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How a collective of women in ski masks captured the attention of the world—and now face possible prison time for their stand against Putin: “At 9 p.m. on Thursday night, I’m at a rally of a couple of thousand anti-government protesters, hearing Pussy Riot’s name being chanted in the crowd, and I think I have […]

The life of the great English novelist, as documented in a biography by Claire Tomalin: “The great drama—which is to say, the abiding trauma—of Dickens’s childhood was his year-long stint in a rat-infested blacking factory near the Thames, when he was twelve years old, following the arrest of John Dickens for debt in 1824 and […]

Greg Ousley murdered his parents when he was 14, and is now serving a 60-year sentence. A look at the debate over how we should punish minors for committing violent crimes: “Today there are well more than 2,500 juveniles serving time in adult prisons in the United States — enough, in Indiana’s case, to fill […]

How Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, became a global, multibillion-dollar drug trafficking business: “Known as El Chapo for his short, stocky frame, Guzmán is 55, which in narco-years is about 150. He is a quasi-mythical figure in Mexico, the subject of countless ballads, who has outlived enemies and accomplices alike, defying […]

An account of how hundreds of Taliban prisoners escaped from Kandahar’s Sarposa prison in Afghanistan through a tunnel in 2011: “At 5 a.m., hours after Rahim and his cohorts passed directly beneath his office, the warden of Sarposa Prison, General Dastagir Mayar, was awakened. One of his guards stood in the doorway. The entire political […]

With Qaddafi’s former guards now in prison, one man leads the interrogation of his brother’s killer: “Nasser called Marwan’s father and invited him to come see his son. For the last six months, the family stayed away out of fear that the thuwar would take revenge on them all. On the following Friday, eight of […]

Forty years after hijacking a plane and then disappearing, George Wright is found: “On the afternoon of August 19, 1970, a couple of men approached Wright. Their names were Jimmy and Jumbo. Wright was working in the prison laundry at the time. The men said they’d had enough of prison and wanted to do something […]

A killing in Mississippi is the first in the state to lead to a hate-crime conviction. Deryl Dedmon is going to prison for killing a 47-year-old black man, James Anderson, with his truck: “The Dedmon case is shocking for many reasons, but none more disturbing than this belief that a churchgoing white teenager could kill […]

[Not single-page] Brigitte Harris was sexually abused by her father for years, before she decided to stop him from ever doing it to anyone again. She’s now in prison for second degree manslaughter, with a parole hearing this week: “The first thing she learned was that it could be done. ‘Everyone always focuses on Lorena […]

Shin In Geun was born into Camp 14, a prison for political enemies of North Korea. His first memories were of executions, and he had come to hate the parents that gave birth to him knowing that their son would also remain a prisoner: “The guards taught the children they were prisoners because of the […]