Editor's Note: The following reflection was written by Mariah Willor, an anthropology and writing and rhetoric dual major. She is a SOURCE research assistant and an editor for Mend, a publication centering people impacted by the criminal justice system.

On February 16, 2025, in the Syracuse Central Library’s Community Room, Project Mend launched its third issue. Project Mend is an initiative conceived of by Patrick W. Berry, associate professor of writing and rhetoric in Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences. He describes the project as “a means of recognizing that people need more than just the basic necessities to survive—they need community, a space for storytelling and self-expression.” Senior editor Troy White, who has devoted 27 years to human services following the serving of a 15-year prison sentence, agrees, saying that incarceration “affects more than just those physically behind bars. It affects families, communities and society as a whole.”

The writers whose work is featured in the third edition of Mend write of prison as an experience of being “isolated, stripped naked, physically restrained” (Jefferson Fietek); “buried in a human warehouse” (Leo Cardez); and “sitting on the corner…drinking…vodka and gin (Shawnda Frazier).” They communicate their truth in tones that are not docile but filled with pride. These authors look at the crisis of mass incarceration and tell us, This isn’t right. The editors of Mend ask their audience only one thing: Snap when you hear something you like, as editor Tony Eiland asked attendees at its launch to do.

The event opened with editor Marion Rodriguez reading a poem by Shawnda Frazier, an Indigenous incarcerated woman. In “Strong Lakota Woman,” Frazier co-opts the English language and subverts it as a tool of (attempted) Indigenous erasure and creates something new. “Don’t put my mother in jail to rot,” she writes, “this is the only world she’s been taught,” thus testifying to the idea that society creates the criminals it punishes.

Katherine Nikolau discussed her new publication render , which features stories about poets, artists and activists, including José A. Pérez, whose image is projected. render is an offshoot publication of Mend.

Don’t mistake Mend for a sermon, preaching the internal transformation of a few. Mend is a rebellion, advocating for the external transformation of us all. Prison is not a landing place for those who have “made bad decisions” but a larger, much more sinister entity. Prison is embedded in the social, economic and political threads that weave through our nation, disproportionately impacting marginalized communities. Those in these communities are racially and economically profiled and receive harsher sentencing, and formal education and health care can be difficult to obtain or inaccessible to them. The erosion of human rights drives crime. If you couldn’t afford to feed your children, perhaps you would steal, too. Through privatization, the carceral system becomes financially beneficial for our nation to lay these people’s bodies on antimicrobial vinyl mattresses in cement boxes.

There’s commercial glamour in the art of the captive. People will starve themselves or lock themselves in a box for art. They live for art. But there is a stark contrast between living for art and using art to survive.

Writers featured in Mend use their pieces to survive. They reconceptualize what it is to be a writer, what it looks and sounds like. It’s important not only that these voices be heard, but that they be heard by those in our community. When more textbooks sound like them and more social structures are built with them in mind, we will all become a little more human.

Project Mend is made possible through collaboration with the Center for Community Alternatives and through an HNY Post-Incarceration Humanities Partnership generously supported by the Mellon Foundation. Additionally, the project has been supported at Syracuse University by the Engaged Humanities Network, the Humanities Center, the SOURCE, SU Libraries, and the Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric and Composition.