Sara Kielly is an investigative journalist, poet, and jailhouse lawyer whose work has appeared in Slate, Spotlong Review, the New York Daily News, Guild Notes, and In Solidarity. As an Irish-American transgender woman incarcerated at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, she works to change conditions of confinement for minority prisoners and the conversation surrounding our mass carceral state. She is invested in joining with other minority people to build a society that prioritizes equity, inclusion, and the power of minority lives.
With nearly all of New York’s state prisons on lockdown, those on the inside struggle to get by.
A landmark reform law was meant to overhaul carceral punishment in New York. Getting prisons to follow it has been an uphill battle.