Recent Wins & News
Recent Victories
After years of advocacy, Worth Rises was successful in making prison calls free in New York’s state prisons. The new policy, the first to be implemented administratively rather than legislatively, will save more than 30,000 incarcerated people and their families in New York over $13 million annually. Read more about the big win!
Based on years of research, The Prison Industry maps the range of ways in which private corporations, often with their government partners, make money off incarceration. It further details the gross extraction of wealth from incarcerated people and their families, who have been brutalized by overpolicing, mass incarceration, and mass surveillance. Order your copy today.
Award-winning composer, pianist, and vocalist Samora Pinderhughes, along with Jamila Woods, Elliott Skinner, Bobby Gonz, and Keith LaMar, released a powerful new track that sheds light on the exception in the 13th Amendment, which still allows slavery to be used as criminal punishment. Listen to the single here and take action to #EndTheException.
The project, created in collaboration with Zealous, allows the general public — for the first time at anything close to this scale — to learn about prison labor through hand written accounts from hundreds experiencing slavery in prison leveraging cutting-edge archival technology with original illustrations. Read more about the win.
Ahead of Labor Day, Worth Rises launched a digital letter archive with first-hand accounts of slavery in U.S. prisons. The letters, from over 200 incarcerated workers, were collected as part the public education efforts of the organization’s #EndTheException campaign, which seeks to end the exception in the 13th Amendment that still allows slavery to be used as criminal punishment.
The mural by Philadelphia-based artist Ernel Martinez was unveiled during the museum’s Juneteenth block party. It’s sponsored by the #EndTheException campaign, which aims to end the exception to the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that still allows slavery and involuntary servitude to be used as criminal punishment.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted unanimously to dramatically limit the rates that prison telecoms charge for phone and video calls from prisons and jails. Worth Rises estimates that the new rules will impact 83 percent of incarcerated people (about 1.4 million) and save impacted families at least $500 million annually. Read more about the impact of the new FCC rules.
Crafted for our #EndTheException campaign, this project was designed to educate the public about the exception in the 13th Amendment that allows slavery as punishment for a crime. Judged by a group of over 50 judges across the marketing industry, "The Most Famous Speech Never Given" was awarded Gold in the Charity for Not For Profit category and Silver in the Creative Innovation category. Read more about how AI and CGI helped bring this project to life!
President Abraham Lincoln is credited with ending slavery — but even he knows that slavery hasn't truly ended. In a historic moment, Lincoln returns to acknowledge the mistake he made in supporting an exception in the 13th Amendment and urge us to end it. Watch his presidential address.
This independent economic study, commissioned by Worth Rises for the #EndTheException campaign, makes the fiscal case for ending slavery and involuntary servitude in prisons and paying incarcerated workers fair wages. It reveals that this policy change would generate fiscal benefits to incarcerated workers, their families and children, crime victims, and society at large to the tune of billions every year. Read the full study here!
After years of advocacy, Worth Rises and its local partners passed a bill making all communication free in Massachusetts state prisons and local jails, including phone calls, video calls, and electronic monitoring. The bill is the first to cover all prisons and jails in a state, and will save incarcerated people and their families in Massachusetts over $14 million annually. Read more about the big win!
Worth Rises gathered over 70 prison phone justice advocates, including impacted people, in Minneapolis for the first Connecting Families Conference. The program include powerful talks, informative panels, and critical training for advocates fighting to make prison and jail communication free in their communities.
Alongside families, advocates, and local partners, Worth Rises successfully passed legislation to make phone calls free in all Minnesota state prisons. Governor Tim Walz signed the bill on May 16, delivering a major victory that will save families an estimated $4.5 million each year.
Read more about the win here.
In a quick battle that represents the momentum of the connecting families movement, Worth Rises and its local partners passed a bill making calls free in Colorado’s state prisons. The bill covers all state prisons and will be implemented over three years with calls becoming fully free on July 1, 2025.
