documentation.
January 23, 2025
Filter Magazine »On January 20, President Donald Trump unveiled an executive order titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” It contains two directives for the United States Attorney General pertaining to the rights of transgender people while incarcerated.
January 15, 2025
Filter Magazine »In the year between paroling out of Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) custody and being thrown into county jail for a technical violation, I obtained several of the gender-affirming procedures and treatments I was denied access to while in prison. Breast augmentation, lip filler, body contouring, etc.
November 27, 2024
Filter Magazine »Six weeks after the United States Department of Justice published the findings of its investigation into Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) prisons, it published a similar report on its investigation into Atlanta’s Fulton County Jail. Fulton County is notoriously rife with violence and sexual assault, reminiscent of the GDC facilities where I spent most of the past 14 years.
November 19, 2024
Filter Magazine »In 2015, when I was about three years into a 14-year prison sentence, the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) started rolling out the first JPay tablets. The JP5s look more or less like clunky versions of what people in the free world probably picture when they think of tablets, but any resemblance is superficial.
November 6, 2024
Filter Magazine »Just about everyone who makes it out of Georgia’s prisons has to serve time on probation. The norm for felony convictions in the state is a “split sentence,” where the time you spend in prison is only the first phase of your punishment. Christy, for example, will complete her 14-year prison sentence in early 2025, upon which she’ll begin serving her 16 years on probation.
October 31, 2024
Filter Magazine »One of the first things that happens upon entry into the Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) men’s prison system is a group delousing. After a couple of hours shackled on the transport bus, prisoners arriving at Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison (Jackson) are taken to a shower room, told to strip, and collectively sprayed down with disinfectant.
October 21, 2024
The Lighthouse »Human Papillomavirus Virus (HPV) is still a promiscuity joke in some circles, despite the fact Black women suffer the highest mortality rate from the cervical cancer it causes. In fact, studies show Black women are almost twice as likely to die from cervical cancer compared to their white counterparts.
October 9, 2024
Filter Magazine »Since 2008, people on sex offender registries in Missouri have been required to post a sign at their home each year on October 31: No candy or treats at this residence. In a ruling issued October 2, a federal judge found the signs unconstitutional because they’re a form of “compelled speech”—when the state forces you to express a viewpoint you don’t agree with.
October 1, 2024
Filter Magazine »Toward the end of my sentence in Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) custody I was a clerk in the Central State Prison law library. As part of my duties, every Tuesday I’d go over to the lockdown unit to pass out whatever case law or other legal research books had been requested by people in solitary confinement. Every cell you’d go to, someone would be begging you for toilet paper or for water.
September 24, 2024
The Lighthouse »Actor James Earl Jones once used his iconic deep voice to tell a protagonist in the cringy blackface comedy, “Soul Man,” how social standing and wealth should be coupled with accountability. “A Harvard law graduate has great power,” Jones boomed beneath Professor Banks’ piercing brown glare. “I hope that I teach my students to use that power responsibly.”But posthumous videos show Jones may not have always used his own iconic status for good.
September 24, 2024
Filter Magazine »Corrections officers (COs) have long relied on prisoners to do various parts of their jobs. But since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic when the nation’s state and federal prisons began seeing staff quit en masse, people currently incarcerated in Georgia Department of Corrections (GDC) facilities report that COs are deputizing some of them to secure cell doors, inventory personal property and escort patients to medical.
September 18, 2024
Filter Magazine »On September 17, a federal judge halted the Indiana Department of Correction (IDOC) ban on gender-affirming surgery for people in its custody. After IDOC implemented the ban in 2023, the ACLU of Indiana sued on behalf of Autumn Cordellioné, a transgender woman currently in the IDOC men’s prison system.
September 7, 2024
The Lighthouse »President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris celebrated Labor Day at a stuffed Pittsburgh union hall. “We celebrate unions because unions helped build America, and unions helped build America’s middle class,” Harris told the crowd, before lauding organized labor’s part in making the nation better, safer and more economically robust. Labor unions have also been a savior for marginalized people.
September 3, 2024
Filter Magazine »As a transgender woman incarcerated in a men’s prison system, each day was a fight to maintain my sense of personhood. At times contraband drugs helped me to cope. But the lifeline that saw me through was a different contraband item, one even more villainized by the Georgia Department of Corrections and by corrections departments across the country: a cell phone.
August 21, 2024
Filter Magazine »Nobody ever really talked about cigarette alternatives in prison. Tobacco is abundantly available to anyone in Georgia Department of Corrections custody who can afford it, and even in prison systems where that isn’t the case, there’s just no market for things like vapes. Since being released in 2023, I’ve noticed a stark difference: Almost every single person I know on parole or probation is furiously vaping.
August 14, 2024
Filter Magazine »I started sex work in my early teens. Older boys in the foster care homes and group homes I grew up in noticed from the beginning that I was clearly very feminine, and bullied and took advantage of me sexually. Eventually I ran away. I found community on the street with other LGBTQ people, most of them with backgrounds like mine. I met witty, clever older trans women who could talk shit like sharp shooters from the Wild West.
August 8, 2024
The Lighthouse »The prison system is cruel and impersonal to those in its grasp, and many U.S. citizens expect it to be—even prefer it that way. But the cruelty also buffets those who have broken no law. San Jose real estate broker Anna D. Smith, 61, has been the mother of an incarcerated son for more than two decades, complete with the emotional turmoil, bureaucratic hurdles, and personal growth that come with it. Her journey, and the journey of her son, Andrew, began in juvenile halls and psychiatric facilities.
July 23, 2024
Filter Magazine »In the middle of the 13 years I spent incarcerated, there was a brief period in 2018 that I was out on parole. Being on the sex offender registry in Georgia barred me from almost every job I could find while simultaneously drowning me in hundreds of dollars per month in fees, and before long my parole was revoked. The second job I’d taken, as a secretary at a veterinarian’s office, was slightly too close to a school.
July 16, 2024
Filter Magazine »They say that time is money, but if that’s true then mine doesn’t seem to be worth that much. I have three degrees, and two jobs where they don’t matter. In the little time I have to myself I do freelance work, and still struggle to make ends meet. A struggle felt by many, but especially by those of us laboring under the restrictions of parole and the sex offender registry. I earned my degrees in prison.