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An undercover officer for the Drug Enforcement Administration ends up in prison when the drug war becomes personal: “‘A lot of people disappear in Mexico,’ he says. ‘They are buried where no one will find them. Some are eaten by tigers and some by sharks. There are also big tanks with acid in them.’ He […]

Jimmy Flynt has had a falling out with his infamous brother Larry, and is now striking out on his own: “Jimmy doesn’t sugarcoat his time with Larry. His brother is narcissistic, a micromanager, and a publicity hound, he says. Does he feel liberated to no longer have to deal with such a difficult personality? He […]

A prisoner in Connecticut who is protesting his conviction by refusing food is now being force-fed. Is it torture? “Staff turned off the video camera typically used to record medical procedures. They strapped Coleman down at ‘four points’ with seatbelt-like ‘therapeutic’ restraints. Edward Blanchette, the internist and prison medical director at the time, pushed a […]

The writer, an idealist, discovers how difficult it is to figure out how to help with human rights issues in North Korea: “Blaine Harden, author of the book about escaped prisoner Shin Dong-hyuk, has said before that North Korea’s diplomats ‘”go nuts” and leave the room’ when the subject of the camps in broached in […]

[Fiction] An Iraqi-born American woman works as an interpreter inside a prison camp: “She opened the door of the trailer, the rising sunlight submerging her. The still air was saturated with extreme humidity, making it feel like Basra, and the temperature was close to thirty-five degrees Celsius. The heat might have been tolerable but not […]

The writer, a former American prisoner in Iran, goes inside America’s prisons and examines the solitary confinement system. He discovers “a recipe for abuse and violation rights”: “As I read the medical literature, I remember the violent fantasies that sometimes seized my mind so fully that not even meditation—with which I luckily had a modicum […]

It is “a national disgrace”: The U.S. prison system, for years, failed to stop rampant sexual abuse from occurring behind bars. Inside the new program to stop it: “The review panel’s most recent report describes the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, a maximum-security state prison in Troy, Virginia. About 1,200 women are confined there, and […]

How filmmaker David Ayer’s early years in South Central Los Angeles has given him a distinct understanding of the LAPD: “‘I was feral,’ he recalls, ‘uncontrollable, did my own thing. Brushes with the law and all that stuff.’ He punctuates this with a gruff laugh. ‘It was a disaster.’ Most everyone who knew Ayer was […]

Adapted from Witchel’s forthcoming memoir All Gone. A daughter adjusts after her mother develops stroke-related dementia: “Mom faced me. ‘I want you to kill me,’ she said solemnly. For decades, she insisted that if she was mentally compromised in any way, her children were to pull the plug. But the situations we’d imagined never included […]