Nation Topics - Jails and Prisons | The Nation

As a federal district judge in Iowa, I have sentenced a staggering number of low-level drug addicts to long prison terms. This is not justice.

As a movement against punitive segregation in local prisons and jails, a new report by the New York Civil Liberties Union reveals more disturbing details than ever before.

In refusing to block the extradition of terror suspects to the US, the European Court for Human Rights has condoned a brutal regimen of long-term solitary confinement.

Seven years after Katrina, poor people accused of crimes are being denied their right to counsel and left to languish behind bars.

What will Pennsylvania do with prisoners like Sharon Wiggins, who has been locked up for more than forty years for a crime she committed at 17?

How does having too many postage stamps in prison land you alone in a bathroom-sized cell, 23 hours each day for a month?

As states like Mississippi reject solitary confinement, this “blue” state leads the nation in the use of “disciplinary segregation.” Or as prisoners call it: torture.

“Captured in Somalia in 2003, Suleiman Abdallah was one of the ‘disappeared’ prisoners of the ‘war on terror.’ When I finally found him years later, he was a broken man.”

A new database is being called the “Wikipedia of Innocence” for its unprecedented look at wrongful convictions.

Why is a first-world country imprisoning its children for life?