Kim Kardashian West visited with inmates at the D.C. Jail in July.

DC Department of Corrections

The D.C. Jail got a high profile visitor this week: Kim Kardashian West.

An official with the D.C. Department of Corrections has confirmed rumors that the businesswoman, media personality, socialite, and now criminal-justice reformer visited the city’s jail on Tuesday, though they could not say why she was there.

A picture shared on Instagram by Halim Flowers, an activist who was released this year after serving 22 years in prison, shows Kardashian West standing alongside a federal inmate in the jail. Flowers was part of a team “explaining the atrocity of giving children life sentences in cages to our sister,” he wrote, referring to Kardashian West.

Another city official, speaking on background, says Kardashian West visited the Young Men Emerging unit, and was there as part of a documentary planned for the Oxygen Network about her newfound activism around criminal justice issues. The YME unit is a new initiative within the D.C. Jail that works to rehabilitate 18- to 25-year-old offenders. Writing in June, this is how two founding mentors described it:

Historically, the justice system has arbitrarily set the age of adulthood at 18. Responding to brain science, developmental psychology and research which show that decision-making skills continue to develop well into the 20s, and as part of a growing national movement, the D.C. Department of Corrections created YME to better serve emerging adults.

The YME unit enables mentees to undergo a mental paradigm shift within a safe space.

“She was definitely there as part of our documentary,” which has the working title Kim Kardashian West: The Justice Project, says Rebecca Boswell, a spokeswoman for Oxygen.

“In this compelling 2-hour documentary, Oxygen will capture Kardashian’s efforts to secure freedom for Americans who she believes have been wronged by the justice system,” Oxygen said in a press release in May.

Kardashian West somewhat unexpectedly became one of the nation’s best-known criminal-justice reformers earlier this year when her plea to President Trump for clemency for Alice Marie Johnson—who was convicted in 1996 to life in prison for drug trafficking—led to Johnson’s release in June.

“I am only one of thousands of first-time, nonviolent offenders given mandatory and lengthy prison terms after committing crimes under financial distress,” Johnson wrote on CNN’s website last month. “In 1996, I was given a death sentence without sitting on death row. I was convicted as a first-time, nonviolent drug offender to life behind bars in federal prison. Since I went to prison, the laws governing my wrongdoing have changed. If I were convicted again today for the same crime, my life might look very different.”

More recently, Kardashian West has taken up the cause of rapper A$AP Rocky, who was detained in Sweden in connection with a street fight in May.

Making changes to the criminal justice system has become one of the few issues to attract bipartisan support in Washington in recent years. Late last year, Trump signed into law the First Step Act, which seeks to help former prisoners more effectively re-enter society after completing their sentences. Speaking in April, Trump said he wanted to cut the unemployment rate for those coming out of prison.

According to the D.C. Policy Center, an estimated 67,000 residents have a criminal conviction on their record, and almost 3,000 come home from jail or prison each year. Many of the challenges of re-entry are made worse for D.C. residents because those convicted of felonies are sent to serve out their sentences at federal prisons—many of them thousands of miles away from the city.

City officials have increased their focus on returning citizens in recent years. In February, Mayor Muriel Bowser inaugurated the READY Center, described as a “one-stop shop where formerly incarcerated District residents can access critical post-release services such as housing and employment assistance as well as educational and health care supports and opportunities.”

But Bowser has also been criticized by some for her decision to steer more people accused of gun-related crimes to the federal courts, where they can face stiffer sentences. And the D.C. Jail itself has faced its fair share of problems, from malfunctioning A/C in recent years to accusations that some inmates were not allowed outside for months at a time.

Earlier this year, D.C. Auditor Kathy Patterson said in a report that a whole new D.C. Jail facility is needed. City officials have started exploring the possibility of one, which could cost upwards of $600 million. But earlier this month activists protested outside Bowser’s house, protesting some of her policies and the possibility of a new jail facility.

This story originally appeared on WAMU. It has been updated to reflect the fact that Kardashian met with a federal inmate at the D.C. Jail. 

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