Jonathan is a Filter tobacco harm reduction fellow. He’s incarcerated at Washington Corrections Center, where he’s a teacher’s assistant for re-entry workshops. He also works on harm reduction in prison, training peer educators around HIV and hepatitis C, though he no longer uses drugs himself. Jonathan’s writing has been published by the Appeal, Truthout, Jewish Currents and the Seattle Journal of Social Justice. He also writes with Kastalia Medrano.
His Washington State Department of Corrections ID is #716850, and due to a 29-year-old paperwork error his name in Securus is “Jonathon.”
Jonathan’s fellowship is supported by an independently administered tobacco harm reduction scholarship from Knowledge-Action-Change, an organization that has separately provided restricted grants and donations to Filter.
Tobacco harm reduction in the United States, like most other harm reduction, tends to ignore the prison-industrial complex and the…
Harm reduction can always be practiced, regardless of whether you have government approval and specially designed products. I know this…
Washington State is one of only four in the nation to allow what are commonly called conjugal visits. These Extended…
When I first heard the words “tobacco harm reduction,” as recently as 2022, I was a little surprised. What is…
[Part 1 and Part 2 of this story were published earlier in July.] Back in 2004, right before tobacco was…
[Read Part 1 of this story here] When I got off the chain bus at Washington State Penitentiary (Walla Walla)…
When I first entered Washington State Department of Corrections custody in 1995, the currency was still cigarettes. In any cashless…
In the early 1990s, there was a joke people would make about HIV transmission. “AIDS: The gift that keeps on…
In 2013, the City Council of Grants Pass, Oregon, was looking for a solution to homelessness that didn't involve providing…
On March 23, the city of Nashville settled a federal discrimination lawsuit over barring people living with HIV from serving…