Dorsey Nunn

Dec 20, 2024 | themarshallproject.org | Dorsey Nunn

Bicycles and the winter holiday season have always been tied up together for me. They speak to love, freedom and the loss of it, shame — and revolutionary acts of philanthropy by formerly incarcerated people. My earliest Christmas memory stars a deep purple bike with a banana seat and cruiser-style handlebars. It was 1960, and I was 9 years old. The bike was too glorious for wrapping, towering over the other presents that sat lumpy and small under the shiny synthetic tree.

Dec 12, 2024 | sacbee.com | Dorsey Nunn

The recent defeat of Proposition 6, which would have banned forced labor in California’s prisons, combined with the success of Proposition 36, which strengthens penalties for certain crimes, is a stark reminder that our state’s progressive reputation masks a more complicated reality.

Aug 3, 2024 | scheerpost.com | Dorsey Nunn

By Dorsey Nunn / The AppealThe fight to end indefinite solitary confinement started in Pelican Bay, a “supermax” prison built at the far northern tip of California in 1989. But support would come from every single prison in California’s swollen system. Pelican Bay was built to house the supposed “worst of the worst,” in the kinds of conditions the public never heard about until the torture chamber was up and running.

Oct 11, 2023 | heydaybooks.com | Dorsey Nunn |Lee Romney

A decade behind bars spurs fifty powerful years of political and legal battles for freedom and human rights. When Dorsey Nunn shuffled, shackled like a slave, into the California State carceral system at age nineteen, he could barely read. While caged he received an education he never could have anticipated. His first lesson: Prison had a color scheme, and it didn’t match the larger society.