John J. Lennon
Prison Journalist
RECENT JOURNALISM BY JOHN J. LENNON
Can the Parole Process Make Prison Sentences More Just?
The Prisoner and the Pen
True Crime and Punishment: An Exchange
How Do People Released From Prison Find Housing?
Peddling Darkness
The Prison Letters Project: Considering Past Trauma
Cover photo: Christaan Felber
ABOUT JOHN J. LENNON
John J. Lennon currently serving a 28-years-to-life sentence at Sullivan Correctional Facility for murder, drug sales and gun possession.
He is a contributing editor at Esquire and a contributing writer at the Marshall Project. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and elsewhere.
JOHN J. LENNON’S TWITTER
Glad that Gov. Hochul has allotted money in the budget for people with mental illness to get treated somewhere other than jail or prison. As I wrote in 2019, the awful reality is 10 out of 11 psychiatric patients housed by the government are incarcerated.
Check out John J Lennon chopping it but with Wilbert Rideau:
I'm honored that I got to do this Q/A with Wilbert Rideau, one of the most acclaimed prison journalists, who paved the way for so many of us writing from the inside today. We talked about reading on death row + how he grew to call his warden a friend.
Background checks are finally being implemented for the "gun-show loophole" (I actually suggested this more than ten years ago), but it's being done seemingly on unsteady legal grounds. In other words, a court could overturn the rule. So could Trump.