Why Philanthropy Must Start Investing in the People Behind Prison Bars

By Glenn E. Martin

Walk into almost any prison in America and, if you know where to look, you’ll find something philanthropy has been searching for: talent. We lock up some of America’s best and brightest. Not abstract talent, not hypothetical “leadership potential,” but real, disciplined, hard-earned brilliance that grows in the most unlikely places. You’ll find men and women leading circles on conflict resolution, developing reentry strategies, mediating disputes that would otherwise turn violent, and running classes that rival the structure and rigor of programs in the nonprofit world. Many of them have built models that later became the backbone of community violence-interruption programs, mentoring pipelines, and restorative justice initiatives on the outside.

And yet, these innovators are almost never funded while they are inside. Their ideas stay trapped behind the walls with them. That is philanthropy’s missed opportunity and its responsibility.

For years, foundations have said the right things: lived experience matters, proximity matters, community-led solutions matter. But even as the sector embraces this language, the people who are closest to the criminal justice system, those currently incarcerated, remain shut out of the philanthropic ecosystem. In a field obsessed with equity, this is one of the deepest inequities of all.

The truth is simple: if philanthropy wants to meaningfully transform the criminal justice system, it must start investing in the people inside it.

I say this not just as an advocate but as someone who lived both sides of the wall. When I was incarcerated, I spent years running the college program, mentoring men, and filling the gaps the system ignored. What I didn’t have was investment. Not financial, not strategic, not structural. I came home and hustled my way into the nonprofit world, eventually launching national campaigns, building organizations, and becoming one of the early voices calling for the closure of Rikers Island. And let’s be honest: that came with a price. When I pushed to shut down Rikers long before it was politically safe, colleagues in reentry and criminal justice reform told me I was crazy, naïve, divisive. Many of the same people who now champion “abolition” served as barriers when I was doing that work without institutional permission.

But here is the thing: the success people now celebrate in me was forged inside. The leadership people saw on the outside began in a prison cell. And philanthropy had nothing to do with it. Imagine how much more I, and thousands like me, could have built if anyone had invested in us before we came home. Imagine if those years weren’t spent waiting for freedom but developing scalable ideas with support, structure, and legitimacy.

Philanthropy talks constantly about innovation, but innovation has a source. In the criminal justice field, the most important innovations have always started inside the system itself.

Credible Messenger mentoring started inside.

Restorative circles were refined inside.

The most impactful reentry models were designed inside.

People behind bars see the system from a vantage point no researcher, consultant, or funder can replicate. Their solutions aren’t pilot projects. They are the distilled wisdom of thousands of lived experiences. They know what motivates someone in crisis, what fuels trauma, how conflict escalates, and what de-escalates it. They know this because they live it. That is not “stakeholder feedback.” That is expertise.

But we treat incarcerated expertise as invisible. I’m not suggesting that everyone in prison is an expert. But, at best the talented ones are seen as inspirational, but never investable.

Funders often hide behind bureaucratic mythology: “We can’t fund incarcerated people,” as if their grant agreements were written on tablets brought down from a mountaintop. The truth is that these are choices. Many nonprofits already operate inside prisons and could serve as fiscal sponsors. Fellowships could support pre-release savings, families, or post-release stipends. Materials, training, and evaluation can all be funded with existing mechanisms.

If philanthropy can move millions through donor-advised funds, private foundations, intermediaries, and complex financial structures, it can certainly figure out how to support an incarcerated innovator with a curriculum and a classroom.

The impact is immediate and undeniable. Units led by strong, trusted incarcerated facilitators are safer. Officers report fewer fights. Participants develop emotional regulation and conflict mediation skills. Programs, including those created by groups like UBSFS, make the entire institution more stable, humane, and functional.

And the dividends continue after release. The men and women who lead programs inside often come home with a sense of purpose, discipline, and clarity that many people never develop on the outside. They become violence interrupters, nonprofit founders, policy leaders, and private-sector entrepreneurs. My own success in business, in real estate, and in consulting is a natural extension of the work I started inside. But I had to bootstrap everything. Philanthropy did not help me innovate. I built my own runway and took flight anyway.

Imagine if philanthropy embraced the same courage it demands from its grantees.

Foundations often ask organizations to dream bigger, take risks, be bold. They want justice nonprofits to push for systemic change, challenge entrenched power, and advance ideas that seem impossible, the same way people treated our push to close Rikers Island. But philanthropy rarely takes those risks itself. It chooses safety over innovation, bureaucracy over courage, incrementalism over imagination.

If philanthropy wants to avoid stagnation, the kind that produces glossy reports but not real change, it must fund places where transformation is already happening. It must trust its own rhetoric about proximity. It must acknowledge that the leaders who will reshape this field are already working inside prisons, right now, without grants, without fellowships, without recognition, without support. 

This is not charity. This is not symbolic. This is strategic investment in the future of the movement.

For all its talk of equity, philanthropy has created a hierarchy of whose lived experience is fundable. Formerly incarcerated? Maybe. System-impacted? Sure. Currently incarcerated? Off-limits. This is a moral failure wrapped in administrative language. The people most harmed by mass incarceration, overwhelmingly Black, Brown, and poor, are denied access to resources meant to transform that very system. If that is not structural inequality, what is?

Prisons, for all their brutality, are thinking institutions. Not by design, but by necessity. When all you have is time, you read. You write. You reflect. You mentor. You imagine. Some of America’s greatest organizers, strategists, teachers, and innovators discovered their purpose in a prison law library or a makeshift classroom in a cellblock.

Philanthropy loves to talk about “garage startups,” but in the justice space, the most groundbreaking innovations did not come from Stanford. They came from men and women in khakis holding notebooks in dayrooms.

If philanthropy wants to be on the right side of history, not in memoirs, not in speeches, but in real outcomes, the next frontier is clear: invest in the leaders doing the work long before anyone is watching. Invest in the thinkers society has thrown away. Invest in the innovators who have transformed themselves and everyone around them. Invest in the place where real change actually starts: inside the prison walls.

The movement cannot afford philanthropic timidity. It needs philanthropic courage. Courage that matches the courage it asks of people like me, and the thousands still behind bars whose brilliance remains unfunded.