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About HoSQ

Felicia, a woman with short dark hair and a green shirt, is shown in a close-up portrait.
A close-up portrait of a smiling man with a grey beard, wearing a white baseball cap and dark sunglasses, against a bright blue sky.

Our Mission

About HoSQ: Our Inspiring Mission and Storytelling Vision

Learn About HoSQ (Humans of San Quentin). We are a humanitarian non-profit sharing the lives of people inside prison with the outside world. Our mission is to collect real stories shared by incarcerated people in order to bring awareness, foster understanding, and build lasting connections. Our aim is to give voice to the unheard. We aspire to educate and build compassion by sharing the lives of humans living behind bars, collaborating with criminal justice research organizations like the Prison Policy Initiative and connecting readers to our Stories of Life Inside.

Our Work

Our work is a reminder of our shared humanity. Through first-person narrative storytelling, we present personal stories which break down stereotypes and humanize people living behind bars. Employing presently and previously incarcerated people whenever possible, HoSQ engages everyone – both inside and outside of prison – with educational opportunities for growth, healing and creating lasting societal change.

Darryl plays a red five-string bass guitar outdoors in front of a chain-link fence.
A man plays an electric guitar outdoors in front of a microphone, with a saxophonist and a high-security fence in the background.
Eddie Herena, a man with long grey dreadlocks in a blue shirt, studies an open textbook while holding a white pen.

The Power of Story

HoSQ’s first-person storytelling program provides a platform for healing and recovery. For the storyteller, writing becomes a pathway for self-reflection and a way to process painful experiences in their own words. For the reader, these stories offer countless opportunities for compassion, empathy and understanding. HoSQ inspires individual change by challenging attitudes and beliefs, and by building healthy emotional connections which carry over into our larger communities. We are empowered by including the most excluded population into the public conversation.

Our History

In 2017, Diane Kahn, a teacher working inside San Quentin, was inspired by the storytelling project Humans of New York and her passion to share the voice of the men inside. The idea began to take shape with a conversation between Diane and James King, an accomplished incarcerated writer at the time. James suggested that Diane meet with Juan Haines, Senior Editor of the San Quentin News.

Aerial view of Alcatraz Island, a historic federal prison, situated in San Francisco Bay. The island features a large, multi-winged building complex with a central courtyard and a baseball field, surrounded by water and backed by a green, hilly landscape.
A large, multi-winged institutional building complex situated on a grassy hill overlooking a body of water under a clear blue sky.
Three men in San Quentin baseball jerseys sit at a table with papers and pens, looking forward.

From the moment Juan and Diane sat down, they were determined to interview the “humans in blue” and share their stories of life inside with the outside world. We started as a small project in San Quentin and has evolved into a national conversation. Since inception, our digital platform has grown to include voices from over 400 prisons in all 50 states, and has collected more than 4500 handwritten stories from people presently incarcerated.

In May 2022, HoSQ recorded their first collection of stories from outside of the United States at Chiconautla Women’s Prison in Ectapec, Mexico. Since then, we have shared the voices of people currently incarcerated in Guatemala, Colombia, Philippines, and Norway. In the last few years, we have grown to more than sixty team members, interns, and volunteers with one third of the team living behind bars.

A group of nine people, mostly men in blue scrubs and one woman in a red vest, standing in a paved area in front of a building.
Anthony plays basketball at San Quentin State Prison, wearing a Warriors jersey and dribbling the ball while being guarded by another player.

Our local impact in Marin County, which houses San Quentin and our office, is especially tangible: we employ formerly incarcerated individuals who helped to establish HoSQ or who were initially featured on our platform. Our office also hosts a number of local high school and college interns who regularly transcribe, internalize, and empathize with numerous story submissions each day, motivated by the sense of perseverance and purpose imparted on paper by those behind bars.

Our Vision

Our Vision

HoSQ is building the largest platform dedicated to collecting, archiving and sharing first-person stories of people presently and formerly incarcerated.

Read More Stories

Receive more inspiring stories and news from incarcerated people around the world.