Kenna Barnes is the Senior Director of Advocacy and Programs at Black & Pink National, a prison abolitionist organization. During her time there, she has created programs to support people who have been impacted by the carceral system, especially those who identify as LGBTQ+ and those who have HIV. Barnes has also helped shape Black & Pink’s research work, such as the Advancing Transgender Justice Survey, a collaborative report led by the Vera Institute. They were interviewed by Newsjunkie reporter Morgan Kriesel on April 17, 2026.

“We're in the trenches... It's surveillance, it’s censorship, and it's isolation.”

Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work?

I'm Kenna. I use she/they pronouns. I am the senior director at Black & Pink National. I've been here for five and a half years.

We're in the trenches. Something that I always highlight when talking about Black & Pink is we do so much work—we support folks who are outside of prisons, we also support folks who are inside of prisons, specifically LGBTQ+ folks and folks living with HIV (but really we love all of our community members, no matter how they identify).

When I interviewed Dr. Jennifer Peirce from the Vera Institute, she mentioned that you guys were a big help with the Advancing Transgender Justice Survey, because you have these relationships with LGBTQ+ prisoners who are on the inside. I was wondering if you could go into how you established those relationships and built trust with the community.

It is becoming increasingly more difficult to connect with people inside prisons. We've been around for 20 years and in [2016] we pivoted to do a nonprofit structure, a 501(c)(3), because it was just better for funding. The work that was happening before we turned into a 501(c)(3) was really scrappy, grassroots—like people in prisons sharing contact information. It was really radical, unabashedly who-we-are work.

We have an inside newsletter that goes out. That's how folks were getting in touch. We have 22,000 members in our database right now, which is incredible.

There has been a shift: prisons want people inside to never speak to anyone outside of prisons, or anyone else inside of prisons. They've shifted to digital mailing centers, and they’ve also changed everybody's address. I know exactly where to look on the Department of Corrections website for whatever I'm looking for, and I still get “Return to Sender” mail.

Maintaining connections has gotten increasingly more difficult, and it's something we're really working on.

What are they doing at these mail processing centers?

They're digitizing all the mail that's coming in. They're scanning the mail and putting them into the system (that I'm sure the prison pays millions for) and then it goes on to people's tablets, or people get computer time.

It’s even legal mail. If you're talking to an attorney, the attorney puts their bar number on the letter to be like, “You can't read this, prisons.” So now we're navigating—how are these things being digitized if it's a prisoner’s right for them to have privacy with their lawyer?

It's surveillance, it’s censorship, and it's isolation.

The connection to the outside world—it seems like one of the last avenues for that has now been taken away. That's harrowing news.

And you can't send letters to another person inside prison. A lot of folks have slipped notes to each other for years, but this additional [ban on] external communication is really horrible.

I imagine your 2015 survey of LGBTQ+ prisoners was [delivered to participants through physical mail]. Then the 2024 survey of trans prisoners—was that also physical?

Yep.

Are you working on getting the newsletter through this system now? When did that process start?

Over the last year we have put the newsletter on hold because we were getting so many “Return to Sender”s it wasn't financially reasonable anymore. I think the last time we put it out the cost was about $14,000, because we're sending it to 22,000 people.

We're moving to a digital newsletter structure, and I am in the process of talking to organizations like the Prison Journalism Project on how these large organizations are getting their information inside.

We have the digital copies online. I actually have a copy right here. I get the newsletter in the mail too, so [non-imprisoned] folks can do that.

“In these times we cannot have trans and queer people vulnerable to hackers, or to the government…”

Did you work on the surveys?

Not the 2015 one, but I was a part of figuring out what questions we wanted to ask for the work we did with Vera [in 2024]. We worked on the distribution of it, which, even when we sent it physically, was a really big lift. We also worked with them on really navigating what was important data, what felt aligned, and the overall messaging.

[Collaborators at Vera] said to me in a meeting, “What do you want people to take away from this?” And I said, “I want them to know that people already tell us what they need.” They're already asking for it, and we're not listening.

Just learning that—like we've all been saying trans women should be housed in women's facilities, and [some] trans women in prison were saying, “I don't want that. I like being in men's facilities,” for whatever reason. A lot of the things that came out of it were not what we had [expected]. Even people deep in this work finding things like that out, getting surprised.

I want to ask you about the development of those survey questions, because that was something that Jennifer and Vera couldn't comment on. You said you wanted to make sure you got the “important data.” What is the important data?

