We are pleased to announce that as of September 2025, the Expressive Arts & Write to Heal programs have officially launched at Taconic Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison for women in New York. Starting in early 2024, these programs were introduced at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, New York’s only maximum-security prison for women and the reception center for all women entering the state’s prison system. As a result of enthusiastic participant feedback and other aspects of the program’s success, the NYS Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) asked Women & Justice Project (WJP) to continue running the programs at Bedford Hills, and to eventually expand to the state’s two other women’s prisons, Taconic and Albion Correctional Facilities.

We were thrilled to begin offering the programs at Taconic in September 2025, sharing the same model that has made the program so impactful for our participants: sessions are co-designed and co-facilitated by women with deep insight into and personal knowledge of the incarceration experience in New York’s prisons, with social workers available to provide additional support for participants as needed. In this supportive space, participants learn how to engage creative techniques – art, writing, and dialogue – as potent vehicles for self-expression, self-reflection, communication, personal transformation, and connection.

At Bedford and Taconic, Expressive Arts sessions are facilitated in partnership with WJP artist-in-residence Katie Yamasaki and offered weekly for people living in general population. Write to Heal is facilitated in partnership with Columbia University’s Center for Justice and offered in Bedford’s Residential Rehabilitation Unit (a separate housing unit for people serving more than 15 days in segregated confinement) and in Taconic’s general population.

We look forward to sharing work from the Taconic programs on this site soon. To learn more and support the programs, please visit our About page.