Worth Rises and Color Of Change released a Policy Blueprint for Ending Carceral Profiteering that calls on the Biden-Harris Administration to stop corporate profiteering off of incarceration and gives the Administration a concrete roadmap to doing so. Corporate exploitation throughout the carceral system harms people detained on the inside, families and communities on the outside, and taxpayers and public safety at large. It’s time to put an end to it. Read the full report here.
After pressure from Worth Rises, FDRsafety has terminated its contract with Alabama to approve the safety of a new nitrogen gas protocol for death penalty executions. The announcement came hours after local faith leaders delivered an open letter and more than 3,000 signed petitions expressing moral outrage. Worth Rises also successfully moved Airgas to forbid the use of its nitrogen gas in the executions.
After decades of advocacy, advocates, including Worth Rises, passed the federal Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communication Act to increase the Federal Communications Commission’s regulatory authority over prison and jail calls. The bill mandates regulation of all phone calls, authority that was previously restricted to roughly 20% of all calls, and video calls, which the agency had never regulated. It also establishes many disability rights related to communication. Read more about this win!
What started off as a series of periodic reports, is now an interactive, dynamic digital data tool exposing over 4,000 corporations and investors that profit off mass incarceration and mass surveillance and their devastating impacts on our nation, especially our most marginalized communities. Corporations are assigned harm scores, marked for divestment, flagged from supporting prison labor, and more. Check it out!
Worth Rises once seemed like a far-fetched idea. No one could imagine advocates taking on the powerful prison industry. Today, only five years after our founding, we are on the path to victory. We’ve passed legislation to make calls free for incarcerated people, diverted hundreds of millions of dollars in investments from the prison industry, and put millions of dollars back into the pockets of families with loved ones behind bars. Read the full report!
Alongside local families and advocates, Worth Rises successfully passed legislation in California to make prison phone calls free! In September 2022, Governor Newsom signed the bill, officially making California the second state to do so. This major victory will impact nearly 100,000 incarcerated people and save families more than $33 million, annually. Read more about the victory!
In September 2021, after months of pressure from Worth Rises and other advocates, Alabama halted its plans to build two new mega prisons and terminated its 30-year lease agreements with CoreCivic. We are excited to join our coalition partners in celebrating this milestone victory for the people of Alabama! We plan to stay vigilant as the state considers other options to expand its correctional system.
On Juneteenth, Worth Rises joined over 70 organizations in launching #EndTheException, a national campaign supporting the Abolition Amendment to end the exception in the Thirteenth Amendment that allows slavery as punishment for crime. The event featured powerful poetry and remarks from sponsors Senator Jeff Merkley and Congresswoman Nikema Williams. Watch the replay!
Worth Rises leads the Connecticut Connecting Families coalition to the biggest prison phone justice victory yet! In June 2020, Governor Lamont signed legislation that would make Connecticut the first state to make all prison communication free with a minimum of 90 minutes per person per day and protect visits from replacement. Read more about the victory!
In a powerful TED Talk, Worth Rises Executive Director Bianca Tylek pulls the veil off the guarded prison industry and explains the opportunity we have to dismantle it, using telecom and the prison phone justice movement as a case study. Watch now!
Worth Rises Executive Director Bianca Tylek and our partners Diane Lewis, Jewu Richardson, and Brian Sullivan appeared on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee in May to share about our work to make prison calls free in Connecticut and challenge prison profiteers like Tom Gores. Check it out!
Based on our report, The Prison Industry: How it Started, How it Works, How it Harms, The Curriculum features Punishment + Profit, a weekly webinar series, and will equip participants with a strong understanding of the prison industry and a framework to imagine the world without it. Take the course now!
The Prison Industry: How it Started, How it Works, How it Harms delves into the history, business, and impact of the prison industry and all its corporate players, as well as offering powerful first-person narratives from people who have been directly harmed by the greed of private corporations.
After months of disappointment in dialogue with Tom Gores, owner of the largest prison telecom corporations in the U.S., we sent a letter to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) calling for his removal from the board. Days later, artists echoed our call in their own letter to LACMA. Under the pressure, Gores resigned!