“With a class of college students and inmates, teaching philosophy in prison is a rowdy, honest and hopeful provocation.”
prisons
Posted inEditor's Pick
Reading Behind Bars, and Beyond Barriers
“Jackie Snow reflects on what working for a books-to-prisons nonprofit has taught her about reading.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Human Cost of Jeff Landry’s Drive to Resume Executions
“Chris Duncan’s death sentence—built on the testimony of two discredited doctors—illustrates just how faulty the system can be.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
In Harm’s Way
“How decades-old decisions to build two California prisons in a dry lakebed and a chaotic climate left 8,000 incarcerated people at risk.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Frank Smith Was Locked Up for Eight Decades. At 98, What Would It Mean to Be Free?
“Likely the longest-serving prisoner in America, he’s been paroled into a Connecticut nursing home. But he’s still not out.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
What Happened to the Women Prisoners at Hickman’s Farms
“During the pandemic, in an unheard-of experiment, incarcerated women in Arizona were moved to a prison camp on a multimillion-dollar private farm, where hazardous, meagerly paid work changed their lives forever.”
Posted inCrime, Highlight, Quotes
Wayne Byerly’s Redemption Through Ratting
“Snitches get stitches” is a horrifying understatement.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Price We Pay for Mass Incarceration
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 […]
Posted inUncategorized
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”: The cell I am standing in is one of eight in a ‘pod,’ a large concrete room with cells along one side and only one exit, which leads […]
Posted inUncategorized
Our growing prison population, and whether there’s a link to the dropping crime rate: The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had […]