It was exactly one year and one day ago that Richard Matt, the big-dicked murderer, may god rest his soul, escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility alongside his friend David Sweat, the murderer whose dick is of indeterminate size, pictured above. According to a scathing report state investigators released to mark the anniversary, Clinton guards made the two men’s escape much easier than it should have been.

Michael Grimm, the former New York congressman who was convicted of felony tax evasion in 2014, is back home on house arrest after a seven-month term in federal prison. The congressman has not ruled out a return to politics, he told NY1 in a recent interview.

Solitary confinement is torture. Confinement in a solitary cell with a cellmate? That my be even worse.

Plenty of people are chewed up and spit out by American prisons all the time. Few of them are chewed up, spit out, bitten into, swirled around, digested, regurgitated, and eaten yet again quite like Candie Hailey has been in the last several years.

Rikers Island is hell. For the latest evidence of this, see the case of Jairo Polanco Munoz, a 24-year-old man who was incarcerated there for just 70 hours before he died in his cell, likely by suicide.

A new report compares Los Angeles County’s Juvenile Hall to a “Third World country prison.”

Candie Hailey did a three-year pretrial stint at Rikers Island before facing a jury on charges of attempted murder last year. She spent more than two thirds of that time in solitary confinement, and attempted suicide eight times. When Hailey finally got her day in court, the jury found her not guilty. “I would say I’ve been through hell and back,” Hailey told the Associated Press. “My soul died but my body is alive.”

Last year, the Federal Communications Commission put in place a new set of rules that make it much more difficult for the providers of prison telephone services to charge the bejeezus out of inmates and their families. How might the providers continue with their scam? One shady, anonymous document may provide an answer.

Anyone serving a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole for a crime they committed as a juvenile has a right to challenge their punishment, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today. The decision will give roughly 1,000 inmates a shot at reducing their terms, according to NBC News.

The latest in the New York Times’s string of coverage of the horrors of life inside New York prisons tells the story of an assault on one inmate by another which was architected by guards who sought to punish the victim. During the attack, the victim screamed for help as a guard watched through a cell door and did nothing, according to the report.

The United States incarcerates a sickening and outrageous number of people. Any idea that could mitigate this crisis is worth listening to. Here’s one.

The state of California issued a report this week on conditions at High Desert State Prison. It is a nightmare.

In the New York State prison system, it’s possible to be thrown into solitary confinement for a nonviolent offense, then kept there for two years straight, 23 hours a day with no days off. That’s exactly what happened to Leroy Peoples, the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit settled this week that will drastically reduce the use of the punishment.

After the shooting death of NYPD Officer Randolph Holder, New York City’s programs focused on providing offenders with alternatives to prison time have come under new scrutiny, the New York Times reports today. Opponents of these programs are welcome to debate against their merits (they’d be wrong about that too), but they cannot claim in good faith that the programs had a single thing to do with Holder’s death.

In June, the escape of two inmates from Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, thrust security issues at the previously little-considered state prison into the spotlight. A New York Times investigation shows that problems at the facility go way beyond the inability to keep prisoners in their cells, and they’ve been going on for years.

If you’re a detainee making a phone call from jail, there’s a good chance your conversation will be recorded in full, logged with your name, and digitally stored in perpetuity—even if you’re talking to your attorney.

Currently, making a 15-minute phone call from jail might cost you or the person you’re calling as much as $17. Those dollars add up: make three calls per week and you’re paying over $2600 per year just to talk to your loved ones. This week, the FCC ruled to put a stop to the price gouging.

In September, an Alabama judge was recorded giving a mandate to the offenders assembled before him, all of whom owed money for fees stemming from their crimes. They could pay up, they could go to jail, or they could give a pint of their blood.

According to court documents filed by New York City Public Advocate Letitia James, the city’s Department of Correction received 116 allegations of sexual abuse at Rikers Island in 2014, but reported only two of those to the NYPD. Of those 116 cases, 61 were allegedly carried out by Rikers staff.

It’s no fun being locked in federal prison, but now prisoners can take heart in the fact that they will be served pork, even though they said they do not want to be served pork.