I think people identifying themselves. I have been a researcher for years, and something that I learned from Dr. Sofia Jawed-Wessel, who was a wonderful mentor in grad school, was: let people self-describe. Let people tell you who they are, instead of giving them these options.

Like the demographic questions—what aligns, what feels best, and then how do we group those together? If somebody's saying they're genderqueer, do we group that into “Gender Non-conforming?” Do we make that its own group? Navigating some of those things for actual statistical analysis was really important.

Was your approach more open-ended? Did you end up doing your categorical analysis based off of their responses, instead of going in with the categories ready for them to choose from?

Exactly. [Dr. Kelsie Chesnut at Vera] was able to come up with groups that made sense, but also made it possible to analyze the data. We created those groups afterwards.

What was that process of working with Vera? What was the dynamic?

They were really great. They asked for a lot of [Black & Pink’s input]. We operated as experts in the field, and just having that on-the-ground knowledge was something they valued a lot.

Something I've been trying to do with this project is point towards advocacy groups and people who are connected to marginalized communities, especially. Do you have any advice for how to connect with more analysis-focused, or bigger research groups?

That's a really interesting question. My initial response is: they should be finding us. They have more resources. They should be paying us. We shouldn’t have to do that work.

Andrew Aleman, who was our deputy director, worked really closely with Lambda Legal on a report. And then he and I worked with the ACLU National on another report, as field experts, and it was right in that same kind of pocket of time. Those larger institutions get wind of experts in the field, as other folks are working with them.

It's up to us to make sure we're advocating for our names to be in those spaces, for our place to really be known. But it's up to those bigger organizations with resources to actually ask the people who are on the ground.

I also talked with Jennifer about how LGBTQ+ prisoners, especially trans prisoners, are a hard-to-reach population because of safety concerns—being out, even being associated with queer materials can be dangerous. Reporting your identity to prison administration is its own can of worms. Why do LGBTQ+ prisoners want to be included in data projects like yours?

That's where these larger institutions could really benefit from engaging with organizations like ours, who are really integrated into the systems, who are trusted with queer and trans folks. That's part of it, but also being really clear that you're not required to do this. And you are going to be anonymous. As soon as we got the data, we would input it, and then erase all of your identifiers.

I've worked with the Digital Defense Fund on, “What do we do with some of this really sacred information?” We are in the middle of revamping our entire PenPal website, because the software we were using was not secure. In these times we cannot have trans and queer people vulnerable to hackers, or to the government.

“…folks who have lost that [access to data]…, you're gonna have to get closer to the actual people now. Maybe think about why you didn’t before.”

A report from the Williams Institute said that 360 federal datasets have had sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) measurements removed, including things like ICE detention stats, the National Inmate Survey and other prison statistics, and the National Crime Victimization Survey. What does it mean for queer people to be erased from them?

It's a curse and a blessing, in my opinion. [The powers that be] don't have that data. That's the blessing of it. The curse is: we can't show that there's disparities. Then we can't show that certain policies are being used against certain people.

PREA, which is the Prison Rape Elimination Act, sounds really good on paper. It says, “We don't want people inside prisons to experience rape or sexual harm.” But it is consistently used to isolate queer and trans folks, and folks living with HIV because they're “safety hazards.” They don't want them to be raped, and so they put them in administrative segregation, which is different than solitary confinement. Solitary confinement has more parameters.

[If we don’t have the data], then we don't know how PREA is being used. We don't know how many strip searches are happening on queer and trans folks. It's like every policy, in general, but especially in prison—it’s so dependent on how it's being used.

The data that we had added security to the system. If you believed in the system, if you thought it was overall good and working, this data loss is tragic, full stop. If you are critical of the system, it's a little bit more complicated.

I think one potential positive outcome from having federal data shut off is that more groups like yours get to be brought into the fold, where these research centers have to rely on you and on the actual community, and building trust with them.

What scares me is that we are still living under the system that the data was created to help mitigate. My fear at the moment is, “Okay well, we're still living in the box, but now the box is opaque.”

Have you heard anything from your contacts about how attitudes towards queer people, the policy changes, how that has affected people on the inside?

It's bad. I just had a member call me yesterday, she's in Missouri and she was telling me that they're trying to pass this appropriations bill for the Department of Corrections, and they tacked on this tiny little message at the end that says we can't spend any money on gender-affirming care. People are going to pass it, because legislatures—they're not reading everything. And even if they are, they don't care. But she's gonna have to navigate not having hormones after being on them for 15 years. People die [from that]. It is life threatening to have to imagine that. And she's just one person.

