...visitation rooms of penitentiaries have backdrops where friends and family can get pictures taken of/with the inmate to commemorate the time they spent together. Often, these backgrounds are idyllic landscapes that offer the inmate a moment to emotionally escape their sentence. Emdur’s series is two-fold; It features inmates posing in front of these faux scenes, as well as the rooms that the giant paintings inhabit.

Because jailing individuals is a public cost, it is no surprise that U.S. and state governments have chosen to outsource in response to prison overcrowding. But this study brings up another point. Cutting costs and generating revenue at the expense of people of color is a tradition deeply woven in the fabric of American history.

Racially biased marijuana enforcement...effects extend far beyond the degrading experience of being arrested and jailed. Most serious are the lifelong criminal records produced by a single arrest. Twenty years ago, misdemeanor arrest records were papers stored in dusty file cabinets. Now they are computerized and instantly available for $20 or less from commercial database firms...Employers, landlords, schools, banks and credit card companies rule out applicants on the basis of these now universally available records, which have been aptly described as a “scarlet letter” and a “new Jim Crow.”

There's no question Kwame Kilpatrick broke the law, disgraced his office, and screwed over Detroit. But locking him up for 28 years is a ludicrous solution.

The University of Wisconsin...found that Wisconsin's incarceration rate for black men—13%—was nearly double the country's rate.

"I thought from day one that I would be found not guilty...I believed in justice, and I thought innocence was more powerful than anything else."

whose full name is being withheld to further protect her son's identity, said that after W.B. entered juvenile hall, located in a suburban Martinez, California neighborhood a few hundred feet from parks, a golf course, and several churches, his mental health deteriorated. While in solitary...W.B. was allowed just two thirty-minute breaks outside his cell each day—a practice that flies in the face of a 2006 court order requiring that 40 to 70 percent of a youth's waking hours in custody be spent on constructive activities such as schooling.

An architect's position in the prison-industrial complex becomes...like the engineer who designs the guidance system for missiles. The difference being that an architect inflicts design on the people within a space—even if those people aren't consciously aware of what's happening.

...California’s “worst” are engaging in one of the most radically nonviolent acts of resistance a protestor can employ. They have elected to starve themselves until the state agrees to meet their five core demands—chief among which is a call to end the...practice of indefinite solitary confinement...After repeated attempts to negotiate with the California Department of Corrections to improve the conditions of their confinement (as well as two previous hunger strikes), these men have turned to the only tool they have left, offering their bodies in a dramatic act of corporal dissent.

Reform works.

...In a system designed to be punitive rather than rehabilitative, this sex segregation makes the intended lack of a physical sexual outlet (or the alternative, engaging in gay sex) part of the intended punishment. As if that weren’t enough, “corrections officers and prisons administrators have been known to threaten to expose prisoners to a greater threat of rape in order to evoke good behavior, to punish, or to squeeze out information.” It’s clear that sex and punishment are nearly synonymous in the logic of capitalist mass incarceration.