NCSL: Voices From Inside: Living and Working in Prison

Corrections staff and incarcerated people share their experiences with an initiative that promotes collaboration as a way to enhance the well-being of both groups.

Published by the National Council of State Legislatures on September 21, 2026

By Kelley Griffin

Nneka Jones Tapia remembers the day more than a dozen police officers with rifles stormed into her family’s North Carolina home to arrest her father on a marijuana possession charge. She was just 5 years old.

For the next three years, her family packed a picnic basket every Sunday and drove to whatever prison was holding him, so they could sit together and share a meal.

That ritual, Jones Tapia told a session at NCSL’s Legislative Summit, taught her something that runs against the grain of how most people think about locking someone away.

“Control and isolation do not make us safer” and not just for the person behind bars, but for everyone around them, she says.

Jones Tapia, who has a doctorate in psychology, is the managing director of justice programs at Chicago Beyond, which advocates for prison reform. Previously, she spent 20 years researching the impact of jails and prisons on people, families and communities before taking over as executive director of the Cook County Jail in Chicago, a facility she says was then one of the nation’s “most notoriously violent.”

The changes she and her team made at the jail were sweeping enough that a federal judge overseeing a consent decree called it a model facility before she left. Many of those changes, she says, didn’t survive her departure—a fact she’s still wrestling with.

Jones Tapia joined Chicago Beyond to promote the group’s Holistic Safety Framework, a program that correctional systems can use to change the prison experience for incarcerated people and guards by having them work together. The organization has partnered with systems in Arizona, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, New York and Vermont.

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