Category: Writing

John J. Lennon reviews Ben Austin’s “Correction,” a study of a system meant to promote rehabilitation — and reward prisoners who change — but that no longer seems to work the way it was intended.

If prison authorities had their way, John J. Lennon writes for Esquire, no one would be writing from the inside at all.

John J. Lennon replies to letters to the editor in response to “Peddling Darkness,” his review of Sarah Weinman’s book Scoundrel.

Thousands of people released from prison in New York go directly to homeless shelters.

True crime stories, like Sarah Weinman’s Scoundrel, make for suspenseful reading. But do they exploit the criminal, and deepen a thirst for punishment?

Working with Emily Bazelon on The New York Times Magazine’s Prison Letters Project, John J. Lennon dives into letters from Ivié DeMolina, who was convicted for her part in the 1994 murders of one man in New York and another in New Jersey.

I’ve been locked up in maximum-security prisons for two decades. My time on Rikers Island was worse.

In this feature for the Winter 2023 issue of Esquire, John J. Lennon writes about one of the last bastions of prisoner intimacy in America: the conjugal trailers of New York.

This book review by John J. Lennon of Keri Blakinger’s “Corrections in Ink” appears in New York Magazine/Vulture.

In 2017, I was sitting in on a Columbia University course at Sing Sing. I heard that Elias Alcantara, a former White House aide in the Obama administration, was supposed to talk to the class.