A national criminal justice news outlet
In 2019, I started an email Substack focused on criminal justice. In the last two years, we’ve grown to over 200 subscribers and founded an LLC.
We stepped into the full role of a start up criminal justice news outlet. We’ve partnered with a national news outlet, published almost ten writers including incarcerated people. We’ve sent over 40 in-depth stories or essays to our readers and reported in over five different states and started a podcast. We’ve also hosted ten interns in four separate positions.
We are growing to tackle our mission of connecting and informing people impacted and involved by the justice world to better empower them to inflict change.
Read past issues here.
It drops into your email with a collection of small and digestible snippets from the frontlines of the criminal justice system. It promises to be humanizing, spunky, and educational.
Our name: Des is short for Desmoterion, “place of chains”, used to describe prisons in ancient Athens. We like the idea of the chains because incarceration expands far beyond bars to laws, policies, belief systems, private industry and America’s idea of freedom.
LJ Dawson 