In a spoken-word poem, Dwayne Betts details the emotional impacts of juvenile incarceration.

This article was published in partnership with Caught, the new podcast on juvenile justice from WNYC Studios and the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal-justice system. Sign up for its newsletter or follow the Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

Editor’s note: This is the second of two essays The Root is publishing in partnership with Caught, a new podcast from WNYC Studios about the juvenile-justice system. We hope to generate a conversation about how we can support rather than merely punish young people who are in crisis, and we want to hear from you too.…

Editor’s note: This is the first of two essays The Root is publishing in partnership with Caught, a new podcast from WNYC Studios about the juvenile-justice system. We hope to generate a conversation about how we can support rather than merely punish young people who are in crisis, and we want to hear from you too. Go…

Want to know what phase the moon is in? There’s an app for that. Want to track your meals? There are dozens of apps for that. Want to see which works of art your face resembles? There’s an app for that, too.

Matthew Charles was released in 2016 after being incarcerated for more than 20 years. But now the Justice Department wants to send him back to prison.

Updated Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2018, 1:15 p.m. EST: After being called out by the ACLU for banning an award-winning book about mass incarceration, New Jersey said that it has lifted the ban on Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.

The first of nine jails at the Rikers Island complex in New York City will be shut down by the summer, the city’s Department of Correction announced Tuesday afternoon.

With the number of lethal and nonlethal shootings, robberies and assaults on the rise in Baltimore, police and government officials are clamoring for ways to make sense of what is happening. But even with public finger-pointing and posturing, there still isn’t a consensus about who should be blamed for the current…

Let me make this clear: I’m not team #FreeMeekMill, but I am team #FreeRobertRihmeekWilliams.

When it comes to incarceration, being able to be granted bail and then to come up with the bail money are two of main components that keep people locked up.

I’m taking it for granted that anyone who knows anything about the American criminal-justice system could hazard a guess that black men end up serving longer prison sentences than white men who commit the same crimes. But just in case you needed solid evidence to cite in your next argument with your racist aunty, a…

When talking about inequality in the criminal-justice system, we often focus on the war on drugs, crooked cops or the prison-industrial complex. But insiders know there is one part of America’s legal system that has an outsized influence on convictions, sentencing and incarceration:

A state investigation details the cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners at an Alaska correctional facility. The investigation reveals an incident in which corrections officers forced male inmates to strip naked in front of female guards, placed dog leashes around their necks and paraded them around the prison…

Facing a decade and a half in prison couldn’t stop her. Losing a loved one to suicide didn’t destroy her. Battling loss and pain while raising three children was not enough to make her quit.

All hell broke loose and two people were arrested at a Baltimore City Hall hearing for a proposed mandatory one-year sentence for possession of an illegal handgun—a bill that some say will continue to exacerbate the mass incarceration of young people of color.

Although criminal-justice reform has gotten a lot of airtime in the last few years—with some victories in dribs and drabs—a recent study found that the average amount of time served behind bars rose by about five years from 2000 to 2014.

In more news from the world of the white and privileged, members of the Missouri Board of Probation and Parole callously played with inmates during their parole hearings by trying to get them to say ridiculous words such as “platypus” and “manatee,” or mention specific song titles, for points.

President Donald Trump believes that his fellow politicians are not as supportive to police as they should be, and he said Monday that officers on the beat are subject to “unfair defamation and vilification” that have made their jobs more dangerous.

“Yoooo, have you heard of this dude named Bill Brennan?!” My friend intentionally does not use exclamation points as an act of resistance against manufactured cyber emotion; so when I received that excited message last week, I quickly went through my mental Rolodex because it felt as if I should have heard of Bill…