Prison System Corruption Media Articles

Excerpts of Key Prison System Corruption Media Articles in Major Media

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When he walked out of prison after 28 years, the first thing Allen Burnett did was drive to the ocean. "I just stood there for a minute," he recalls. "I wanted to feel the air." Sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, he believed he would die behind bars. At California State Prison ... Burnett eventually earned a college degree with magna cum laude honors thanks to a pioneering in-prison education program through Cal State, and he found mentorship with other prisoners. Governor Gavin Newsom commuted his sentence. Today Burnett is the co-founder and executive director of Prism Way, a Los Angeles nonprofit that trains formerly incarcerated people to become peer support specialists. The work draws directly on the peer-counseling culture Burnett experienced during his own incarceration. The mission is clear: turn lived experience into healing. The California Model, inspired in part by Norway's prison system, emphasizes trauma-informed staffing, education and rehabilitation that mirrors life outside. Peer support is a key component. In 2022, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation began training incarcerated people to become peer support specialists. These mentors help fellow inmates cope with trauma and addiction, bridging gaps that formal treatment sometimes cannot. Early results of peer counseling have been promising. In the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown Los Angeles, it coincided with a sharp drop in self-harm.

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With all of his appeals exhausted, Charles "Sonny" Burton had already chosen the last meal he would have before being put to death by nitrogen gas at Alabama's Holman correctional facility. His fate was in the hands of Kay Ivey, Alabama's governor and a staunch supporter of capital punishment who has presided over more than 25 executions – more than any other Alabama governor since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. But on the morning of 10 March, just two days before Sonny was to be put to death, Ivey commuted his sentence to life without parole. No new court ruling or legal evidence had come out, but the governor was forced to respond to an unusually diverse coalition [that] made the case that executing a 75-year-old man who didn't pull the trigger – while the man who did died in prison with a life sentence – was simply wrong. Burton had been on death row since 1992 for the killing of Doug Battle during a robbery at a Talladega AutoZone. Derrick DeBruce, the man who fired the weapon, had his sentence reduced to life without parole in 2014 after winning a federal appeal. That meant that of the six people who took part in the robbery, Burton alone was facing execution. Schulz's clemency petition cited precedents from Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas – states where Republican governors who supported the death penalty had refused to execute inmates who played a lesser role in a killing than a co-defendant who got a lighter sentence.

Note: More than half of all wrongful criminal convictions are caused by government misconduct. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on judicial system corruption and repairing criminal justice.

I learned to garden in Rhode Island's Maximum Security prison, which I entered as an 18-year-old kid. I was serving two consecutive life sentences for a gang-related murder I committed at 17, and I was struggling to fully grasp the possibility that I would die in prison while holding onto hope that I wouldn't. The guys in the crew and I loved that 50- by 20-foot garden, which was fenced off in a corner behind the old gym that was set ablaze decades ago in a riot. At first, it was watering, weeding, trying to figure out how to smuggle strawberries back to the cell block, and learning the science of the soil from a teacher we called Dr. Dirt. Then, the garden became a lifeline for us. When spring came, we could finally see the new life we helped take root. Each sprout was a quiet victory, and each harvest was a reminder that, even in unexpected places, growth was possible. After 23 winters behind bars. I was released under the Youthful Offender Act, which is also known as Mario's Law, because it was inspired by my case. This legislation allows people who received long sentences for crimes they committed as children the opportunity to apply for parole after serving 20 years in prison. Going into prison as a kid was not what I needed. It did not teach me about remorse, accountability, trauma or my potential. I had very little access to programming or education. Prison would have kept me dormant if it weren't for the gardeners in my life who wouldn't leave me in a drought.

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Jayson Murphy lit the speck of paper and inhaled, holding the smoke in his lungs as long as he could. His cellmate, John Jenkins, purchased the drug-soaked paper from another incarcerated man at Lebanon Correctional Institution, a state prison notorious for substance abuse and violence. The next morning, Jenkins set his dirty laundry outside the cell and tapped Murphy's leg. But Murphy, 50, didn't move. "Oh man, my cellie is dead," Jenkins recalled telling a corrections officer. A crime lab detected potent synthetic drugs that incarcerated users call K2 in the partially burnt paper found near Murphy's body. Authorities closed their criminal investigation the moment the coroner ruled the death an overdose, abandoning any effort to determine how the drug entered the prison. Drug-soaked paper, sold in confetti-sized hits, is now the most commonly found drug in Ohio prisons, fueling violence and accounting for more deaths than any other substance. The highly addictive drug is smuggled in by staff and visitors, tossed over fences and dropped in by drones. Wide-ranging and unpredictable side effects include vomiting, twitching, convulsing, aggression and psychosis. Jenkins said nearly all 150 men in his cellblock smoke paper. He described a scene from "The Walking Dead" – men passing out or shuffling around. Murphy was among at least 13 people incarcerated in Ohio who fatally overdosed on K2 in 2024, up from just three the year before.

