As the once-sparkling metropolis of Dubai flounders, it’s worth revisiting Johann Hari’s eerily prescient, deeply disturbing take on the city-state from earlier this year. There are lots of nasty anecdotes contained therein, but none more depressing than the fact that the United Arab Emirates still imprisons debtors, a practice abandoned in the United States during [...]
Entries Tagged as 'prisons'
The Gulag-Free Archipelago
December 1st, 2009 · 4 Comments
Upon being presented with the map above, the first question that pops to most minds is, “Why is the incarceration rate in the United States so absurdly high?” But given our proclivity for the esoteric, we now find ourselves wondering, “Why is the incarceration rate in Indonesia so darn low?”
There is certainly no single, all-encompassing [...]
Tags:crime·Indonesia·law·prisons·witchcraft
Inadvertently on the Angels’ Side
September 15th, 2009 · 2 Comments
Our post about Teddy Roosevelt’s health-care reform attracted a fair number of responses, in particular the ending snippet about the Progressive Party’s opposition to privately contracted prison labor. As one commenter pointed out, this opposition wasn’t borne out of genuine concern over the practice’s moral shortcomings, but rather Big Labor griping over the downward pressure [...]
Tags:C.L.R. James·economics·philosophy·prisons·slavery·Theodore Roosevelt
Oil Non-Shock
August 13th, 2009 · 4 Comments
During out all-too-brief sojourn in St. Cloud, Minnesota, we caught wind of James Leroy Iverson’s release from North Dakota’s Missouri River Correctional Facility, after serving 40 years for a pair of 1969 murders. Iverson was, in fact, North Dakota’s longest-serving inmate, and thus a man unaccustomed to 21st-century living. What has shocked him the most [...]
Tags:economics·energy·fossil fuels·James Leroy Iverson·North Dakota·prisons
Daily Bread
July 29th, 2009 · 3 Comments
Last night’s long subway ride afforded us an opportunity to start reading Ian Frazier’s Siberia travelogue in the latest New Yorker. So far, it’s every bit as astounding as we’d hoped—the long digression about Siberian butter, in particular, made our inner magazine geek nearly burst with glee. What can we say, we’re absolute suckers for [...]
Tags:Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia·Ian Frazier·prisons·Russia·Siberia·Soviet Union·The New Yorker
Shove to Shovel
June 2nd, 2009 · No Comments
We know you’re sick of hearing this excuse, but we’re seriously slammed on the screenplay today; hoping to get a complete rough draft done by end-of-day Friday, so the weekend can be all about Microkhan Jr. So we’re gonna be lazy right this second and just post a great video of yore—the public-access-style promo for [...]
Tags:East Flatbush Project·hip-hop·music·prisons·Sergio Leone
A Yardstick for the Fuzz
May 29th, 2009 · 1 Comment
Several years ago, we read a revealing interview with Wilbert Rideau, former editor of the newspaper at Angola State Prison. He was asked whether harsher sentences, including the death penalty, would deter criminals. Rideau bluntly answered “no”—criminals never think they’re going to get caught. That’s in part because (as noted in the chart above) the [...]
Tags:crime·Germany·Guatemala·Japan·Louisiana·prisons·statistics·Wilbert Rideau
Convict Love Tokens
April 3rd, 2009 · No Comments
In response to yesterday’s post on trench art, one of Microkhan’s treasured Aussie readers turned us on to convict love tokens. These engraved coins were made by English convicts as they awaited deportation to Australia, during the island continent’s 19th-century turn as a massive penal colony. The token to the right was produced by an [...]
The Risks of Prison Wine
March 20th, 2009 · 3 Comments
If you’re looking for proof of mankind’s inveterate need for altered states of consciousness, look no further than pruno. Long created beneath the bunks of prison inmates, and often consisting of such odious ingredients as ketchup and sauerkraut, pruno is notoriously unpalatable, even for the most hardened toughs. According to a participant in a harrowing [...]
Shiv the Destroyer
March 10th, 2009 · No Comments
One of this blog’s core beliefs is that human ingenuity knows no bounds. Today’s Exhibit A: Prison inmates’ MacGyver-like knack for crafting weapons from ordinary objects. This particular set is in the possession of a San Francisco comic-book seller, who got the shivs from a crooked prison guard. Here’s his favorite:
This was made as a [...]
