NLG-NYC Parole Preparation Project Featured in The New Yorker

We’re thrilled that the Parole Preparation Project (PPP) of the NLG-NYC Chapter has been featured in The New Yorker! The article follows Richard Lloyd Dennis and his PPP volunteer team as he faces the Board of Parole for the 13th time. Lloyd, as he’s known by those close to him, is 68 years old and […]

[WEBINAR] Implementing Abolition: How to Create Just and Lasting Decarceration

Tuesday, April 9 – 5 PM (ET) / 2 PM (PT) UPDATE -4/11/19: Watch the recording of the full webinar! While prison populations have declined in recent years, they remain enormous, and immigration detention has ballooned. Also, in many areas where prison populations have decreased the most, racial disparities have worsened. Webinar faculty will talk […]

What American Drug Culture Reveals about Race in the US

We are publishing this piece as part of the NLG annual student Week Against Mass Incarceration. In 2019, we are highlighting the connections between the exponential increase of incarcerated people and the 40-year War on Drugs.  By Lisa Drapkin, NLG Director of Membership The cultural narrative around drug use in the US is constantly shifting, […]

DE-NJ NLG Prisoners’ Legal Advocacy Network (PLAN) Mounts Legal Responses to Widespread Reports of Prisoner Abuses in the Aftermath of the 2018 National Prison Strike

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE September 20, 2018 Contact: Paul Stanley Holdorf, Esq. Melinda R. Patterson, Esq. 908-591-1589 | plan@nlg.org From August 21, 2018 to September 9, 2018, prisoners across the country participated in a peaceful strike to protest steadily deteriorating conditions of confinement in United States prisons. These worsening conditions, such as major cutbacks to prisoner […]

New Resource: Best Practices Guide for Setting Up a Legal Defense Fund

Legal defense funds can serve as crucial tools for sustaining grassroots led movements and defending the people who put their lives on the line for them. The National Lawyers Guild and National Bail Fund Network have teamed up to create the Best Practices Guide for Setting Up a Legal Defense Fund in order to address […]

WEBINAR: Bail Funds and Community-Based Strategies

REGISTER NOW! bit.ly/bailfundwebinar Bail and bond funds can be an important tool towards dismantling the prison industrial complex and ending mass incarceration. However, as many new funds emerge in response to the rampant policing of protests and uprisings, this is an important moment to share lessons learned on the ground. Lawyers and legal workers sometimes […]

Struggles of Using Legal Recourse as a Path Toward Better Prison Conditions

Lisa Drapkin, NLG Membership Director It seems there could never be enough legal support to help the millions of prisoners who would benefit from having a lawyer at arms’ length. Whether it is lack of medical care, abhorrent nutrition, exposure to extreme temperatures, lack of clean water, or brutality by prison guards, there are endless […]

Mass Incarceration in the Trump Era

By Pooja Gehi, NLG Executive Director In 2015, the National Lawyers Guild adopted a resolution calling for the dismantling and abolition of all prisons. As an organization, we recognized mass incarceration in all of its iterations—policing, violence, incarceration, forced labor, privatization and capitalism—as a crisis that we must resist in all of our work. Sharlyn Grace, then […]