I’ve spent 27 years inside New York’s prison system. I didn’t come to journalism through a traditional path — I came to it through lived experience, the kind that complements what my colleagues bring to the newsroom every day. When The Marshall Project gave me the opportunity to build something that reflects that experience, “Inside Story” was born.
“Inside Story” is a video series developed by formerly incarcerated staff at The Marshall Project, the Pulitzer Prize-winning criminal justice news organization. I host it. My co-creator and director, Donald Washington Jr., and I actually met in a college class inside Sing Sing Prison, where we both majored in Behavioral Science. That’s where our path toward “Inside Story” started — two guys in a classroom behind walls, figuring me out the system we were living in. Now we’re building media that helps others understand it.
The team behind “Inside Story” doesn’t just report on the criminal justice system — we’ve been inside it.
We’re about to launch our third season of “Inside Story,” and Season 3 is different. Not different for the sake of it. Different because the audience demands it, the moment demands it, and frankly, we’re ready for it. This season, we’re going where the audience is. We’ll be posting Season 3 of “Inside Story” to our YouTube channel and other social platforms, alongside short-form videos building on the topics we cover in each episode.
The show is rigorous. It’s fact-checked. It goes beneath the surface and doesn’t pick sides — it gives you the full picture and trusts you to engage with it seriously. But serious doesn’t mean dry. Every episode is designed to pull you in, keep you there and leave you with something you didn’t have before.
Subscribe to The Marshall Project’s YouTube channel now to follow “Inside Story” as it rolls out. To get notified in your inbox when we publish a new episode and updates about our other work for audiences on the inside, sign up for our Inside Updates email list.
Sincerely,
Lawrence Bartley