Looking for Accountability, Finding Something More

Nicole Tora is a public policy major in the Class of 2027. Nicole is one of our 2026 Human Rights Summer Research Grant winners and a featured guest blogger. Grant winners will be sharing an inside look into their experiences on the Duke Human Rights Blog this summer and fall as part of our Student Stories: Summer Research Series. Read Nicole's first blog post from this summer, Beyond the Letters: Finding Humanity Through Advocacy.

When I started my summer with the Pennsylvania Prison Society (PPS), I thought I had a pretty clear idea of what I was trying to find. My research focused on a simple question: How does the The Pennsylvania Prison Society respond to incarcerated people’s rights concerns, and what does this reveal about prison advocacy as a mechanism of accountability?

At first, I thought that the answer to this question would come from analyzing the organization itself — its policies, advocacy strategies, and prison monitoring work. Instead, I found myself returning to the same place every day: the letters. 

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Every day, incarcerated individuals and their loved ones write to the PPS seeking help with challenges they are facing. Some describe waiting months to receive medical treatment. Others write about difficulties communicating with family, concerns about correctional staff, questions about parole, or uncertainty navigating prison policies. As a helpline intern, my role was to review these letters, help connect people with resources, and ultimately determine the response I felt was most appropriate. What I didn't expect was that these letters would become the foundation of my research.

The more correspondence I read, the more I realized I wasn't just reading individual stories, I was looking at patterns.

One letter described someone not receiving proper treatment for a chronic illness. Then another described the same problem. And then another. One person wrote about the challenges of staying in contact with their family because of the financial obligation. Later that week, someone else described nearly the same challenge. Concerns about health care, communication, financial hardship, and living conditions surfaced repeatedly, regardless of who was writing or where they were incarcerated. Individually, each letter represented a unique experience, but together they revealed that many of these concerns were not isolated incidents but recurring issues affecting incarcerated people across Pennsylvania.

Recognizing these patterns answered part of my research question, but it also led me to another one. I knew what people were asking for. What I still wanted to understand was what prison advocacy actually looked like in practice.

Before this summer, I assumed advocacy was measured by outcomes. Did someone's situation improve? Was the policy changed? Was a problem resolved? While these outcomes certainly matter, my research showed me that advocacy often begins much earlier.

Much of prison advocacy happens long before a problem is ever resolved. When PPS receives a concern, staff first gather and document information. Depending on the situation, someone might receive information or resources, while more serious concerns may require additional investigation or an official visit from the prison monitoring team. PPS may communicate with an incarcerated person's family, correctional staff, facility administrators, or another organization better equipped to provide specialized assistance. I began to see PPS less as an organization that simply "solved" complaints and more as an intermediary between people inside prisons and the institutions that held power over their daily lives.

At the same time, my research made the limitations of advocacy impossible to ignore. As I reviewed cases throughout the summer, I noticed that successful outcomes often depended on factors beyond PPS’s control. Some correctional facilities responded quickly when concerns involved immediate threats to someone's health or safety. Other concerns, like sexual abuse within facilities, remained unresolved despite repeated advocacy efforts. The organization could raise concerns, share information, and communicate directly with prison officials, but it did not require facilities to react. Throughout the summer, we continued to receive similar complaints from other incarcerated individuals.

This was probably the most challenging finding to sit with. If an advocacy organization does everything within its power and an institution still does not act, has accountability actually been achieved?

There is no easy answer. The PPS can document complaints, conduct prison monitoring, communicate with administrators, and advocate on behalf of incarcerated individuals, but it cannot require correctional facilities to take action. Ultimately, that decision remains with the institution itself. At first I saw this primarily as a limitation of advocacy, and in many ways it is. Advocacy cannot substitute for institutional responsibility, and bringing attention to a problem does not guarantee that the problem will be fixed. However, my research made me reconsider what I expected advocacy to accomplish in the first place.

That finding changed how I thought about accountability. I used to think accountability meant holding institutions responsible after something went wrong. However, the work I engaged in throughout the summer made me think about it differently. I came to understand that accountability can also mean making sure concerns are documented, ensuring that someone understands their fundamental rights, or creating a record of issues that otherwise might go unnoticed. And while those actions may not make headlines or immediately transform the prison system, they are often the first step toward any larger change.

When I started this summer, I wanted to know whether prison advocacy could function as a tool of accountability. I expected to find a much clearer answer. Instead, I found that advocacy exists somewhere between recognizing a problem and having the power to fix it. Maybe that tension is the most important finding of all. Prison advocacy can create visibility and opportunities for action, but accountability ultimately requires action from the institutions being asked to change, too. And that leaves me with a question I did not expect to be asking at the end of this research: If advocates can bring a problem to light, who is responsible for making sure something changes once it is seen?

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