Tag Archives: Prisons

2018: memo for labor

memo for labor you cannot separate the job from the house from the rent from the earth from the food from the healthcare from the water from the transit from the war from the schools from the prisons from the … Continue reading

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1897: C.3.3.

When Oscar Wilde’s poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol was published in February, 1898, the author’s name appeared only as “C.3.3.,” which had been the number of Wilde’s tiny room in the prison: block C, landing 3, cell 3. It … Continue reading

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2017: Walt Whitman’s House

Marsden Hartley: Walt Whitman’s House, 328 Mickle Street, Camden, New Jersey (c. 1905) From 2017 Google Streetview: Whitman’s house today—now 328 Dr Martin Luther King Blvd—and the view from its windows, Camden County Jail: We two, how long we were … Continue reading

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2017: Be a Resilient Cooperator

Do human beings act purely out of self-interest? The Prisoners’ Dilemma is a classic puzzle designed to test and explore this question: Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no … Continue reading

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1945: The Book of Alfred Kantor

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day—Yom HaShoah Alfred Kantor was 22 when he was sent to Theresienstadt, the ”model ghetto” 40 miles north of Prague that the Nazis had created for Czech Jews. He was then sent to Auschwitz and, later, … Continue reading

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2002: In the Encyclopedia

Marc Steinmetz: Radio Receiver (2002) “Sometime in the seventies an inmate of Ludwigsburg prison, Germany, built this radio on the sly and hid it inside an encyclopedia.” From a series of photographs of prison escape tools (here).

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1943: Nurse Hamaguchi

Ansel Adams: Nurse Aiko Hamaguchi (1943) From Adams’s photographs of Japanese-American internment at Manzanar (here).

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2012: The Geography of Incarceration

“The United States is the prison capital of the world. This is not news to most people. When discussing the idea of mass incarceration, we often trot out numbers and dates and charts to explain the growth of imprisonment as … Continue reading

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