The Michigan Corrections Organization and Michigan Department of Corrections will post signs this month alerting prison inmates across the state of penalties for anyone threatening to injure prison workers by throwing food, feces or bodily fluids. The endeavor is called the Officer Dignity Initiative, and it warns inmates that the actions warrant a five-year felony sentence.

In our politically fractured age, the problem of mass incarceration is one of the very few issues that brings liberals and conservatives together. The shocking facts of our criminal justice system are surely one reason for this. The U.S. is home to 5% of the world’s population but 25% of its prisoners. Our incarceration rate is 19% higher than Turkmenistan’s, 36% higher than Cuba’s and 57% higher than Russia’s—all repressive regimes. No other liberal democracy has an incarceration rate anything like ours, which is more than 370%...

Alec Kreider, who brutally murdered three members of a Manheim Township family in 2007, killed himself in prison Friday. Kreider, 25, died at SCI Camp Hill, where he was serving three consecutive life sentences for the stabbing deaths of Kevin Haines and Haines' parents, Tom and Lisa. The Cumberland County Coroner’s office said Kreider hanged himself. Kreider, who was 16 at the time of the killings, was found unconscious in his cell early Friday evening, according to a press release from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

As one of the Angola 3, he was in isolation longer than any other American. Then he came home to face his future. By Rachel Aviv.

Edwin Debrow committed murder at age 12. Now 37, he remains behind bars. When should a child criminal be given a second chance? By Skip Hollandsworth.

Drug gangs sparked a prison riot that killed 56 people, with decapitated bodies thrown over prison walls in the bloodiest violence in more than two decades in Brazil's overcrowded penitentiary system, officials said on Monday. Sergio Fontes, the security chief for Amazonas state, told reporters several decapitated bodies were thrown over the wall of the prison in the Amazon city of Manaus, with most of those killed coming from the Sao Paulo-based First Capital Command (PCC) drug gang.

IN SEPTEMBER, AFTER months of organizing via smuggled cellphones and outside go-betweens, prisoners across the country launched a nationwide strike to demand better working conditions at the numerous facilities that employ inmate labor for little or no pay. The strike, which spread to dozens of institutions in 22 states, briefly called attention to a fact about prison labor that is well-understood in America’s penal institutions but scarcely known to the general public...

Every day when Lt. Cmdr. Shay Rosecrans crossed into the military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, she tucked her medical school class ring into her bra, covered the name on her uniform with tape and hid her necklace under her T-shirt, especially if she was wearing a cross. She tried to block out thoughts of her 4-year-old daughter. Dr. Rosecrans, a Navy psychiatrist, had been warned not to speak about her family or display anything personal, clues that might allow a terrorism suspect to identify her.

The Helsinki District Court has handed down a 10-year prison sentence to former Helsinki drug squad chief Jari Aarnio. Aarnio stood accused of a raft of drug-related and official misconduct offences that allegedly took place while he lead the specialised crime unit.

Hull prison is on the brink of riot and has been put on lockdown after CCTV cameras were allegedly torched by 15 inmates who took part in the large-scale disorder at HMP Birmingham, the chair of the Prison Officers’ Association has said. Mike Rolfe said trouble flared after the prisoners arrived at the category B jail from the Midlands.

A quarter of the US prison population, about 364,000 inmates, could have been spared imprisonment without meaningfully threatening public safety or increasing crime, according to a new study. Analyzing offender data on roughly 1.5 million US prisoners, researchers from the Brennan Center for Justice concluded that for one in four, drug treatment, community service, probation or a fine would have been a more effective sentence than incarceration.

“Does an act reflect a person’s character, or is it the product of disease, addiction, exhaustion, desperation or disability? Establishing mens rea, the extent to which a crime is the result of a ‘guilty mind’, is not the test of moral responsibility, but a crucial step towards establishing the threat posed by a person, and the most constructive response to his or her actions.” By Raoul Martinez.

We go inside a prison to tell the stories of the Maori men living their lives "behind the wire".

We got an early peak at the numbers from a new study of brain injuries in an American prison, and they aren’t pretty. By Nick Keppler.

You can imagine how this idea was received 10 years ago, but here’s the pitch: A tenacious British actress teams up with Oscar winner Tim Robbins to bring acting classes to maximum-security prisons. And not just any acting classes, but improv workshops that ask Crips and Bloods and convicted murderers and white supremacists to sit together, wear makeup and masks, and maybe even pretend to be women sometimes. The eight-week intensive is meant to help the incarcerated better handle their emotions.

When Donald Trump won and private prison stocks surged, an unexpected cheer came from downtown Manhattan. It’s a great time to be in the jail business. By Manuel Madrid.

Over 5 million kids in the United States currently have or have had a parent in prison. That works out to about one in 14 American children—a majority of whom are under age 10. Broken down by state, children with incarcerated parents can represent 3 to 13 percent of the population, according to “A Shared Sentence,” a report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The unusually intense stress that these children face has been well documented and studied.

While the UK and much of the world struggles with overcrowded prisons, the Netherlands has the opposite problem. It is actually short of people to lock up. In the past few years 19 prisons have closed down and more are slated for closure next year. How has this happened - and why do some people think it's a problem? The smell of fried onions wafts up the metal staircase, past the cell doors and along the wing. Down in the kitchen inmates are preparing their evening meal. One man, gripping a long serrated blade, is expertly chopping vegetables.

Two prisoners have escaped from HMP Pentonville, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has said. The escape was discovered when prison officers found two mannequins in the prisoners' beds on Monday. One of those who escaped is serving a "very long sentence", the BBC's home affairs correspondent Danny Shaw said.

Ms. Manning says she tried to commit suicide at the start of a week of solitary confinement she was serving as punishment for a previous attempt to end her own life. By Charlie Savage.