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1 month ago | 
rollingstone.com | Kwaneta Harris
March 21, 2025 In my experience, women are given only five tampons and a handful of pads per monthly cycle, so we're left to fend for ourselves if we run out. Photo illustration by Matthew Cooley. Images in illustration by Adobe Stock, 2.
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1 month ago | 
thisamericanlife.org | Kwaneta Harris
The story of Craig Monteilh continues: What happens when you turn someone into the FBI who, it turns out, is working for the FBI? Trevor Aaronson, whom Sam Black interviewed for this story, has a book called The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism.
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1 month ago | 
solitarywatch.org | Kwaneta Harris
In the shadowed corners of American prisons, where time stands still and humanity often crumbles, women have endured the cruel practice of solitary confinement for over two centuries. From suffragettes to political activists, from the mentally ill to the wrongfully accused, their stories echo through concrete walls, telling a tale of systemic oppression that persists into our modern era. In 1872, when the sewing machine was revolutionizing American households, Susan B.
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1 month ago | 
opencampus.org | Kwaneta Harris
The state asks us to celebrate Black History Month within these concrete walls, yet their very education system perpetuates erasure. In the high school readiness programs offered in Texas prisons, textbooks still cling to the sanitized narrative that the Civil War was merely about “states’ rights.” The same texts refer to enslaved people as “migrant workers,” a calculated distortion that obscures the brutal reality of chattel slavery.
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2 months ago | 
solitarywatch.org | Kwaneta Harris
When they promoted me to medium custody after more than eight years in isolation, I thought I was leaving solitary confinement behind. Instead, I found myself in a strange space: not quite solitary, not quite general population, but somehow managing to combine the worst aspects of both. On paper, in Texas, medium custody is supposed to have outdoor recreation twice a week: Tuesday and Thursday, for one hour each time. In reality, staffing shortages mean we often go weeks without seeing the sky.
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2 months ago | 
thebarbedwire.com | Kwaneta Harris
On a hot day in the summer of 2024, the women’s prison visitation room had less than a dozen people in it. They’ve seldom been full in the seventeen years I have lived in Texas prisons. I watched 24-year-old Muffy palm the golf ball-sized Saran Wrap into her waistband. When the guard answered the phone, Muffy — who wore a permanent smirk and fresh sneakers — maneuvered the ball inside her body.
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Dec 19, 2024 | 
solitarywatch.org | Kwaneta Harris
Solitary Watch is honored to announce that the acclaimed incarcerated journalist Kwaneta Harris has joined us as our newest Contributing Writer. Stay tuned to our site for frequent articles and updates from Harris. • • • • • • • • • •After eight and a half years of living in solitary confinement, I was finally returning to general population. Now I could walk to each cell and tell friends, who had become family, goodbye.
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Nov 12, 2024 | 
inthesetimes.com | Kwaneta Harris
GATESVILLE, TEXAS — Searing heat radiates from my chest and spreads to my limbs. Sweat gathers at my hairline, pools in the crooks of my elbows and crawls down my back. I grab a big bowl I keep filled with water for this very purpose and pour it over my head. Instant relief follows. Unlike most women going through menopause, I can’t rush to adjust the thermostat. I’m having another hot flash in solitary confinement at a Texas women’s prison. There is no air conditioning, no escape from the heat.
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Oct 26, 2024 | 
portside.org | Kwaneta Harris
“We the People” Includes We the Incarcerated Published October 26, 2024 That the United States incarcerates people at a higher rate than most countries in the world is, by now, a truism. But that’s not the only way in which the country is an outlier. The vast majority of people locked up in prisons throughout America cannot vote. In many democratic nations, including Canada and most of the European Union, . Imprisonment itself is seen as sufficient punishment.
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Oct 18, 2024 | 
yesmagazine.org | Kwaneta Harris
This story was originally published by Prison Journalism Project in partnership with Reckon News, a national news organization that covers the people powering change, the challenges shaping our time, and what it means for all of us. The story is part of Locked Out, a special series from PJP about voting, politics and democracy behind bars. That the United States incarcerates people at a higher rate than most countries in the world is, by now, a truism.
