Behind Behind Bars exhibit has art and poetry created by clients of the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia
Sophia Berumen, Multimedia Contributor
• October 6, 2025
On Sept. 13, “Beauty Behind Bars: The Transformative Power of Art in Confinement,” hosted at St. Columba’s Episcopal Church, spotlighted visual art and poetry created by current and formerly incarcerated...
Zoé Orfanos once taught a convicted murderer how to use Google. She was volunteering with Offender and Restoration, a nonprofit in Arlington, Virginia.
Suicide haunts jails across our country. Unfortunately, the Central Detention Facility, DC’s city jail, is no exception.
More than half of all prison and jail inmates in the United States have mental health problems, according to a 2006 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). Another BJS report that year found that suicide caused 32.3 percent of deaths in local jails.
According to the DC Department of Corrections, two suicides were committed from 2009 to 2012 at the Central Detention Facility.
