Prisoners

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…

The Ultimate Terrorist Factory

By Scott Sayare,

Are French prisons incubating extremism?

From a class-action lawsuit filed in February against the city of Ferguson, Missouri, for excessively fining and imprisoning residents for minor infractions. In March, the Department of Justice concluded that…

Dire Straights

From questions asked by deputies of the L.A. County Men’s Jail to determine whether an inmate should be placed in a unit created to house and protect gay and transgender…

Life After Guantánamo

By Pardiss Kebriaei,

A father and son’s story

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