A lot of these state entities are taking federal, executive orders and running with them, acting like they have to (and we know they don't). They are institutionalizing these things. A lot of them are just scared because they know that the administration will pull funds if they don't align. It's devastating.

The people who are going through stuff like that, where their care is being cut off, do you see a relationship between that and federal data? How are we going to see the consequences of these policy decisions if we don't have this oversight?

I think that's when you have to make sure you have connections to people inside, or have connections to organizations who have connections to people inside. I think we're going to have to get a lot scrappier, coming right to the source.

And there's absolutely an alignment—they want to erase trans people, trans women in particular, they want to erase their existence, and they don't care what happens. I really think these prison doctors and medical staff have a lot of responsibility that they are not taking. I think they are absolutely complicit in genocide.

The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention issued its third red flag for anti-trans genocide in the US in March. We know that erasure is an integral part of the genocidal process. In some ways, that's the purpose, to erase and destroy entire identities. From the state’s perspective, erasing data on trans people really plays into this. Does the erasure of this data make it easier to disappear these people?

We've seen it with indigenous folks. We've seen it with black folks. You erase somebody's identity, and then you don't have to care. These little things that the government does that people don't even clock as genocide that are—ask any black or indigenous folks, and they will tell you that's exactly what they've done. They track a lot, a lot, a lot, and then they say, “Oh, never mind. You don’t exist.” But they have to track all the data first to know what they're [attacking].

Gathering the data in the first place is step one [of the genocidal process]. That's another point to like, data is not inherently good.

Should the government know that about us? I don't know.

Yeah, I'm kind of there with you. I think centralizing anything gives bad actors the opportunity to come in and take it.

They’ll do it every time.

Anything that is happening outside of prisons that is heinous, they practiced it first inside prison. Knowing what we know about black folks experiencing incarceration—they're taking those tactics and they're moving them to queer and trans folks.

It's really concerning, but it’s also why it's so important for people to collaborate and connect. Because black folks have navigated this for centuries, indigenous folks have navigated this for centuries, and so they have tools that we should all be using, because they have lived, they are still here.

Have you been collaborating with black communities and indigenous communities? Can you speak a little bit about that?

I mean, just the nature of the work [guarantees] we have. A lot of our folks are black, or indigenous, or people of color, because of the rates of incarceration and punishment in those communities. Then you add being queer, trans, or you add living with HIV, and it's like Game Over. So a lot of our work already really coincides.

We work with folks in Tennessee. WeCareTN is the organization. Our executive director is also the executive director there. She's a powerhouse, Jasmine Tasaki. She's a black trans woman leading this organization.

UBUNTU—they are a black-led evaluation organization. We also have a meeting with them today about evaluating our data, our programming through an anti-racist lens, specifically to look at how we're navigating blackness in these systems.

Another thing I've been wanting to highlight with this project is collaboration, especially getting in touch with marginalized communities, as the way forward when the central power abandons you. Something I've noticed, this is definitely a problem in journalism, and I think in academia as well, is this hesitancy to include marginalized voices, even when you are studying them, because it's seen as not objective. Like, “You're biased. You don't have our correct lens and background.” I think there’s this panic and despair over the lack of federal data because it's like, “My objective source is gone.”

What would you say to your median ex-government researcher who has found themselves unable to do the work that they were doing. How would you try to bring them into including more qualitative data, or more voices [other than the “objective” voice].

I would say, “Be more creative, and don't think of yourself as the expert.”

I will never be the expert of the people we serve, because I'm not a black person. I'm not an indigenous person. I'm system impacted—I've gone to court, I've got charges, but I've never been to prison. Why do you think I've never been to prison?

I'm not the expert. So I ask people who are and I say, “Here are the resources, and people to do it.” I say, “Okay, now where do you need me to step in? I set up all this background work. I did the lit review. What do we need to gather for this data?” it’s setting up the structures, and paying them.

But I think that folks who have been in this work, folks who have lost that [access to data], even community organizations and health centers, you're gonna have to get closer to the actual people now. Maybe think about why you didn’t before.

“Ideally, the government would know nothing about anybody's sexual orientation or gender identity.”

Something else that came up while I was talking to Jennifer with Vera is the idea of prisons showing us how our power structure sees its people and sees its responsibility to it, because it is a place where they have total control over their citizens’ lives. I think the way that we're seeing this shake out with trans people is gender affirming care being totally nixed in federal prisons, which is going to result in deaths. There was a trans reporter, Aleksandra Vaca, who called this forced conversion therapy.

