“She saw a glimpse of me and what our life could be if I was free.”

“Her eyes were slightly open, but vacant.”

One crinkly letter at a time.

“Step by step, I shuffle forward amid the mass of bodies, waiting to get inside.”

Demetrius Buckley’s long-awaited transfer to a lower-security prison means more time outside of his cell and a chance to see his daughter. But the transport process was like everything else in prison: slow, confusing and casually cruel.

Demetrius Buckley thought his bond with his 11-year-old daughter was strong. But when he couldn’t physically protect his child from adult problems, he learned the limits of parenting via prison phone calls.

Recently reunited with his 10-year-old daughter, Demetrius Buckley struggles to push past the barriers of a maximum security prison to be present for his curious, whip-smart little girl.

When Rebecca Figueroa was arrested two months into her pregnancy, she didn’t worry because she wasn’t guilty. But seven months later, she was still in jail and totally unprepared for a high-risk pregnancy, childbirth in restraints and the constant fear of losing her daughter.

When a trip to the hospital means spending hours on a cramped bus handcuffed to another prisoner.

He completed his prison sentence. Then immigration officers came calling.

After a neighbor fatally shot her son in 2001, Dr. Dorothy Johnson-Speight started the anti-violence group Mothers in Charge. “I thought maybe two people would show up; the room was jam packed.”

After my mother was diagnosed with cancer, she married the love of her life even though he was still behind bars. Then he got sick, too.

In Arkansas, 8 men are scheduled to die by lethal injection this month.

It’s a common misconception that once someone enters jail or prison, they lose their interest in the outside world.

A grandmother struggles to explain the unexplainable.

“Even when a parent has been part of a child’s pain, that parent’s love can still be the antidote.”

But only after two wrongly convicted men were set free.

“The criminal justice system has become an ever-present shadow looming over my life.”

Lia McKeown says a California prison refused to adjust her job duties to accommodate her pregnancies. Now she’s suing for discrimination.

On living with, and sharing, that information for a lifetime.

“They look tired, ragged, and sick, more so than they thought they would.”

The 24/7 nature of corrections work can make it all-consuming.

“From time to time you hear someone shout something like, ‘Trump cannot be stopped!’ or, ‘Let’s get this White Nazi out of power!’ There is no gray area.”