incarceration

For Mac Hudson, eating together is a traditional way of connecting to community. “It’s the African tradition from our communal existence,” said Hudson, founder of the equity organization AccessMA. That cultural legacy is why it’s one of the initiatives at the heart of the program “From Liabilities to Contributors,” which his organization runs.

The film “Sing Sing,” directed by Greg Kwedar and starring Colman Domingo, explores the true story of a group of men who find solace and connection in Rehabilitation Through the Arts, or RTA, a program providing arts education for incarcerated people.

Harold Adams spent more than half a century in the state’s criminal justice system — 31 years in state prison and another 22 years out on parole in the community. He spent those two decades checking in with a parole officer at least once a month, restricted from free travel, wary of random searches and, until recently, paying $85 a month in monthly parole fees.

Formerly incarcerated citizens prepare holiday feast for South Boston community

On a Tuesday afternoon in Nubian Square, Will Dunn walks his beat. The tall, bearded man in sweats and a T-shirt is greeted like a local mayor, waving at drivers who slow down to honk and say hello, wrapping friends in giant bear hugs and cracking jokes.

Life without parole sentences perpetuate the cycle of “generational poverty, violence and trauma” and must end, declared state Sen. Liz Miranda, who is sponsoring a bill in the state legislature to end the draconian practice. 

Advocates for access to sealing and expunging criminal records are citing progress but also continuing hurdles in the ability of Massachusetts residents to take advantage of changes in how long and under what conditions a prior offense can stay on someone’s public record.

Attorney Bryan Stevenson, who chronicled his defense of the unjustly convicted and condemned in his 2014 bestselling memoir “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption,” gave a sold-out lecture on March 2 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

In a blink of an eye in 1974, an attack by whites in the middle-class town Destrehan in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, against bused-in black students from neighboring St. Rose turned Gary Tyler’s young life into a helter-skelter, leaving the public school sophomore the country’s youngest-ever death row inmate.

“Free her” was the resounding message of the broken hearts strung along the gate outside the State House on Feb. 14. Protestors had written the names of their incarcerated loved ones on the paper valentines.

Members of the Democracy Behind Bars Coalition, a group of elected officials and activists, met Monday to show support for new legislation aimed at protecting the voting rights of incarcerated residents in Massachusetts.

Activists and elected officials marched the three miles from the Suffolk County House of Corrections to the Massachusetts State House Monday morning in support of a moratorium on construction of a new women’s prison in Norfolk.