Music has been used in American military prisons and on bases to induce sleep deprivation, "prolong capture shock," disorient detainees during interrogations—and also drown out screams. Based on a leaked interrogation log, news reports, and the accounts of soldiers and detainees, here are some of the songs that guards and interrogators chose.
posted on Feb 26, 2008 - View this thread

A visual history of floating prisons shows that using ships at prisons did not end with the infamous prison hulks along the Thames. Today, New York (home to the Prison Ship Martyr's Monument commemorating the most deadly part of the Revolutionary War) uses the impressive Bain, anchored off the Bronx, as a prison barge, while the Australians have the sleek-looking Triton as a mobile prison ship patrolling national waters.
posted on Jan 10, 2008 - View this thread

The US Sentencing Commission has recommended that Federal sentencing guidelines be reduced for crimes involving crack cocaine -- and is now deliberating making the new guidelines retroactive for prisoners already incarcerated. [WaPo] If taken into effect, about 3,800 inmates could be released by this time next year.
posted on Nov 12, 2007 - View this thread

"Puppies Behind Bars" gives cute lil pups to hardened prison inmates, who train them to eventually be guide dogs and police bomb sniffers. The puppies teach the convicts as much, if not more. Being responsible 24/7 for a dog can turn the most hardened criminal's life around. "This is my way of doing something to reparate," says one murderer. Some say it's their first taste of unconditional love. "The strongest guy in here's going to get that lump in his throat," says an inmate. The dogs get weekend furloughs to NYC so they can get used to city streets. No convict who trained a puppy has gone back to prison after being paroled.
posted on Nov 7, 2007 - View this thread

Prisons of the World | Interesting locations, harsh conditions and little known facts, includes images and video.
posted on Jun 15, 2007 - View this thread

The current edition of Words Without Borders features a striking array of current and historical writing by prisoners held in such countries as Albania, Syria, Finland, Spain, and Argentina. previously on mefi
posted on May 21, 2007 - View this thread

Tuol Sleng: 114 photographs taken by the Khmer Rouge at Pol Pot's secret prison, code-named "S-21" in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. When the Vietnamese invaded in 1979, the S-21 prison staff fled, leaving behind thousands of written records and photographs.
posted on Dec 24, 2006 - View this thread

Abu Ghraib revisited? Savaged by dogs, Electrocuted With Cattle Prods, Burned By Toxic Chemicals, Does such barbaric abuse inside U.S. jails explain the horrors that were committed in Iraq? [...] It’s terrible to watch some of the videos and realise that you’re not only seeing torture in action but, in the most extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying. Channel 4-documentary on US prisons. (google video. Disclaimer: nasty stuff)
posted on Dec 10, 2006 - View this thread

Invest in immigrants!!! Business is booming!!!
posted on Jul 22, 2006 - View this thread

CIA Secret Prisons Exposed The disappeared: Are they dead? Are they alive? Ask Congress. Ask the president.
posted on May 11, 2006 - View this thread

Who is 10641?
via via
posted on Nov 15, 2005 - View this thread

The Prison Policy Initiative conducts research and advocacy on incarceration policy. Some interesting data include the proliferation of prisons in the US over the last century, disenfranchisement of potential black voters, global incarceration rates and percentage of US population under control of the criminal justice system.
posted on Jul 27, 2005 - View this thread

U.S. to Seize State Prison Health System The California Prison Health system kills an inmate a week due to neglect or incompetence, so a federal judge put the entire system into receivership. Thing is, that's not that half of it.
posted on Jul 1, 2005 - View this thread

Bob Parson's may have (somewhat) changed his tune when it comes to inhumane treatment of prisoners, but there are still plenty of ways to show your support for the little terrorist resort that could (toture people)
posted on Jun 22, 2005 - View this thread

During the 1990s, both the federal government and many state governments experimented with a new type of prison dedicated to maximum security prisoners, known as a "supermax." Such prisons are formally known as "Administrative Maximum" (ADX) prisons at the federal level, and the only federal ADX is in Florence, Colorado - ADX Florence. On top of confining inmates to their cells for 23 hours a day, such prisons usually feature soundproofed cells, near-total deprivation of human contact, and a routine policy of solitary confinement.

