One of my favorite subgenres in the dessert case of crime fiction is prison stories, which would be the hidden file in the seven layer cake. To most of us, prison is a hidden world, a mythological place akin to purgatory or hell, a place difficult enough to visit as a tourist, much less live…
Jenji Kohan’s Netflix series Orange Is The New Black is doing amazing things with the Women In Prison genre—creating a deeply moving, and often funny, portrait of life behind bars. But she’s drawing on a film tradition that back decades. That tradition reached its highest point with John Cromwell’s 1950 Caged, the Citizen Kane of…
Texas Runs out of Lethal Injectables? Apparently, it's not a shortage, but an expiration of stock, still, the busiest death row's syringes are empty… There are military death sentences ordered, so why has it been more than 50 years since a military execution? More fascinating Death Row stories, from a man who's interviewed…
The orange wall depicts 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005. Photographic artist Chris Jordan has more to see in his ongoing collection Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait (2006- current). Hat tip: The Strange Attractor See more from Criminal Element's Week Behind Bars
Orange Is The New Blackis to the Women In Prison flick what The Sopranos was to the mobster movie. It uses the form and tropes of the genre as a springboard into serious issues that the genre itself is usually content to avoid. I hope that doesn’t make Orange Is The New Black sound grim.…
Prison food was no picnic, unless you were incarcerated at Alcatraz. James A. Johnston, first warden of The Rock, knew bad food led to bad moods, and bad moods led to riots. So, he made sure the prison population at Alcatraz had three squares a day from a well-conceived menu. They were even permitted to…
