Dear Friend,
I’m Christopher Godshall-Bennett, a staff attorney at Muslim Advocates, and I wanted to share a special project with you that we just launched. This project has been a huge part of my personal journey since I first started at MA as an intern in 2020. Over the past three years, our team submitted open records requests from state prisons across the country, combed through massive datasets, and built a website compiling what we found. Together, we launched an interactive online database called Keeping the Faith: An Index of State Prison Policies on Religion [[link removed]] .
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This first-of-its-kind resource contains policies governing common religious practices in state prisons across the country. Now these disparate policies are all in one place for strategic use by folks advocating on behalf of imprisoned people nationwide. We’ve already heard promising feedback from partners that this resource will be invaluable to their advocacy efforts.
In prison, where coercive state power is at an apex, imprisoned Muslims—especially Black Muslims—have led the charge for increased legal protections in carceral facilities. As part of our communities’ legacy of advocacy to uplift the most marginalized voices, we believe this index can be both an advocacy tool to facilitate challenges to particular denials of religious accommodation and a celebration of the achievements of those jailhouse advocates who kept, and fought for, their faith to achieve the legal victories we rely on today.
We couldn’t do this work without the support of donors like you. YOU make our legal and advocacy work possible.
Support Muslim Advocates! [[link removed]]
We know in these turbulent times, there are so many organizations that you can support. We thank you for your past contributions and hope you will continue to support the urgent legal-advocacy work we do to build a more just world for everyone.
In Solidarity,
Chris Godshall-Bennett
Staff Attorney,
Muslim Advocates

Muslim Advocates
PO Box 66408
Washington, DC 20035
United States
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