The text is from here, which isn't really related but got me searching for ADX-Florence, and lead me to the HRW site that inspired me to share.
posted on Apr 13, 2005 - View this thread

Torture Inc. Americas Brutal Prisons Savaged by dogs, Electrocuted With Cattle Prods, Burned By Toxic Chemicals, Does such barbaric abuse inside U.S. jails explain the horrors that were committed in Iraq? Warning: tiny, NSFW, embedded Windows Media file.
posted on Apr 4, 2005 - View this thread

Cruel and Unusual - The End Of The Eighth Amendment
It might seem at first that the rules for the treatment of Iraqi prisoners were founded on standards of political legitimacy suited to war or emergencies; based on what Carl Schmitt called the urgency of the ''exception,'' they were meant to remain secret as necessary ''war measures'' and to be exempt from traditional legal ideals and the courts associated with them. But the ominous discretionary powers used to justify this conduct are entirely familiar to those who follow the everyday treatment of prisoners in the United States—not only their treatment by prison guards but their treatment by the courts in sentencing, corrections, and prisoners' rights. The torture memoranda, as unprecedented as they appear in presenting ''legal doctrines . . . that could render specific conduct, otherwise criminal, not unlawful,'' refer to U.S. prison cases in the last 30 years that have turned on the legal meaning of the Eighth Amendment’s language prohibiting ''cruel and unusual punishment.'' What is the history of this phrase? How has it been interpreted? And how has its content been so eviscerated?
posted on Nov 8, 2004 - View this thread

New Behaviour Correction - The North American penal systems are outdated. If we look to the UK, evidence of specific punishment points to a new method of behavior correction. The current NA system seems incredibly unspecific when we punish a host of crimes by sending people to the same cage.
posted on Sep 3, 2004 - View this thread

Save The Children calls on release of Iraqi children from jails. This apparently in response to recent media reports on the abuse of children in Iraqi prisons. And it's not just Save the Children who is concerned, but UNICEF, Amnesty International, and the Red Cross. Infact, Congress has called for a special briefing tomorrow from the Pentagon on "confidential reports" from the Red Cross on prison conditions in Iraq. The Pentagon is closing the briefing to the public, however, and apparently thinks that even Congress shouldn't know the details of how we treat prisoners.
"It's something of a stretch of policy and procedures to give them to the Congress," Rumsfeld spokesman Larry Di Rita said.
posted on Jul 8, 2004 - View this thread

Secret world of US jails The United States government, in conjunction with key allies, is running an 'invisible' network of prisons and detention centres into which thousands of suspects have disappeared without trace since the 'war on terror' began. In the past three years, thousands of alleged militants have been transferred around the world by American, Arab and Far Eastern security services, often in secret operations that by-pass extradition laws. The astonishing traffic has seen many, including British citizens, sent from the West to countries where they can be tortured to extract information. Anything learnt is passed on to the US and, in some cases, reaches British intelligence.
posted on Jun 14, 2004 - View this thread

The Scandal's Growing Stain Time Magazine: "Abuses by U.S. soldiers in Iraq shock the world and roil the Bush Administration. the inside story of what went wrong—and who's to blame"
posted on May 9, 2004 - View this thread

Blunkett charges miscarriage of justice victims ‘food and lodgings’ We locked you up in jail for 25 years and you were innocent all along? That’ll be £80,000 please.
posted on Mar 17, 2004 - View this thread

Prison time requires culinary creativity.
posted on Aug 5, 2003 - View this thread

Department of Justice finds "significant problems" in the detainment of aliens after Sept. 11. Among the findings in the report by Glenn Fine, DoJ Inspector General: The FBI failed to distinguish between aliens arrested on suspicion of terrorist activities and those with no connection to terrorism. Some detainees did not receive notice of why they were being detained for more than a month. Many detainees were held for weeks and months without the FBI taking any action on their cases. Detainees were frequently subject to harsh conditions of confinement and many were not allowed adequate legal consultation. (Full report available here - link via Tom Tomorrow.)
posted on Jun 5, 2003 - View this thread

An imaginative solution to California's school budget crisis.
posted on Jan 24, 2003 - View this thread

Bread and Circuses The Texas Prison Museum as an odd mix of entertainment and education. If someone gives it $100 million will the prison museum unenroll from the Kroger Share Card Program and lose the value of 1% of participants' grocery purchases? A veritable treasure trove of the absurd and frightening. What's your favorite? Mine are the pavers. We could get up a collection for one from Metafilter. Who's with me?
posted on Nov 19, 2002 - View this thread

Guts and Glory. While the rest of south Louisiana recovered from hurricane Lili, we decided to check out a Louisiana tradition. Angola is the nation's largest maximum security prison, it has held many men, including famous, controversial, and their death row boasts a pro wrassler as a guard. The Angola Prison Rodeo is held every Sunday in October. Convict Poker says it all. Check out their newspaper, museum, music and films.
posted on Oct 7, 2002 - View this thread

