Prison systems across the country ban books, but no one had ever systematically collected the lists. They were scattered, inconsistently formatted, and nearly impossible to compare. The project started when reporter Keri Blakinger ran into trouble sending her own memoir to incarcerated people in Florida and wondered how widespread the problem was. What emerged was a year-long investigation — and a product challenge: how do you build something useful out of incomplete, inconsistent data while keeping the people closest to the problem at the center of the design?
I was brought in as data project lead. I designed and built a four-step generative AI pipeline using ChatGPT to extract and standardize book data from bureaucratic state documents — reducing what had been a two-week manual process to roughly 45 minutes per policy, with human review at every stage. I also ran the community listening process: conversations with carceral librarians, prison educators, books-to-prison programs, and formerly incarcerated people that shaped every product decision — what to include, what to suppress, and how to frame information that could affect vulnerable people if gotten wrong. I published a piece about the methodology in the Generative AI Newsroom as a resource for other journalists.
A human-in-the-loop AI pipeline — not AI as a shortcut, but AI as infrastructure for a process that still required reporters, style editors, and data editors at every validation step. Community co-design through listening sessions, interviews, and systematic surveys — asking people what they needed to hold the system accountable, not what we assumed they needed. An editorial commitment to framing censorship as a human rights issue. And sustained project management to hold technical, editorial, and community threads together across a year of reporting.
The searchable database — covering banned book lists from 18 states and policy summaries from over 30 — was used by more than 30 publications to generate over 40 stories. In October 2023, Texas rolled back policies preventing books from reaching incarcerated people after The Marshall Project began asking questions. Keri Blakinger's memoir, initially banned in Florida as "dangerously inflammatory," was overturned after a five-month appeal. The data contributed to PEN America's report on prison book bans and inspired localized investigations by newsrooms across the country. I also built a reporting recipe with the team to help other journalists investigate prison book bans in their own communities.