A University of California San Diego student abandoned in a DEA holding cell for four days, without food or water, settled a lawsuit against the Justice Department on Tuesday for $4.1 million.

Mentally ill people make up 17% of the jail population in Los Angeles. "If you're trying to figure out what makes for a desirable therapeutic environment...'this ain't it.'"

Luxury fashion designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, two men who have almost certainly personally adjusted the breasts of many of your favorite celebrities, were each issued a jail sentence of one year and eight months on Wednesday in Italy, for tax evasion.

Today, the ACLU announced that it is filing a federal lawsuit on behalf of prisoners at the East Mississippi Correctional Facility, a private prison in Meridian, Mississippi. The suit alleges that EMCF is "hyper-violent, grotesquely filthy and dangerous." One example of the jail's dangers: this handwritten letter from an inmate describing his own rape.

Various clerical errors may have led to the early and improper release of hundreds of Colorado prisoners. Judges across the state are reviewing case files sent to them by corrections officials to determine which of those prematurely released inmates need to return to prison.

At age 26, Lindsay Lohan has been taken into police custody a grand total of six times. Assuming this pattern holds for the rest of her life (and that she lives as long as the average American woman), she will have been admitted to jail roughly 19 times by the time she dies at age 81 (in jail).

In February of 1987, deputies were transporting inmate William R. Blake to court in Dewitt, New York, to face drug and robbery charges. Blake grabbed a deputy's gun and shot two officers, killing one. He was apprehended immediately. For the past 25 years, Blake has been in solitary confinement in a prison in upstate New York. He will not leave prison alive.

The USA incarcerates a higher percentage of its citizen than any other nation on earth. (We're #1!) Needless to say, we've accomplished that feat largely on the backs of minorities, particularly black people, who are incarcerated at more than six times the rate of white people. But, as unthinkable as it may have been not long ago, some elements of this trend are actually turning around for the better.

More than two decades of The War on Drugs has proven definitively that locking people in jail is a terrible way to solve the drug problem. It has given us the world's highest incarceration rate—an incarceration problem that is worse than the problems that the mass incarceration was supposed to solve. Now, perhaps, the pendulum has begun to swing back towards sanity.

Well here's a story that is bad from every angle; a multi-faceted diamond of misery.

No need to fret over the recent news that Lindsay Lohan could be headed back to jail very, very soon. It turns out, Lindsay Lohan ain't even mad at jail. Jail makes her a better fake-crier.

To close a prison is a good thing, assuming that the prison is being closed for lack of prisoners to fill it, because prison is a horrific (if sometimes necessary) institution, and the intelligent minimization of the number of our fellow citizens who have to be locked in prison is an intrinsic good. So why are people so opposed to closing down a prison in their own community?

Adrian is a prisoner in an isolation cell in a New York State prison, due to be released in September of 2015. He spends 23 hours per day locked in his cell. The picture above, clipped from a newspaper and festooned with motivational reminders, hangs on his cell wall "to remind him of his dream to work in an office one day."

Should it be legal to pay your friend to do your jail sentence for you? Sure, worked for this guy.

There is a longstanding and serious debate over whether solitary confinement is, in and of itself, torture. Countless prisoners who've experienced it have said that isolation is worse than any form of physical torture. A new Amnesty report on isolation in California's prisons should make any rational person queasy about what we're doing to society's most forgotten people.

Rodney Dwayne Valentine was released on Saturday morning from Rockingham County jail after spending over two months locked up on charges of injury to personal property. Upon release, Valentine asked for a lift to a nearby motel. Everyone in the sheriff's office was like, "No way," so Valentine refused to leave and just sat there, apparently. After a few hours, officers suggested that Valentine take a cab. He still refused to leave.

Earlier this year, I sent letters to every American death row inmate scheduled to be executed in the near future, asking about their life and their thoughts on various issues. Today, we have a second letter from condemned Ohio inmate Brett Hartmann, who is scheduled to be executed on November 13.

Earlier this year, I wrote to every American death row inmate scheduled for execution in the near future. I asked them about their personal history, their lives in prison, and their thoughts on America and its justice system. Today we hear from Abdul Awkal—a man who was scheduled to be executed by the state of Ohio last week, before receiving a last-minute reprieve.

A few weeks ago, I sent letters to every American death row inmate scheduled for execution this year. I asked them about their own survival prospects, their day-to-day lives, and their thoughts on America, its media, and its justice system. Today, a death row inmate replies.

Dharun Ravi, the 20-year-old Rutgers student convicted of bias intimidating and privacy invasion in the Tyler Clementi webcam peep case, has been sentenced to a relatively scant 30-day jail term, The Newark Star-Ledger reports.