Page 3 | Harper's Magazine

Imprisonment

To the Penal Colony

by Masha Gessen,

By Masha Gessen, from Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, out now from Riverhead Books. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, members of the Russian punk-rock…

This Will Be the Last

by Monique Mabelly,Translated by Ryann Liebenthal,

By Monique Mabelly, from an account of the September 9, 1977, execution by guillotine, at Marseille’s Baumettes prison, of Tunisian prisoner Hamida Djandoubi, published in Le Monde last October. Mabelly,…

You Looking at Me?

From recent mental-health evaluations of John Hinckley Jr., included in court documents submitted in April in support of a request by his attorneys to increase the amount of time Hinckley…

Martyrdoms of Light

by Ishmael Randall Weeks,

Oslo Discord

by Anders Behring Breivik,

From a twenty-seven-page letter by Anders Behring Breivik sent last October to corrections officials in Norway. Breivik is currently serving a twenty-one-year sentence in a maximum-security prison near Oslo for…

Locked in the Cabin

by Santi Moix,

Fulsome Prison

by Danny Hembree,

From a letter sent in January to the Gaston Gazette, a North Carolina newspaper, by Danny Hembree, a fifty-year-old death-row inmate at Raleigh’s Central Prison. Hembree was found guilty last…