Changing the Conversation About Incarceration With The Marshall Project Inside’s Publisher Lawrence Bartley

Lawrence Bartley says he’s not the most articulate person in the world—and that he almost didn’t write that first story, which would eventually lead him to launch both the print publication News Inside, and the video series Inside Story with The Marshall Project. Incarcerated at the time, he was going before the parole board and stood a good chance of being released. 

“I had a lot of accomplishments when it comes to prison standards,” he says, including multiple college degrees. But he was denied parole. 

While typically in New York that would have meant serving two more years, he wound up going before five parole boards in seven months—a complete emotional rollercoaster. Through it all, a friend of Bartley’s urged him to write about his experience. Bartley says it required some convincing. 

“I was thinking about what I was going to do next, how I would have to appeal, how I would present myself for the parole board, to strangers who didn't know me, and how I could explain to them that I'm not the person who they see that committed a crime,” Bartley says. 

In the end, it was the thought of someone else who might benefit from his story—perhaps someone in a similar situation—that drove Bartley to sit down and write. The Marshall Project—a nonprofit news organization—published it, and a month later Bartley was released. By the end of that summer, Bartley was working for The Marshall Project himself. And within a year he’d conceived of and launched a print publication: News Inside. 

Photo Credit @The Marshall Project

The Power of News Inside

The Marshall Project is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization seeking “to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system.” Through journalism, the organization impacts the system to render it more fair, effective, transparent and humane. Part of that picture includes bringing news of the criminal justice system to incarcerated people themselves via News Inside. 

Bartley says the motivation for the print publication came from how much he thought he could have benefitted from something similar during his 27 years of incarceration.

“I thought about where I was, and how if I had the news I was seeing on The Marshall Project website inside, how it would have changed my life—how I could have used it as a tool to promote different prison programming, to move the court in a different way, to appeal my parole decisions with some of the language I saw in those deep dive articles that The Marshall Project published,” he says. 

The print publication required specific binding so prison staff wouldn’t worry it could hide contraband—but it worked. News Inside now circulates in more than 1,350 prisons and jails and reaches more than 223,600 incarcerated people.

Photo Credit @The Marshall Project

Increasing Access With Video

Bartley, as the publisher of News Inside, began receiving positive feedback about the publication from across the country, even from prison administrators, who were fans of the stories and coverage. But it came to his attention that to be more effective, video would be a crucial tool—since around three out of five incarcerated people have lower literacy that might keep them from reading News Inside in its current form.

Quickly, what began as large group Zoom calls during the pandemic, aimed to keep supporters in the loop, morphed into shooting stories in Bartley’s living room—and eventually to a series of eight professionally produced and shot segments. And while those stories are produced with incarcerated audiences first and foremost, they’re also available for public consumption on the Vice News channel on YouTube.

Lawrence Bartley, left, and Donald Washington Jr. created “Inside Story” as a way to inform and inspire imprisoned viewers. Photo Credit @Devin Greenleaf

Sharing the View From Inside 

What’s revolutionary about both News Inside and Inside Story? They take into account the perspective of people who live or have lived in the system. 

“Each segment of Inside Story is touched by someone either currently or formerly incarcerated,” Bartley says. And the stories discuss things that matter to incarcerated people—like relationships with family outside, or how confessions are handled, for example. 

Bartley takes a different tact when interviewing subjects, often gaining access to story aspects that usually hide in the shadows. For example, being able to talk with detectives who normally aren’t allowed to comment to the media. The results are stories unlike what gets published anywhere else. 

“I think that we bring something different,” he says, pointing to a specific interview with a detective: “At the end of it, the detective came to me and said, ‘No one ever asked me questions like that.’... So I know that we're on the right track.”

Bartley hosts the series, which includes interviews with criminal justice experts and activists like Bryan Stevenson, right. Photo Credit @Camilo Fuentealba

The Next Season

As The Marshall Project gears up for another series of Inside Story, Bartley carries hope about what the flow of communication can accomplish, breaking down barriers. He witnessed that power before, when he served as part of a quasi-incarcerated government, approved by prison administration, to bring issues from the incarcerated population to the prison administrators—and also help communicate issues the prison administrators had to the incarcerated population. His eyes had opened to the humanity on both sides. 

“So now being a journalist, I feel like I'm still doing that communication, but it involves the public,” Bartley says. “It involves currently incarcerated people and people who work in the system, to have that communication channel through all of them.” 

And that gives him hope for his country, he says. 

Mighty Arrow funds The Marshall Project as part of our Social Justice: Criminal Justice Reform strategy, however, we’ve found their journalism highlights so much more than just that.  It has revealed insights from perspectives related to our other philanthropic focus areas that we would have not learned about otherwise. Journalism itself is at risk these days. We are inspired by Lawrence and the many folks at The Marshall Project for their courage to tell these stories.

To find out more, check out The Marshall Project, read News Inside, and watch Inside Story.

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