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Eastern State Penitentiary, c. 1876.

A Brief History of Solitary Confinement

Dickens, Tocqueville, and the U.N. all agree about this American invention: It’s torture.
by Jean Casella, James Ridgeway via Longreads on February 2, 2016

Historians and the Carceral State

Examining histories of mass incarceration and views on teaching histories of the carceral state.
via Process: A Blog for American History on June 18, 2015
Prisoners hoeing a field at Cummins Prison Farm in Arkansas, 1972.

Prison Plantations

One man’s archive of a vanished culture.
by Maurice Chammah via The Marshall Project on May 1, 2015

The Caging of America

Why do we lock up so many people?
by Adam Gopnik via The New Yorker on January 30, 2012
Six-panel illustration of debtors' prisons.

I.O.U.

What replaced imprisonment for debt was something that has become a mainstay of American life: bankruptcy.
by Jill Lepore via The New Yorker on April 6, 2009
Attica after state police stormed the prison, 1971.

How Should We Remember Attica?

Orisanmi Burton’s "Tip of the Spear" uncovers the obscured and radical demands of the inmates who staged the 1971 prison uprising—a world without prisons.
by Charlotte Rosen via The Nation on May 26, 2025
Oil painting of Margaret Fuller by Thomas Hicks, 1848 (National Portrait Gallery) and frontispiece from first edition of Woman in the Nineteenth Century.

The Mind and Heart of Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller was a polymathic intellect and writer, simultaneously ahead of her time and deeply enmeshed in the social and political fabric of her era.
by Megan Marshall, Brigitte Bailey, Noelle A. Baker via Library of America on February 27, 2025
A hallway inside of an old prison with wooden cell doors and brick walls.

The Supreme Court Is Using History to Disenfranchise Unhoused People

The court’s ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson involves highly selective readings of the historiography and a willful misrepresentation of history.
by Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan via The Panorama on September 17, 2024
Anti-death penalty protesters standing outside the Supreme Court.

The Hollowing of the Eighth Amendment

The Supreme Court’s Republican majority has been quietly rolling back a longstanding consensus over cruel and unusual punishment.
by Duncan Hosie via New York Review of Books on June 18, 2024
A group of black prisoners, shoveling.

Race, Prison, and the Thirteenth Amendment

Critiques of the Thirteenth Amendment have roots in a long history of activists who understood the imprisonment of Black people as a type of slavery.
by Daryl Michael Scott, Livia Gershon via JSTOR Daily on September 21, 2023
Johnny Cash.

Far From Folsom Prison: More to Music Inside

Johnny Cash wasn't the only superstar to play in prisons. Music, initially allowed as worship, came to be seen as a rockin' tool of rehabilitation.
by Morgan Godvin via JSTOR Daily on November 29, 2022
Portrait of Alexis de Tocqueville

‘A Great Democratic Revolution’

Alexis de Tocqueville left France to study the American prison system and returned with the material that would become “Democracy in America.”
by Lynn A. Hunt via New York Review of Books on November 17, 2022
Sillhouettes of incarcerated men preparing for a graduation ceremony.
partner

Educational Aid for Prisoners Works. Yet It’s Politically Precarious.

Why all Americans benefit from higher education for those incarcerated.
by Kate L. Flach, Adrian Cox via Made By History on August 23, 2022
Photograph of Hugh Ryan.

Liberating the Archives: Hugh Ryan’s “Women’s House of Detention”

An interview on the queer history of a forgotten prison.
by Hugh Ryan, Eric Newman via Los Angeles Review of Books on August 16, 2022
Illustration of T. Thomas Fortune

Abolition Democracy’s Forgotten Founder

While W. E. B. Du Bois praised an expanding penitentiary system, T. Thomas Fortune called for investment in education and a multiracial, working-class movement.
by Robin D. G. Kelley via Boston Review on April 19, 2022
Illustration of Nation of Islam members holding hands with Muslims from the Middle East over globe.

The Nation of Islam's Role in U.S. Prisons

The Nation of Islam is controversial. Its practical purposes for incarcerated people transcend both politics and religion.
by Olivia Heffernan via JSTOR Daily on March 22, 2022
Photograph of prison warden T. M. Osborne and two other men in a penitentiary hallway.

Were Early American Prisons Similar to Today's?

A correctional officer’s history of 19th century prisons and modern-day parallels. From Sing Sing to suicide watch, torture treads a fine line.
by Charles Neal via JSTOR Daily on January 19, 2022
Johnny Cash visiting his childhood home in Dyess, Arkansas.

Down in Dyess

Johnny Cash's life in a collectivist colony during the Great Depression.
by Ben Nadler via Contingent on May 19, 2021
Mug shot of 18-year-old Lucille Crouse.

Kansas Locked Up More Than 5,000 Women and Girls for Having STDs

“The law itself was very, very broad.”
by Aaron Barnhart via Timeline on March 1, 2018

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