MEDIA
Authored
Massachusetts should decriminalize sex work: Moving business out of the shadows will make it safer. Co-written with Chastity Bowick. Commonwealth Magazine, 2022.
We also need to decriminalize sex work to reduce commercial sex trafficking. We should follow the lead of New Zealand, which decriminalized sex work in 2003. Five years later a government report found there was no growth of the sex trade or in sex trafficking. Sex workers in New Zealand report having more legal rights, find it easier to refuse clients, use condoms, and have an improved relationship with law enforcement. As is true for other forms of labor trafficking, enactment and enforcement of labor rights would reduce commercial sex trafficking.
“I’m a survivor of sexual violence while I was incarcerated,” Cox said. “I think that this myth exists that the carceral system is used to eradicate sexual violence and violence in all forms, and that’s not true. We’re merely moving people around.”
Dismantle The Prisons. WGBH. August, 2020.
Troubling Allegation of Brutal Conditions at Mass. Prison. Boston Globe. February, 2020.
Ending Abuse of LGBTQ Prisoners in Mass., Boston Globe, July 2019
The Case for Excluding LGBTQ People from Solitary Confinement. The Scarlet. February 2018
Hope for the Criminal Justice System. The Scarlet. April 2018.
Digitized Theft. The Scarlet. September 2017.
Featured
2023
A Mass. bill would cut prison time for organ donations. An advocate is calling the measure ‘unethical and depraved.’ Boston Magazine, 2023.
"To incentivize the selling of your body parts in exchange for the most precious commodity in the world ... was just so appalling."
2021
A Call for Change as Queerphobia Runs Rampant in the US Prison System. Edge Media, 2021
2020
Corrections commissioner disavows internal memo. Commonwealth Magazine. March, 2020.
“[Guards who have been suspended] are the people least qualified to be handling a public health crisis for incarcerated people,” he said.
Former transgender inmate details prison experience and pushes for change, Boston University News Service, January, 2020
2019
Sex work or sexual abuse? US Representative Pressley, activists debate decriminalizing prostitution. Boston Globe, December 2019.
Pressley’s decision was influenced by meeting with such advocates as Michael Cox, policy director of Black and Pink Boston, a prison abolition group that focuses on people who are LGBTQ or HIV-positive. He impressed upon her that sex work is a matter of survival for many LGBTQ people that even a so-called Equality Model would jeopardize.
“If you take away their source of income, street-based sex work, how are you going to support those women? Those women are now more vulnerable,” he said.
Massachusetts Department of Correction Gives a Lesson in How to Get Around Solitary Confinement Reforms. Solitary Watch. November 2019.
Rep. Pressley Launches A Bold, Progressive Criminal Legal Reform Resolution: The People’s Justice Guarantee. Press Release from Representative Pressley, November 2019.
Former Inmate: Solitary Confinement Used Disproportionately Against LGBTQ Prisoners, WBUR, October 2019.
Within the prison system there are several clear pathways for an LGBT person to end up in solitary confinement…I reported an act of sexual violence and I spent 45 days in solitary confinement. This is both a deterrent to report future acts of violence…and has a chilling effect on all other queer people.
Black and Pink speaks on campus about LGBTQ experience inside prisons. The Daily Free Press, October 2019
“Inside the prisons, [members of the LGBTQ community] are so much more likely to experience violence: physical violence, sexual violence, harassment,” Cox said. “Our experience inside the system is categorically different.”
Rules Would Place ‘gag order’ on committee overseeing solitary confinement in Massachusetts. MassLive, July, 2019.
“What are you all hiding and what is this department so afraid of?” Cox said.
Pride Corporate Donors Giving to Anti-LGBTQ Politicians, Motives? Rainbow Times. August 2019.
2016
Boston based non profit seeks to end solitary confinement in MA prisons and jails, Rainbow Times, July 2016