prisons

How three novelists depict the reality of incarceration

The new criminal justice law is modest. But it may signal a shifting narrative.

Is private management more efficient? Is it wrong to profit from punishment? Is the whole idea immoral in concept?

Hundreds of people awaiting deportation hearings would have been incarcerated in Elkhart County, Indiana.

John Pfaff's Locked In adds to what we've learned from Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow.

Legislative action may be slow, but a new consensus is emerging: massive incarceration is unsustainable, both morally and financially.

To Robert Ferguson, Calvinist roots lead European-Americans to see all punishments meted out to humans as righteous. Yet ultimate blame for our prisons is our own.

When I was a newly ordained pastor, I heard a speech by a federal judge. The judge said that he kept in contact with every person he sentenced to prison. His rationale was simple: he didn’t want his only impact on an individual to be the act of denying his or her freedom. Though as a pastor I visited hospitals almost daily, I had never been inside a jail. Within a few weeks of hearing that judge’s challenge, I made my first visit to the county jail.