Prisoners

All Work and No Pay

From interviews conducted with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated laborers by employees of the American Civil Liberties Union and professors and students at the University of Chicago Law School. field labor…

Soul Proprietor

by Daniel Genis,

From Sentence, a memoir, which will be published next month by Viking. The entire time I was in prison, I owned a typewriter, and it was on this typewriter that…

Murder, He Spoke

From publishers’ descriptions of audiobooks recorded by Edmund Kemper for The Blind Project. Kemper was convicted of murdering his grandmother, grandfather, mother, and seven other girls and women between 1964…

Another World Is Possible

by Hari Kunzru,

When I moved to New York City in 2008, my perception of safety (and everything else) was conditioned by a lifetime of American cop shows. Though I’d grown up in…

Daydream Believer

by Carlos Busqued, Translated by Samuel Rutter,

From Magnetized: Conversations with a Serial Killer, a collection of interviews he conducted with convicted murderer Ricardo Melogno, which will be published in June by Catapult. In 1982, at the…

Gruel and Unusual

From complaints filed since 2015 by inmates at the Morgan County jail, in Alabama. The complaints were included in a lawsuit filed last year against Ana Franklin, the county sheriff,…

Silver Linings Daybook

by Arsenii Formakov,

From letters sent by Arsenii Formakov to his family, in Riga. Formakov was a Latvian poet, novelist, and journalist. In 1940, he was arrested for anti-Soviet activities and sentenced to…

Christmas in Prison

by Kenneth E. Hartman, on December 25, 2016

Greeting the holidays in an age of mass incarceration

Trick of the Russian Soul

by Svetlana Aleksievich,

From Secondhand Time, an oral history of post-Soviet Russia compiled by Svetlana Alexievich and published last month by Random House. Alexievich is the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in…

Injustice Delayed

by Rebecca Solnit, on March 4, 2016

"The overall impression I came away with from the court decision was that Jarvis Jay Masters was considered a low-grade person who only deserved a low-grade trial. It’s certainly what he got."

Bird in a Cage

by Rebecca Solnit,

There are two things I think about nearly every time I row out into San Francisco Bay. One is a passage from Shankar Vedantam’s The Hidden Brain, in which he…

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