recommendations
The Year in Books 2022
As 2022 draws to a close, we reflect on books that informed, inspired, and empowered us to envision a world without mass incarceration.
News & Events
Premal Dharia will transition out of her Inquest and the Institute to End Mass Incarceration leadership roles in September 2026
Five years ago, during the height of the pandemic, Andrew Crespo and Premal Dharia launched the Institute to End Mass Incarceration and Inquest. The goal was to work with communities leading the fight to end mass incarceration across the country by finding ways to braid together the power of lawyers, organizers, storytellers, journalists, researchers and scholars. Since then, together, we have worked with partners nationwide to pursue essential and intertwined work on multiple fronts from media, to education, to advocacy.
After five remarkable years of growth and impact, with immense gratitude and appreciation, we are sharing the news that Premal, our inaugural and founding executive director, will be transitioning out of her roles at IEMI and at Inquest, where she is a founding editor and coeditor-in-chief. Andrew Crespo will continue to lead IEMI as its executive faculty director and Inquest as its editor-in-chief.
“Premal has been a wonderful partner in this extraordinary endeavor,” says Andrew. “Back when we launched IEMI and Inquest in 2021, I said that ‘I could not imagine a more thoughtful, more experienced, or better partner in this essential and exciting work,’ and I would say the same again now. I am so grateful for Premal’s political vision, strategic clarity, loyalty, and dedication. She will leave a legacy that spans a strong and growing organization, an award-winning magazine, and innovative interventions in the field that will have impact for years to come. We are filled with gratitude for all she has done.”
“Building and leading this organization, and its publication, has been the experience of a lifetime,” says Premal. “The early days were exhilarating, creative and full of raw energy and dedication. And that energy and dedication have only grown over the last five years. I am so deeply proud of the team we have built, the work we are doing, and the relentless optimism that infuses all of it. I am grateful to be leaving IEMI with the knowledge that the organization is healthy, strong, and well positioned to continue its important work.”
Premal has been a visionary leader, steering the organization from day one. She has been instrumental to building and guiding the Institute’s advocacy work, including its Carceral Infrastructure Project, through which Premal helped spearhead, among other things, a powerful connection between formerly incarcerated men in Washington, D.C., and local residents challenging a proposed new prison in eastern Kentucky, and the Exposing Prisons Project, which is working to make transparent what happens behind prison walls by expanding and protecting the right to report on it from inside and outside. Both projects are forging new paths for lawyers, journalists, and the movement as a whole. She has been an inspiring teacher in IEMI’s incredibly popular and successful clinic and seminar for Harvard law students, which has instilled in students a unique perspective and approach to lawyering: one that also seeks to understand the practice of community organizing so that lawyers can truly support organizer-led movements for social change. And she has been a clear-eyed leader in helping to launch and shape Inquest, which has grown to be a leading national forum for writing about mass incarceration featuring a broad range of incredible contributors: currently and formerly incarcerated writers, lawyers and organizers, scholars, doctors, social workers, and more. Inquest has reached over 500,000 readers, has been a finalist for the National Magazine Awards and a winner of multiple Stillwater Awards, and is a founding member of the national Movement Media Alliance.
Premal came to IEMI after nearly twenty years of challenging the harms of mass incarceration. Through her work as a public defender representing clients in state and federal courts and in Guantanamo Bay, as a supervisor who trained and guided other lawyers, as a civil rights lawyer pushing for change in the criminal legal system, as a Fellow at the Reflective Democracy Campaign, and as a nonprofit founder and leader, including of the Defender Impact Initiative, she has spent years working with leaders, advocates, organizers and those most directly impacted by the criminal system across the country. Through her writing and public speaking, she has sought to grow and strengthen efforts toward more justice for everyone.
At IEMI, Premal has only built on this legacy. She has done all one hopes for and more in an organization’s executive director: she has built a thriving body of work that will only continue to grow in its impact and inspiration atop the foundation she helped create. Premal will stay on at IEMI and Inquest through early fall to support the organization through this transition; her last day will be September 4, 2026. On behalf of all of us here at IEMI and Inquest, we extend to her our deepest gratitude and admiration.
Sincerely,
The IEMI & Inquest Teams
P.S. If you’d like to send your own note to Premal, you can reach her here.
Inquest included in The Best American Essay 2025
An Inquest essay, “Hell Is Real and It Is Beige” by Vic Liu, has been listed among the Notable Essays & Literary Nonfiction of 2024 in The Best American Essays 2025. We extend our congratulations to Liu for this well-deserved recognition for her remarkable essay narrating a kafkaesque journey to a prison’s visiting room.
This incredible honor concludes a year during which multiple Inquest authors won Stillwater Awards and Inquest was named a finalist for the National Magazine Awards.
These recognitions say to the world what we knew when we launched Inquest: the voices of those harmed by the criminal legal system are ones we must hear if we are truly working toward the end of mass incarceration. And the voices of those deep in the work, those doing the thinking, advocating, organizing and activating, are essential to share.
