Joshua Bevill, the founder of The Justice Project, started his 30-year federal sentence at one of the most volatile and violent maximum-security U.S. penitentiaries in the nation, colloquially referred to as “Bloody Beaumont” where he found solace in the law library, his sanctuary amid the extreme violence and chaos. (He was eventually transferred to a minimum-security prison.)
During his time in prison, he immersed himself in every facet of federal sentencing law and developed a knack for pinpointing and articulating deficiencies in prisoners’ cases. He became a great storyteller, adept at unraveling and distilling a case into a story that captures the injustice as well as humanizes the prisoner.
While learning the nuances of federal sentencing law, Joshua quickly spotted an inefficiency in the system: prisoners do not have a right to an attorney during the post-conviction stage.
Now consider that in the federal system each year, it is during the post-conviction stage that there are new precedential legal cases, U.S. Sentencing Guideline amendments, and/or changes made by Congress, changes that can reduce swathes of prisoners' sentences by many years, if not decades. There are also changes of fact, such as terminal illness and family circumstances, that open the door for a compassionate release. (And let's not forget about Clemeny.)
But when there’s a change, the warden doesn’t just open the door for the prisoner and release him. Instead, it requires complex, highly detailed, time-consuming litigation, which is usually vehemently opposed by skilled prosecutors.
Here's the problem. Suppose a prisoner has no money to hire an attorney, which the overwhelming majority do not. In that case, the layman prisoner is left to cobble together a legal brief to litigate in federal court *on his own*. This typically doesn't end well for the prisoner. (Notably, although there is access to free legal labor in many cases, the demand far outstrips the supply.)

"In some cases, for instance, you'll have a new Supreme Court case or even a change made by Congress that gives a prisoner serving decades in prison or even life a viable path to get his sentence reduced dramatically, but you have prisoners who have no idea the change even applies to them.” Bevill points out. "So they languish in prison, despite the change because of ignorance and poverty."

Joshua thinks every well-deserving federal prisoner who has a promising shot at a sentence reduction should have access to free, high-quality legal labor.

He also notes that things change and evolve to improve the system and ameliorate unjust sentences stemming from systemic flaws, so it's tragic for an eligible prisoner to squander a golden opportunity to have his (or her) life restored because he is poor.

Alice Marie Johnson was supposed to die in federal prison, death by imprisonment. It took Kim Kardashian hopping on a private jet to personally visit with Trump in the Oval Office. Point is, it's not easy to undo an unjust sentence. Well-deserving prisoners need help.