Browse Topics
Incarceration
Banana Hymn
You were ready to don the handcuffs, leg chains, and orange, ill-fitting jumpsuit required of all prisoners in transit. But you didn’t really want to go to your dad’s funeral. That’s what you’d told the man a few weeks before his bone cancer finally killed him.
October 1993Locked Doors
Chopping a door into slivers; sitting two seats back, one row over to his right; being swept up by an undertow
October 1993A Brutal Sadness
Capital Punishment And The Politics Of Vengeance
Robert Alton Harris was gassed to death at sunrise on April 21, 1992, the first person to be executed by the state of California in twenty-five years. The execution ended fourteen years of legal wrangling over Harris’s fate, capped by four overnight stays of execution.
August 1993Odyssey Of Resistance
An Interview With Daniel Berrigan
Americans don’t generally think of the consequences of war. We have grown calloused souls, with the help of a duplicitous leadership, an inert Congress, a morally cloudy church, and the jingoistic media. Add to this our historically embedded racism and you have a poisonous brew indeed, hardening hearts against thought or concern for the slaughtered innocents of Iraq.
April 1993Inside
The men here carry their personal space like body armor. They have been taught the gospel of toughness since they were young. They think it is necessary for survival to wear your strength on the outside.
February 1992The Prison Experience
The statements accompanying the photographs arose in response to a single question Camhi put to prisoners: “What do you want people to know about the prison experience?”
February 1992Prisons
Listening to the scamper of steps, the same question every fifteen seconds, the laughter of the guards
February 1992Sunbeams
December 1991The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
Lady Con
Even with two thick coverlets over the blankets, her pelvic bone pressed like a wooden hanger against my cheek; I was sure it would leave a red mark. She had been eating for nearly two weeks now. How thin could she have been when she was first released?
September 1991The Necessity To Speak
I see them every day, the wounded women in the supermarket or in the bookstore, the children beaten to a whimper until all life has grayed in them. I’ve learned to recognize Fear’s signature scrawled across their faces, the way one learns to recognize a man who walks with a “prison shuffle.”
February 1991
