Tag: prison

“When you lay down to go to sleep, you better be prayed up, because there’s no guarantee you’re waking up.”

What does environmental justice look like in a landscape overrun by prisons? Where the incarcerated suffer from unusually polluted surroundings, and prisons are a toxin in their own right?

In an clandestinely written memoir, a jailed Turkish novelist and political dissident remembers the single sentence that changed everything at the moment of his arrest.

There’s food there, and shelter and healthcare. Which is (sadly) more than you can say for a lot of places.

Wrongful convictions are not isolated events. They happen in every state. They happen multiple times a week. Here’s a breakdown of how and why the innocent are locked up in America.

The US prison system is broken. It sucks up billions of dollars each year and destroys lives. Could a Thai princess and an accidental criminal justice reform activist in the Pacific Northwest have the answers?

Nearly a third of all US federal prisons are located within three miles of a Superfund site; 134 are located within one mile.

“About 50 of the 800 women housed at Rosie’s at any one time are being sexually victimized by staff.”

How and when did prisons become one of the New York’s major providers of mental health care — and can we actually call it “care”?

On the lowest paid, but perhaps most rewarding job at The California Medical Facility — a medium-security prison in Vacaville, CA.

The last time she saw her husband, he was being interrogated by Syrian government officials.

For some elderly women in Japan, prison offers companionship and a life free from worry.

When Anthony Ray Hinton was sentenced to death for two murders he didn’t commit, he used his time to create a book club for death row inmates.

What happens when you’re sentenced to life in prison as a teenager, then released 19 years later and sent to a place that’s supposed to feel like home?

The president chose to pardon an extremely bad man before providing aid to Texas.

Reconnecting with her father after his release from prison, Ashley Ford must also bring him into the digital age.

On journeys to Rikers Island in New York City and Robben Island in South Africa, Roohi Choudhry examines issues of incarceration and racism, and envisions a day when the convicted are no longer exiled to penal colonies.

Mitigation specialist Jennifer Wynn investigates the upbringings of defendants on trial — often for their lives — to humanize clients in a bid to convince at least one juror to bypass the death penalty for a life in prison without parole.

In minimum security, the cook-ups took place on empty top bunk beds. Mattresses were removed, and four or five prisoners would gather around the makeshift table with beef sticks, cheese sticks, squeeze cheese, turkey sticks, dried beans, rice, bags of chips, pickles, jalapenos, packs of tuna, and anything else worth wrapping up in a tortilla. […]

Joyce Mitchell, alleged accomplice to two murderers on the loose from Clinton-Dannemora correctional facility in New York, is hardly the only prison employee to ever have allegedly aided—and had sex with—detainees. From Jeffrey Toobin’s “This Is My Jail” in the April 14, 2014 issue of The New Yorker: Many relationships between guards and inmates appear to have […]

Put another way, the supposition on which our mass incarceration is premised—namely, that it materially reduces crime—is, at best, a hunch. Yet the price we pay for acting on this hunch is enormous. This is true in the literal sense: it costs more than $80 billion a year to run our jails and prisons. It […]

Three of these pieces look at what mealtime is like on the inside, from an examination of chow hall food to stories of inmates’ ad-hoc cell-made meals to an in-depth look at a commissary food that’s both dietary supplement and currency for thousands of inmates. A fourth adds a different dimension, revealing how some of the foods on our own tables are the product of prison labor.

In a perverse tribute to human endeavor, solitary confinement began as a reform. Thinkers in Britain, the Netherlands, and the United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries imagined that it might be possible to induce criminals to change from within, especially if they could be kept isolated from one another and from the corruptions of the outside world. The philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s famous design for a Panopticon—a circular prison with a central “inspection house” that allowed authorities to look into any cell at any time—was predicated on the idea that the prisoner under constant surveillance would internalize authority’s gaze, and cease misbehaving.

“You have to carry your truth into reality.”

When Piper optioned her book to Jenji Kohan, the creator of Weeds, a number of people were asked to sign over something called “life rights.” In short: Some version of our lives could be depicted on the show, and we each agreed not to sue its creators if, for example, the character based on one […]

Now that we’ve all had a chance to finish watching Orange is the New Black (who am I kidding — we all binge watched it in a day or two, right?), I thought I’d share four pieces that clarify and critique the way prison is represented on the show. The first two pieces cover season one, for […]

I read far and wide during my ten-year bit. I read all of the longest works of the world, the thousands of pages of Proust and Musil and Joyce and Tolstoy and David Foster Wallace. And I could follow whatever interested me at the time. I acquired a taste for Sir Richard Burton’s 19th century […]

“I place a stack of 18 postcards in front of me and write on each of them a question that has been on my mind since I left Pelican Bay: ‘Do you think prolonged SHU confinement is torture?’ I send them to prisoners across the state and 14 write back, all with the same answer: […]

“In prison Angel thought that it wouldn’t be too hard to find a job once he got out. He believed he had come a long way.”