Prison & Punishment
The Attica Uprising: When Prisoners Took the Prison
In September 1971, 43 people died at Attica — every one killed by state gunfire. The state blamed the prisoners. It was a lie documented before the tear gas cleared.
Prison & Punishment
Prison & Punishment
Angola: The Plantation That Became a Prison
Angola was a slave plantation before it was a prison. Today 73% of its 5700 inmates are Black and 75% will die there — on the same 18000 acres Isaac Franklin assembled in the 1850s.
Prison & Punishment
Eastern State Penitentiary: The Prison That Invented Solitary Confinement
Eastern State opened in 1829 to cure crime through isolation. Dickens called it torture in 1842. The practice it invented now holds 80,000 Americans on any given day.
Prison & Punishment
Sing Sing: New York's Most Famous House of Pain
Sing Sing executed 614 people in its electric chair between 1891 and 1963 — including the Rosenbergs — in a prison built by convicts quarrying their own marble in 1828.
Prison & Punishment
Alcatraz: The Rock That America Built to Hold Its Worst
Alcatraz held Al Capone and Robert Stroud for 29 years at three times the cost of any other federal prison — then closed in 1963 because the economics no longer made sense.