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By early May 2024, multiple people had accused a teacher of dealing drugs and sexually preying on women at a state prison in Dayton. A hidden camera finally installed in August captured the teacher – who had previously served time for trafficking – passing drugs across his desk, shaking his genitals at students and rubbing up against a woman while dancing in class. One afternoon, he summoned a woman to his empty classroom and took her into his darkened office. The student later alleged that he digitally raped her. Despite video evidence supporting the woman's story, prosecutors declined to charge the teacher, calling it a "he said, she said case," according to an investigative file. Instead, prosecutors charged two incarcerated women with felony drug possession after they told investigators that the teacher, who simply lost his job, was their dealer. Workers suspected of smuggling drugs into Ohio prisons are seldom charged. Many often resign. Some, like the teacher, are fired, but most never face prosecution. Meanwhile ... corrupt staff and vendors are flooding the facilities with drugs. They can deliver larger quantities of drugs each day, hidden inside water bottles, lunch boxes, chip containers and backpacks. "We got inmates that go to prison who were straight arrows and clean, and when they leave prison, they're addicts," said state Rep. Mark Johnson, a ... Republican with two state prisons in his district.

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When incarcerated people face abuse and mistreatment, they can typically file a formal complaint with jail or prison administrators. In federal prisons, the system for resolving these complaints is known as the "Administrative Remedy Program," but it's more commonly referred to as a "grievance system" in state prisons and local jails. Grievance systems are supposed to provide incarcerated people with a way to challenge issues they face behind bars – such as inadequate medical care, harassment by corrections officers, or unsanitary living conditions – and (hopefully) receive some kind of relief. In practice, however, incarcerated people who turn to grievance systems are forced to run a gauntlet of rules and regulations just to be heard, and very rarely succeed. This is especially true when it comes to medical complaints: our analysis of a decade of data from the Data Liberation Project finds that, between 2014 and 2024, a startling 98% of medical grievances were rejected for reasons ranging from the bureaucratic (such as using the wrong size sheet of paper) to the substantive (actually being denied on the merits of the complaint). Less than 1% of medical cases ended in a grant of relief. Conditions are so bad on the inside that since 2000, roughly half of all state prison systems have been court-ordered to improve mental and medical healthcare. In practice ... the grievance system is a black hole, a time-waster, and a deterrent to complaining at all.

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A federal statement announcing Jeffrey Epstein's death has surfaced in newly released Justice Department files but it carries a date that appears to precede the moment he was officially found dead inside his New York prison cell. The document, issued by the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and dated Friday, August 9, 2019, states that Epstein had already been found unresponsive and pronounced dead. But prison records and official accounts show Epstein was not discovered unresponsive until the morning of August 10, 2019. According to official accounts, Epstein was discovered unresponsive in his cell shortly after 6.30am on August 10 by a corrections officer. Medical personnel attempted to revive him, but he was pronounced dead soon afterward. Epstein's death came amid a cascade of failures inside one of the federal government's most secure detention facilities. Prison records show that guards assigned to monitor Epstein did not conduct required checks during the overnight hours before his body was discovered. Scheduled rounds at 3am and 5am were missed, according to official findings. Furthermore, cameras positioned outside Epstein's cell were not functioning properly that night. Investigators later confirmed that at least two surveillance cameras had malfunctioned, leaving critical gaps in visual monitoring. Because of those failures, officials were unable to establish a definitive timeline of Epstein's final moments.

Note: Mark Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein's brother, believes that his death involved an official cover-up. An email thread between high-level federal investigators discusses what appears to be an unnamed individual attempting to extort Mark Epstein. The sender claims: "with the coordination of the director of prison regulations, the cameras were tampered with and some the videos of the prison cameras were cut. At that time, prison guards [redacted] were paid $6,500 so that they would not visit prisoners at this time. Within 15 minutes, a man named [redacted] entered your brother's prison cell and strangled him." For more, internal US Bureau of Prison (BOP) documents suggest a possible cover-up, while a 60 Minutes 2020 investigation uncovered compelling evidence that challenges the official suicide ruling in Epstein's death–including suspicious neck fractures, missing surveillance footage, and a series of unexplained security failures.