Study Shows Building Prisons Did Not Prevent Repeat Crimes
(New York Times link--you know the drill)
The rate at which inmates released from state prisons commit new crimes rose from 1983 to 1994, a time when the number of people behind bars doubled, according to a Justice Department study released yesterday.
The report found that 67 percent of inmates released from state prisons in 1994 committed at least one serious new crime within three years. That is 5 percent higher than among inmates released in 1983.
Criminologists generally agree that the prison-building binge of the last 25 years, in which the number of Americans incarcerated quadrupled to almost two million, has helped reduce the crime rate simply by keeping criminals off the streets. There has been more debate about whether longer sentences and the increase in the number of prisoners have also helped to deter people from committing crimes. The new report, some crime experts say, suggests that the answer is no. (More inside)
posted on Jun 2, 2002 - View this thread

Woman prisoner hangs self, then sues prison Suicide note found near body tells her lawyer to sue the prison for not preventing her suicide.
posted on Apr 4, 2002 - View this thread

Qutoes from Correctional Institutions Offered Guide To Islamic Practices PDF format.
posted on Jan 23, 2002 - View this thread

man protests prison construction by burying buses This is one of the more original methods of protest I've seen. The "artist", an excavator by trade who is trying to protest what he sees as an unlawful zoning change that will lower the value of his property, says his inspiration came from Cadillac Ranch. Will his protest be successful? Do you think this was an appropriate way to catch the attention of the local authorities? I, for one, think this was clever.
posted on Jan 17, 2002 - View this thread

AIDS cases in US Prisons are being diagnosed at 5 times the rate of the rest of the population. Prisoners with AIDS face discrimination, abuse and are denied access to health care and medication, on top of all the other abuses prisoners in the US face every day.

From HIV+ Magazine:
"African-American women, incarcerated faster than any other group, also have the highest HIV infection rate among women, both in and out of prison. Women make up a greater percentage of the HIV-positive prison population than men do, an overlooked issue. Yet prisons continue to be built at an alarming rate, although not fast enough to alleviate the miserable conditions of prison overcrowding. In California all federal prisons operate at more than 200 percent capacity."

Thanks California Prison Focus and Act UP NY's for links and info.
posted on Dec 1, 2001 - View this thread

The most detailed account I've yet seen of the prison riot at Qali-i-Jhangi. Double-crossed by Mullah Faizal's skin-saving deal, the Taliban's foreign legion misread the good intentions of their captors, starting a riot in which mysterious CIA operatives Mike and Dave found themselves trapped. Massive airstrikes result in casualties on all sides, leaving small teams of special forces to mop up the remaining rioters. I'd be surprised if a book doesn't come out of this.
posted on Nov 27, 2001 - View this thread

Tiananmen Square and labor protestor gets 11 years. Gets out of jail, complains that prison ruined his health, and gets another 10 years.

"Hi this is America calling, are our flags in yet?"
posted on Sep 21, 2001 - View this thread

Court rules U.S. broke rights laws The world court has ruled the U.S. ignored the international legal rights of two German-born brothers who were executed for murder. More excecution controversy.
posted on Jun 29, 2001 - View this thread

A new Museum for the tourist What a fun place to take the family for a picnic and day out. See how the other half lived. A tri[p down memory lane for film buffs and those interested in criminal history.
posted on May 3, 2001 - View this thread

According to the exponential math of a Brown University study , if the prison population were to continue growing at the current rate, by 2053 the United States would actually have more people in prison than out. Newsweek tackles "Abuse In America: The War on Addiction." Are drug courts a sensible solution, or just another bandaid?
posted on Feb 5, 2001 - View this thread

Unfortunately, he's too white to go to jail...
posted on Jan 24, 2001 - View this thread

Internet Visitation So much for quality time. A New Jersey court "permitted a divorced woman and her daughter to move to California on the basis that the child's father could exercise his 'visitation' rights by staying in touch with his daughter online."
posted on Jan 18, 2001 - View this thread

"Cuba maintains a prison system that is in many respects far more humane than Western propaganda would have the uninformed public believe."
While the New York based Cuban American Democracy Project does not agree with the views expressed by Professor Jill Soffiyah Elijah, the CADP web site lists tons of articles, testimonies and resources about "situation" in Cuba.
posted on Sep 16, 2000 - View this thread

Texas Inmate Gary Graham Executed. I always thought that the Governor of a state had the authority to grant a full or conditional pardon or a reprieve if he or she believed that further investigation (?) was required. According to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, said authority is only available "upon the recommendation of the board." Is this common among the States?
posted on Jun 22, 2000 - View this thread

texas death row inmate severs chaplain's arm with razor: "A Texas death row inmate Friday grabbed the arm of a volunteer chaplain, tied it with a sheet to a toilet and nearly sawed it off with a razor blade. "It was just hanging by some threads," said a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
posted on Jun 10, 2000 - View this thread