Once youre in prison, there are plenty of jobs, and, if you dont want — Prison

"That which the world miscalls a jail, A private closet is to me. * * * * * Locks, bars, and solitude together met, Make me no prisoner, but an anchoret."

"What I was to encounter at Greensville defied anything that I’d expected. The pigs had a refined system and license for brutalizing prisoners. I was not to understand the magnitude of the situation until a few days after being there. The pigs had a tier of handpicked proxy prisoners, whom they used to violently suppress those who got out of line. The ringleader – I’ll call him Pumpkin – was a career con with a reputation for butchering other prisoners. He had a trustee job (all trustees were similarly selected). Pumpkin was allowed by the pigs to keep weapons on his person. Part of the mental terror game was that while he was out cleaning (everyone knew he was a pig hit man and stayed armed), the pigs would bring others out around him in handcuffs. ... The next day or so the pigs would put them on the exercise yard together, remove everyone’s handcuffs except the target’s (they’d put five to seven prisoners in each pen), and allow them to mob attack the still handcuffed target. Or if they wanted him butchered, he’d be unhandcuffed and left to contend unarmed against a knife-wielding Pumpkin."

"For critics of the criminal justice system, the arrest and imprisonment rates for blacks and other minorities suggest that the system discriminates against those groups. They argue, for example, that blacks, who make up 12 percent of the national population, could not possibly commit 48 percent of the crime: Yet that is exactly what arrest and imprisonment rates imply about black criminality. Defenders of the system argue that the arrest and imprisonment rates do not lie; the system simply reacts to the prevalence of crime in the black community. As we have noted repeatedly, prior research has not settled this controversy. For every study that finds discrimination in arrests, convictions, sentencing, prison treatment, or parole, another denies it."

"Research on sentence patterns lends support to the contention that the system "values" whites more than it does minorities. For example, Zimring, Eigen, and OMalley (1976) found that black defendants who killed whites received life imprisonment or the death sentence more than twice as often as blacks who killed blacks. Other research has found this relationship for other crimes as well: Defendants receive harsher sentences if the victim is white and lesser sentences if he or she is black. If harsher sentences do indicate that minority status equals lower status in the criminal justice system, that equation may also help explain why minorities serve longer terms, all other things held equal, than white prisoners."

"It took a sleepless week of data crunching, but I eventually tracked down the location of my friends - locked away in the mysterious towers of Prague. At the moment, theyre the unwilling guests of Interpols most renowned prison warden - the Contessa. While still a criminal psychology student, she entered into a whirlwind romance and married a wealthy aristocrat. Sadly, the union was short-lived, as the general "suspiciously" died a few weeks after the ceremony. The widowed Contessa put her education and newly acquired estate to work by opening a criminal rehabilitation center. Her pioneering use of hypnotherapy has produced some good results and subsequently earned her a prominent position within Interpol. My friends are locked up somewhere in the clinic and are slated for the Contessas "good samaritan" brainwashing. If I dont bust them out soon, theyll be working a 9-to-5 job selling shoes and Ill be out 2 best friends!"

"The world’s prison population is estimated at around 11 million with rates of incarceration ranging from 698 per 100,000 population in the United States to as low as 16 per 100,000 in the Central African Republic. In the US, there are approximately 2.2 million people incarcerated, representing an estimated 24% of the world’s proportion of incarcerated individuals. Estimates as of mid-May 2020 in the US demonstrate that state jails hold 1,230,000 individuals, 625,000 are detained in local jails, and 225,000 in federal jails and prisons. Mass incarceration policies have important collateral damage to prisoners, their families and communities. Investing in social capital, community-building practices, public safety strategies, and violence prevention initiatives represent a more cost-effective approach. In communities with steady economic and social breakdown, many groups including African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and white working class without a bachelor’s degree are caught in this web of compound and expanding disadvantage. Worldwide, in most settings, poor urban communities experience the highest rates of both incarceration and recidivism."