America talks about recidivism as if it were a mystery. It isn't. It is a predictable outcome of how we run prisons. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics has tracked what happens after release for decades. In a 10-year follow-up of people released from state prison, about two-thirds were arrested again within three years, and more than eight in ten within 10 years. A newer national analysis still showed roughly six in ten rearrested within three years. That is not just a series of bad individual choices – rather, it is a system producing a revolving door. Other countries have demonstrated a different way to operate secure prisons – one that changes outcomes without weakening accountability or surrendering public control. Over the past year, I have toured facilities and spoken directly with leaders connected to the only nonprofit prison systems operating at scale internationally. They share one defining feature: rehabilitation is treated as a core operational mission, not a secondary program. The question is not government prisons versus private prisons. It is whether correctional systems are designed to reward safety, stability and successful reentry, or whether they default to capacity management and crisis response. Nonprofit operators differ fundamentally from both traditional government bureaucracy and for-profit incarceration. There are no shareholders, no pressure to pay dividends, no incentives to keep beds full. Success is measured by what happens after release.

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One morning in July 2013, tens of thousands of California prisoners made history when they refused to eat. They were participating in a state-wide hunger strike, protesting policies that kept people locked in solitary confinement indefinitely. Hundreds of people in Pelican Bay State Prison, the state's supermax facility near the Oregon state line, had been in isolation for over a decade. After 60 days of refusing food, and along with a concurrent lawsuit, the hunger strikers ultimately won major policy changes from the California corrections department. Among them was an agreement to move most people in long-term solitary back into the general population, giving many a renewed chance at parole. Now, back in the community and over a decade since the protest, these men are working to rebuild their lives, help others inside, and make sense of the trauma they endured. While in the SHU at Pelican Bay, men were alone in their cells for roughly 23 hours a day, with every meal provided through a slot in their door. Many said they never received a phone call, unless a family member died. Visits with loved ones were behind a thick plexiglass window. And any time spent outside their cells to exercise took place in an open-air cement room, with walls so high they couldn't see their surroundings. Such prolonged isolation led to paranoia, anxiety, despair, anger and, eventually, numbness among people in the SHU.

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When a camera records an act of lethal violence against someone in official custody, the state cannot hide what it typically keeps in the dark. That's what happened when correction officers murdered Robert Brooks at Marcy correctional facility in New York. Restrained in handcuffs, Brooks was beaten to death by officers unaware that their own body-worn cameras were documenting every blow. The states that lock up the most people – Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama – are the places where watchdogs keep uncovering horrific conditions, from medical neglect that has killed at least 50 people, to jail systems like Mississippi's where authorities literally cannot say how many people have died. Oversight is sometimes the only thing ensuring a prison sentence does not become a death sentence. There is one way to pierce the opacity of our prison systems. Contraband cellphones, smuggled in by guards and sold to prisoners on the black market, can capture these deplorable conditions in grainy, devastating detail. The brutality we see in many state prisons is a choice. This summer, on a visit to the Maine state prison, I witnessed men use email, Zoom and other digital tools as part of programs instituted by Randall Liberty, the forward-looking Maine corrections commissioner. When prison leadership has nothing to hide, incarcerated people have access to technology that would make it easy to document abuses.

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More than a decade ago, I walked into the Challenger Memorial Youth Center in Los Angeles County to gather data for a lawsuit related to their "failure to provide an adequate education to detained youth." What our team found was much more horrifying: masses of teachers not showing up or late to work, leaving youth in their cells; children in solitary confinement for weeks; sexual assault by probation officers and detention staff; teacher-run fight clubs during class; and more. These abuses continue even today, as exposed earlier this year by sex tapes recorded in a juvenile detention facility in Seattle and videos of gladiator fights between teens in custody in Los Angeles County. The juvenile justice system was originally designed to be supportive and child-centered, but it became increasingly punitive and harsh through the War on Drugs in the 1980s, which resulted in exponentially higher rates of arrests and imprisonment. As a result, children with externalizing symptoms of trauma – abuse, neglect, domestic violence – have been incarcerated without treatment for their behavioral and mental health symptoms. Youth incarceration is extremely harmful to communities, causing worse adult health and functional limits. If we want a healthy society, we need to address trauma through treatment, not incarceration. Punishment provides immediate, visible results, while empowering youth requires patience, understanding and time.

