Process
Winners
Finalists
News
Submit
REOPENS FALL 2025
Nominate
ALWAYS OPEN
To all winners
Creating Essential Community For Justice-Impacted Youth Serving Supervision Sentences
Portrait of Five Mualimm-ak

Winner

Five Mualimm-ak

Creating Essential Community For Justice-Impacted Youth Serving Supervision Sentences
Portrait of Five Mualimm-ak

Year

2021

Organization

Incarcerated Nation

Sector

Human Rights

Borough

Bronx

Mr. Mualimm-ak, after 12 years incarcerated, leads Youth Anti Prison Project (YAPP), offering safe spaces and support for Bronx youth reentering society.

Having spent 12 years incarcerated, Mr. Mualimm-ak is intimately familiar with the criminal justice system. He knows what it is to land in solitary as punishment for having a pencil (it’s hard to be an artist when drawing tools get classed as weapons…
Read winner story
52%
of people released from NYS prisons are sent directly to shelters
40%
of all jail sentences in NY are for technical parole violations, like missing a curfew

Publication

Prism

Activist Five Mualimm-ak wins NYC’s David Prize for work serving youth in the juvenile justice system

By Tamar Sarai
October 21, 2021
Since Incarcerated Nation Network founder and executive director Five Mualimm-ak returned home from prison in 2012, his mission has been to advocate for formerly and currently incarcerated people and change the system he came…
Headshot of Five Mualimm-ak

Publication

Story Corps

Five Mualimm-ak and Omar Mualimmak

By StoryCorps
July 7, 2017
StoryCorps gives people the chance to sit down together and have a conversation they’ve never had before. Five Mualimm-ak did just that with his son, Omar, who was five years old when his father was first incarcerated…

Publication

The New School

My Art Got Me Through My Time: Portraits from Solitary Confinement

Five Mualimm-ak
October 30, 2019
I have served over 40,000 hours in isolation at the New York City corrections facility on Rikers Island and in State prison facilities in Upstate New York. During my time in solitary confinement, I produced many portraits…
To all winners