Inquest contributors win big at 2025 Stillwater Awards
The Stillwater Awards, which honor excellence in prison journalism, just announced the 2025 winners—and Inquest contributors won big. Issued annually by the Society of Professional Journalists and the Prison Journalism Project, the awards “celebrate journalistic excellence spotlighting the important work of incarcerated writers whose stories shed light on life inside and challenge the public’s understanding of the prison legal system.”
The first-place award for Best Reported Essay went to Phillip Vance Smith II for his powerful Inquest essay, “Uprooting Violence.” Smith has been incarcerated for twenty-two years and, in addition to this award-winning Inquest essay, has been published in Slate, Logic(s), and the North Carolina Law Review.
Several other Inquest contributors also collected awards, showcasing the powerful voices that we have helped to identify and amplify over the years. Kwaneta Harris, who published an Inquest essay in 2023 on women’s health, won first place for Prison Journalist of the Year, second place for Best Collaboration, and first place for Best Op-Ed. Stevie Wilson, who has twice published with Inquest—once on prison labor in 2023 and again on the harms of prison transfers in 2024—won third place for Best Collaboration. Leo Cardez published an essay earlier this year in Inquest on prison design; he won first place for Best Feature. And Christopher Blackwell—whose essay on solitary confinement was among the first we published back in 2021—won first place for Best Collaboration.
Inquest a finalist for the 2025 National Magazine Award in General Excellence
Inquest has been named a finalist for the 2025 National Magazine Awards. Issued annually for the past 60 years by the American Society of Magazine Editors in association with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, the National Magazine Awards are “intended to advance the practice of journalism” by honoring “print and digital publications that consistently demonstrate superior execution of editorial objectives, innovative techniques, noteworthy enterprise and imaginative design.”
Specifically, Inquest is a finalist for the award for General Excellence in the category of Special Interest publications, with particular attention paid to our Freedom Writers collection of work by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated authors. We are honored to be recognized for these awards alongside so many excellent publications in this category and others, including the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Marshall Project, ProPublica, Mother Jones, the Atlantic, National Geographic, and the Washington Post.
Inquest invites our readers to join us in Boston this month as we welcome the Inthrive Film Festival for multiple days of screenings featuring the storytelling of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated filmmakers. The festival is hosted by the Emerson Prison Initiative and cosponsored by Inquest.
Inthrive Film Festival, the nation’s only traveling festival dedicated to showcasing the talents and stories of incarceration survivors, makes its debut in Boston March 17–19. This multiday, multisite event is a unique opportunity to engage with compelling narratives and participate in thought-provoking discussions. Admission is free and open to the public with online preregistration. Secure your spot and learn more at: InthriveFilmFestival.org/boston
- The festival will start on Monday, March 17, at New Beginnings Reentry Program with a screening of A Bridge to Life and a lively discussion with incarceration survivors.
- On Tuesday, March 18, festival attendees are invited to join Emerson Prison Initiative for its 2025 Conference on College in Prison.
- On Wednesday, March 19, the film festival picks up again in Emerson College’s Bright Family Screening Room for a full day of film screenings and panel discussions.
Inquest Hosts Symposium on Life Without Parole
In partnership with The Visiting Room Project, we’ll hear from people directly impacted by these extreme sentences—and why ending them is part of the broader struggle against mass incarceration.
Inquest, a publication of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, will host a day-long convening that will shed light on the cruelty of life-without-parole sentences, centering formerly and currently incarcerated people who have experienced them.
This gathering follows an essay by The Visiting Room Project filmmaker Marcus Kondkar, who has written about the power of documenting and witnessing intimate, face-to-face conversations with people who have been condemned to die in prison.
For more information about the September 28 event and to sign up for it, click here.
Adam McGee Joins Inquest as Managing Editor
Inquest brings together the ideas, work, and reflections of contributors from a multitude of fields, with the shared goal of ending mass incarceration. McGee will help lead the online publication as it builds on the foundation of a successful first year.
Inquest, a publication of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, is thrilled to announce that Adam McGee has joined our team as managing editor.
Before coming to Inquest, McGee served as managing editor of Boston Review for nearly a decade, where he was also founding Arts Editor of the magazine’s Arts in Society project.
McGee earned a PhD in African and African American Studies from Harvard University and a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. His scholarship has appeared in Studies in Religion, Dreaming, and the Journal of Haitian Studies. As a poet and writer, his work has been in Prairie Schooner, Electric Lit, Poets & Writers, Raleigh Review, Painted Bride, Memorious, Cimarron Review, Assaracus, and elsewhere. Prior to becoming a full-time editor, McGee taught courses in religious studies and anthropology at Harvard, Tufts, and Northeastern.
McGee joins the publication at an exciting time, following our one-year anniversary in July 2022. In Inquest’s first year, we published over a hundred thought-provoking, rigorous, and influential essays, all contributing to our “decarceral brainstorm” that seeks an end to mass incarceration. With McGee helping to lead the publication, the future holds even more potential and excitement, as we look to grow our community of readers, contributors, and fellow travelers. Joining a small but dedicated team, McGee will help to ensure that Inquest continues to provide our readers with writing that inspires them, that provokes them, and that pushes the critical work of decarceration forward.
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Reflections
Inquest: Year One
A reflection from the founding editors of Inquest on the occasion of the one-year anniversary of the publication.