The most humane prison in the world

Halden prison smells of freshly brewed coffee. It hits you in the workshop areas, lingers in the games rooms and in the communal apartment-style areas where prisoners live together in groups of eight. This much coffee makes you hungry, so a couple of hours after lunch the guards on Unit A (a quiet, separated wing where sex offenders are held for their own protection) bring inmates a tall stack of steaming, heart-shaped waffles and pots of jam, which they set down on a checked tablecloth and eat together, whiling away the afternoon.

Character and its discontents

Yes, that’s what I like about me, at least one of the things, that I can say, Up the Republic!, for example, or, Sweetheart!, for example, without having to wonder whether I should not rather have cut my tongue out, or said something else.

— Samuel Beckett, “Malone Dies”

What is character? Ordinarily, we envision character as a set of stable and unified dispositions: we expect the timid employee to be shy on a regular basis, not just on some days, and we picture him as a mellow father, not as a tyrant at home. Since we suppose that characters are unified in these ways, we are almost invariably surprised when it turns out that the different aspects of someone’s personality stand in tension with one another. It is news to us that Tolstoy’s attitude toward his own illegitimate son was worse than aloof, notwithstanding the humanism and sensitivity of Tolstoy’s writings, or that Richard Nixon was rather a good father and husband despite his mendacity in other contexts.

When people act ‘out of character,’ they may just be revealing their deeper tendencies.

Vegas Machine Gun Range Offers New Way to Let Loose

LAS VEGAS — For Vegas die-hards bored with the $750 tasting menu at Guy Savoy, the $250 Elton John tickets at Caesars or the $200,000 single-hand baccarat bet at the Bellagio, this city is serving up a new way to find high-priced thrills.

Machine Guns Vegas — an upscale, indoor shooting range complete with skimpily dressed, gun-toting hostesses — opened last week a half mile from the Strip, with an armory of weapons and a promise to fulfill the desires of anyone wanting to fire off an Uzi or a vintage Thompson submachine gun. With its provocative mix of violent fantasy (think blowing holes through an Osama bin Laden target with an AK-47) and sexual allure, it is the latest example of how the extravagances and excesses that have defined Las Vegas are moving beyond the gaming table.

The caging of America: why do they lock so many up?

A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.

Racism in Britain and the Stephen Lawrence case

A friend approached me last week with a question that would have seemed cryptic in other circumstances. “What’s the latest?” she asked eagerly. Jury out, I told her. Fingers crossed, she said. She raised them as proof.

Exchanges like this were happening up and down the country, for the Stephen Lawrence case resonates as lived experience. For a time, all young black men were Stephen – all who had felt that icy chill on a dark night, spying a group of boisterous white lads approaching from a distance. Everyone who felt an encounter with the police and the authorities had resulted in unfairness. He was an ordinary teenager with his friend trying to get home; but he was all of us. We have been crossing our fingers these past weeks. And now the trial is over. Dobson and Norris have been found guilty. Catharsis at long last, but what next?

The truth about the crackdown on Occupy

US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.

Time to rethink the war on drugs

The security detail at the presidential offices in Bogotá was understandably heavy. Armed police and the military were much in evidence as President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia hosted the leaders of Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru for a regional economic summit. The security forces outside the Palacio de Nariño in the city centre had extra reason to be on high alert – the summit last Tuesday came only days after Colombian special forces shot and killed Alfonso Cano, leader of the Farc (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrilla group.

Unicef criticises Britain for jailing children over riots

Unicef has criticised the UK judicial system for locking up children allegedly involved in the August riots and warned ministers that they are likely to be in breach of their UN obligations to children’s rights.

Police arrest about 400 protestors on Brooklyn Bridge

In a tense showdown above the East River, the police arrested about 400 demonstrators from the Occupy Wall Street protests who took to the roadway as they tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on Saturday afternoon.

Is the death penalty in line with Catholic doctrine?

September has been execution season in the United States. In the past month, Texas executed two prisoners, Florida and Alabama each sent an inmate to the death chamber, and in Georgia, the controversial lethal injection of Troy Davis went forward despite last-minute consideration of his case by the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices did halt the scheduled executions of two other Texas inmates, and Republican Governor John Kasich commuted the death sentence of an Ohio prisoner.