Bio

Chandra Bozelko served more than six years at the York Correctional Institution, Connecticut’s only state women’s prison, for non-violent crimes that remain on appeal. While she was incarcerated, she published a book of poetry entitled Up the River: An Anthology (Bleakhouse, 2013).

Chandra was the first inmate to write a regular newspaper column from behind bars which was called “Prison Diaries.” Prison Diaries is now a weekly blog of columns written by Chandra while she was still incarcerated. Prison Diaries was honored by the Webby Awards twice (2016 and 2017) and won first place in the National Society of Newspaper Columnists’ annual contest in 2016.

Chandra has published over 110 columns since her release. Her written commentary has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, USA Today, US News and World Report, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Lily, Forbes, Elle, Ms. Magazine, Quartz, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Wired and newspapers in 26 states.

Chandra has appeared on CNN as an expert commentator and is widely quoted in mainstream media on issues related to incarceration.

She is an expert commentator for the publication The Hill and a member of the Washington Post Talent Network.

In January 2017, Ms. Bozelko was granted a John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Criminal Justice Reporting Fellowship to report on indigent defense under the new presidential administration. She was named a Journalism and Women Symposium Emerging Journalist Fellow in June 2017.

In September 2017, Chandra was named to the junior board of the Women and Prison Association, the country’s oldest organization dedicated to assisting justice-involved women. She was also named a JustLeadership USA – the nation’s leading group of formerly incarcerated individuals – ‘Leading with Conviction’ Fellow for 2018.

Sub-specialties: women in prison, female incarceration rates, access to sanitary supplies by female prisoners, pretrial detention, prison education, prison phone call rates, prison discipline, prison labor, prison journalism, post-carceral social and romantic relationships, negative consequences of involuntary inpatient psychiatric treatment, indigent defense, "unified" corrections systems (ones that house both sentenced and pretrial inmates together) and gender impact studies for incarceration.

Articles, Publications, Appearances