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Jeffrey Collins has watched 14 men draw their final breaths. Over 25 years at the Associated Press, the South Carolina-based journalist has repeatedly served as an observer inside the state's execution chamber, watching from feet away as prison officials kill men who were sentenced to capital punishment. South Carolina has recently kept him unusually busy, with seven back-to-back executions in 14 months. The state revived the death penalty last September after a 13-year pause caused by the decision of pharmaceutical makers to stop selling lethal injection drugs to the state. Officials acquired pentobarbital, a sedative, only after legislators passed a law shielding the identities of suppliers. That secrecy surrounding the execution process means the role of observers has never been more vital. Executions aren't filmed, making journalists' accounts the only impartial record of state-sponsored killings, their words often cited by lawyers and courts. "I don't think executions should be publicly broadcast, but I think they need to be videotaped," [said Collins]. "We don't get to see everything. With lethal injections, there could be problems if the needle isn't put in the vein correctly or the drugs are bad, but we don't get any look into either of those things. With firing squads ... the target could get placed poorly. But when the curtain opens, the target has already been placed, so we don't get to witness that either. The secrecy prevents the entire story from being told."

Note: Wrongful convictions and official misconduct have led to at least 93 innocent defendants being sentenced to death. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption.

In prisons and jails across the US, people are routinely fed unhealthy, tasteless or inedible meals. Many are left hungry and malnourished, with devastating long-term health consequences. The hidden crisis affecting millions of incarcerated people is the subject of Eating Behind Bars, a new book offering a disturbing account of how correctional institutions punish their residents through the food they provide and withhold. The book by Leslie Soble ... describes roaches and rats in prison kitchens, rotten meat and guard dogs who are fed better meals than incarcerated people. It is a compelling, and at times nauseating, indictment of the criminal justice system. Soble manages the Food in Prison Project at Impact Justice, a national non-profit that advocates for reforms and supports incarcerated people. The prison food crisis [is] a public health crisis, with estimates suggesting each year behind bars reduces life expectancy by two years. It's a labor rights issue, as incarcerated people earn pennies per hour running the kitchens, barely enough to buy canteen snacks to supplement their meager diets. And there are environmental ramifications: US correctional facilities create an estimated 300,000 tons of food waste annually as residents reject unpalatable offerings. A typical prison diet is very high in ultra-processed foods, highly refined carbohydrates, sugar and salt, and very low in fresh fruits and vegetables, quality protein, whole grains.

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Every year millions of people cycle through America's prisons and jails. Many of them never make it home. Using information from a federal government database of more than 21,000 deaths, The Marshall Project is now able to show how people are dying in America's prisons and jails. For incarcerated people under the age of 55, just under half of the deaths we could identify were from largely preventable causes – like suicide or drug overdoses. Older incarcerated people tended to die from natural causes. In more than a third of cases, we simply could not determine a cause of death, because there was not enough information. Our analysis is based on data collected by the Justice Department under the Death In Custody Reporting Act, which Congress passed a quarter-century ago with the intention of creating a record of everyone who dies in law enforcement custody. The data contained information like names, dates and brief descriptions of the circumstances surrounding each person who died in prisons, jails and during the course of arrest between Oct. 1, 2019 and Sept. 30, 2023. The government's data is riddled with errors. Not only did we find hundreds of deaths missing from the dataset, but the majority of the descriptions detailing how each person died didn't meet the government's own minimum quality standards. Almost one-in-10 of the deaths in the dataset were suicides – making it the third most common way people of all ages died.

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New York State's Bedford Hills Correctional facility, Illinois' Pontiac Correctional Center and Albion Correctional Facility in New York State are the three U.S. prisons with the highest reported rates of sexual victimization. These are the findings of a new Department of Justice (DOJ) report about sexual victimization in state and federal prisons, as reported by inmates. The Justice Department carried out a National Inmate Survey in 177 federal prisons. The annual survey is required by the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). The survey of 27,541 state and federal inmates found that some 4.1 percent of adult prison inmates reported being sexually victimized in state and federal prisons during the prior 12 months. Furthermore, 2.3 percent of inmates reported sexual victimization by another inmate while 2.2 percent reported sexual victimization by facility staff. Meanwhile, 17 prisons had rates defined as high compared to other facilities. The data pertains to prisons that participated in the survey so the data may not accurately capture those with the highest sexual victimization in America. The prison with the highest proportion of prison inmates reporting sexual victimization was Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a female prison in New York where 18.6 percent of inmates reported sexual victimization. Pontiac Correctional Center, a men's prison in Illinois was second, with 15.9 percent of inmates reporting sexual victimization.