You can draw a line from data erasure in prisons, to conversion therapy in prisons. The way that the erasure starts with oversight, leading into not being able to see [what’s happening to people in these areas of total government control], and then leading into them being actively persecuted. I wanted to get your perspective on that line, that relationship.

I think it's worse than conversion therapy, because they generally want those people to live, and I'm just not quite sure that's the goal here.

Prisons are a place where the EPA is not checking into radon poisoning, and all of these things happening in prisons that are directly tied to climate issues. It's a direct tie to the economy—who's funding these prisons?

What I've learned in this job is, anytime there's a large issue, see how it shows up in prison and how the government is dealing with it there, because that's probably what they're going to do [everywhere else].

Where more people are targeted and the punitive systems are kicked into overdrive, we should have been paying attention the whole time, but now we really need to.

We're all a lot closer to being incarcerated than we'd like to think. Unless you are a billionaire, they don't care. People don't like to think about that because people also hate people in prisons. They “deserve to be there.” But statistically, the folks who literally have mental health disorders that make it incredibly difficult for them to be in community—people who are born with, or who are diagnosed as psychopaths or sociopaths (it's about one to two percent of the population) I don’t think that they belong in prison. And the rest of the folks are there because of socio-economic, demographic issues. They don't belong in prison.

Say the system and the data we're using to keep it in check is no longer sustainable, and it crumbles around us. Do you have a hopeful vision of that future?

Ideally, the government would know nothing about anybody's sexual orientation or gender identity. And they would just be like, “I don't know where you belong, but it's not prison.”

The hope is for these institutions to start trusting and believing that the people they are researching, or want to support—they can more directly connect to those folks, and we can build a really strong infrastructure of community.

Abolition is the dream. But, one step at a time. The more people learn about prison, the more I can see on their face, “Woah. This should not be happening.”

“Data has to be purposeful… It's not just ours, it's everyone's.”

What is Black & Pink doing to move towards community, towards this vision of the future?

We have opened up residential housing [in Omaha]. It's for folks who are 19 to 30 years old, who are coming out of the system, who are coming out of foster care, who are impacted by these family surveillance systems or the youth detention centers, and don't really have a place to go.

We're in the process of building out the community center opportunity campus. The community center will be a place where we'll have showers for folks to come drop in, we'll have rec rooms, we'll have an industrial kitchen so folks can come in and do food classes.

We did a clothing drive for the neighborhood. We do food distribution. We get food donated to us by an organization called Whispering Roots. We get the clothes donated to us by folks at Omaha ForUs, and our friends, our family.

We're in a predominantly black neighborhood, and while our focus is queer and trans folks, and folks living with HIV, we're wanting to show the neighborhood that queer and trans folks make your community better. We can't sustain our work without the community buying-in. Integrating that neighborhood feeling is something we've worked really hard to do.

As far as data goes, what kind of role do you think that would have in a community? I think bringing in the social sciences (and physical sciences too) into a more localized and participatory space could have a benefit. But do you guys have plans [to integrate data collection]?

I'm an evaluator and a researcher, so I have been doing evaluation of the program the whole time. Bringing in UBUNTU, who does the evaluation of programming, to really find out what we're missing, what we're needing, and how we can integrate more programs, and more people into the programs.

The data is tied directly to the kind of services that you're hoping to provide. It's not so much studying, gathering information for information sake—it's tied to the mission.

Absolutely. How are we going to implement what people tell us is missing? How are we going to bring that in? Data has to be purposeful. If we're asking people questions, we better do something with it.

When it comes to helping other researchers who are maybe looking to duplicate or base their work off of yours—what is your policy on data releases? Your collection is very purposeful, but can it have a wider purpose outside of the specific context in the community?

Sure. We want people doing this. We want people involved in [our] community. It's not just ours, it's everyone's. We would love for people to know, and be able to do this too.

Are there ways that other research groups, or journalists like us can help out? What do you need from the independent research community?

I would love for people to start figuring out how to talk to people in prison. People need to be those resources. They need to figure it out, because it is so hard. If people are committed to supporting folks in prison, they need to be talking to them.

We're revamping the PenPal website in the next month or two, so that should be up for people to pair with pen pals.

I would love to figure out how to have automatic updates on people's addresses, and figure out how to maintain those things with software. We don't know where people are at, we don't know the new addresses, it's so tedious to find out.