Samuel Wiseman (Tulsa): Innocence After Death. Jeffrey Fagan (Columbia) and Aaron Kupchik (Delaware): Juvenile Incarceration and the Pains of Imprisonment. From NYRB, a review essay on prison rape and the government. To little public outcry, tens of thousands of citizens are being held in horrific conditions in super-harsh, super-maximum security, solitary-confinement prisons. Our packed prisons are starting to disgorge hundreds of mostly African-American men who, over the last few decades, we wrongly convicted of violent crimes — this is what it's like to spend nearly thirty years in prison for something you didn't do. An interview with Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. A review of The Politics of Imprisonment: How the Democratic Process Shapes the Way America Punishes Offenders by Vanessa Barker (and more). Take your mark, get ready, ablate: Three positions against prison. Giant Dutch prisoner: Different prisoners experience punishment differently, so why don't we treat them differently? Good takes a look at America's absurdly high incarceration rate. Stay out of jail clean: The best way to keep drug offenders from returning to prison. Atlas Obscura visits the Eastern State Penitentiary, the world's first "penitentiary", which meant to be humane but drove men insane; and La Isla de los Alcatraces: In all of the 29 years it was in operation, no prisoners ever escaped successfully — or so they claim.
