Through the will and perseverance of the prisoners, prison was transformed into a school, a veritable university offering education in literature, languages, politics, philosophy, history and more. The graduates of this university excelled in various fields. I still remember the words of Bader al-Qawasmah, one of my compatriots who I met in the old Nablus prison in 1984, who said to me, “before prison I was a porter who could neither read nor write. Now, after 14 years in prison, I write in Arabic, I teach Hebrew, and I translate from English.” I remember the words of Saleh Abu Tayi (a Palestinian refugee in Syria who was a political prisoner in Israeli jails for 17 years before being released in the prisoner exchange of 1985) who told me vivid stories of prisoners’ adventures smuggling books, pieces of paper and even the ink-housing tubes of pens.

— Israeli prisons as revolutionary universities [via]

‘I have dodged every conventional bullet that has hit most music retailers,’ Paris says. ‘I don’t have to worry about downloading, legal or illegally. The beauty of it is that prisoners don’t have Internet access and never will.’

— Music Retailer Thrives Serving Captive Audience [via]

Criminals aren’t sent to prison so they can learn to live outside of prison; they’re sent to prison to get what they deserve. And that paves the way for the acceptance of all manners of brutal abuses. It’s not that we condone prison rape per se, but it doesn’t exactly concern us, and occasionally, as in the comments made by Lockyer, we take a perverse satisfaction in its existence.

— There’s nothing funny about prison rape

Are there more black men in college or in jail?
Janks Morton, a new movie director, is willing to bet you got the wrong answer. Although he thinks the very nature of the question is an “abomination,” he wonders: Would that same question be asked so often of any other race in America? The very premise of the question, he said, leads to faulty science. But the question is insidious, like the images that have seeped into the public psyche so deep that many black people themselves don’t get the answer right. …
In 2005, according to the Census Bureau, 864,000 black men were in college. According to Justice Department statistics, 802,000 were in federal and state prisons and jails, Morton said.
Between the ages of 18 and 24, black men in college outnumber those incarcerated by 4 to 1.
Still, the idea that the opposite is true stems from an image that has been perpetuated, Morton said, by the government, the media and the black leadership.

— Filmmaker tries to debunk labels of black men