Note: These numbers represent a small number of institutions that voluntarily provided survey data for this study. The actual incidence of sexual violence in correctional facilities may be much higher. To understand how disturbing and common sexual abuse in prison is, read this Human Rights Watch report that documents dozens of first-hand accounts of rape and sexual slavery in prison systems across 34 states. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and sexual abuse scandals.

Roderick Gadson, an Alabama prison guard, was questioned under oath about an incident in which he and other officers used such devastating force against a prisoner that the man had to be airlifted to hospital to treat his injuries. Gadson was shown a photograph of the man, Steven Davis. He was lying in an ICU bed breathing through a tube, his cadaverous face bruised and covered with blood, his eyes black and sunken. Gadson was asked whether he felt that the amount of force used had been appropriate, given the way Davis looked. He replied: "I don't feel like nothing. I just did my job." On 4 October 2019, Gadson and five other officers were called to respond to a security breach inside Donaldson correctional facility. Davis ... was lying prone and unresistant on the ground. Gadson took the lead. One of the witnesses said the officer hit Davis "with his metal stick in the head, picked him up, throwed him down. He stomped the dude with his size 15 boot. The guy's head bounced like a basketball." David died the following day. The cause of death was officially recorded as homicide caused by "blunt force injuries of head sustained in an assault". Despite evidence of a physical assault by Gadson and the other officers, they were all cleared after an internal investigation. Six months later, Gadson was promoted ... to sergeant. Then, in July 2021, he [was] promoted a second time, 21 months after a prisoner in his care had been beaten to death. Now he holds the exalted status of lieutenant.

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My journey into healing began 10 years later when an envelope containing a greeting card slid beneath my cell door at Florida State Prison. Inside was a card embossed with a dove carrying an olive branch–an image that would come to symbolize restorative justice in my life. "I've been thinking about you over the years," it read. I stared at her handwriting, confused. When I wrote back, she revealed, "You killed my daughter and grandson." That sat me down. The impact of what I'd done suddenly became tangible. I wept–for Pat, for Chris, for Agnes. We began exploring the shades and textures of the tragedy that connected us. Our relationship became a living example of restorative justice–pouring our spirits out like wine into each other's hearts. On the morning of our meeting, I walked alone across the compound toward the visiting park. My heart raced as I prepared to meet the woman whose life I had shattered. Inside the visitation booth, I waited, unsure. When Agnes entered–small, strong, radiant–her presence filled the room. We had already done the hard work through years of letters and calls. This meeting was about connection, remembrance, and honoring the restorative justice we'd built. Agnes pressed her palm to mine through the glass. Her eyes met mine. I broke down. "I'm sorry," I cried again and again. "I forgive you," she said softly. "And I love you." That moment–her smile through tears–was the purest expression of restorative justice I have ever witnessed.

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On August 10, 2019, Mark Epstein ... saw a breaking news story on CNN that his older brother, Jeffrey, had supposedly committed suicide while awaiting trial at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhattan. When Mark heard news about Jeffrey's death, he boarded a plane and was the one who identified his body. At first, he thought that his brother had committed suicide, as the FBI and other government agencies claimed. "I had no reason to doubt it [the suicide claim]. He was facing a long time in jail," Mark said. When he hired the renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, he expected Baden to confirm that his brother had committed suicide. However, he said that Dr. Baden instead said he couldn't call it a suicide because it "looked too much like a homicide." Fractures found in the autopsy photos under Jeffrey's neck and jaw were inconsistent with a suicide hanging. Baden said: "Going over a thousand jail hangings, suicides in the New York City state prisons over the past 40-50 years, no one had three fractures [as Epstein did]." Dr. Kristin Roman, the New York City pathologist charged with doing the autopsy, came out of the autopsy, like Dr. Baden, saying that Jeffrey's death looked more like a homicide than a suicide. The initial death certificate said, as cause of death, "pending further study." Dr. Baden and Dr. Roman's assessments did not appear in a June 2023 Department of Justice (DOJ) report.

Note: Internal US Bureau of Prison (BOP) documents suggest a possible cover-up, while a 60 Minutes 2020 investigation uncovered compelling evidence that challenges the official suicide ruling in Jeffrey Epstein's death–including suspicious neck fractures, missing surveillance footage, and a series of unexplained security failures. According to CBS News, nearly two years passed before investigators interviewed the two key corrections officers on duty the night Epstein died. Read our comprehensive Substack investigation covering the connection between Jeffrey Epstein's child sex trafficking ring and intelligence agency sexual blackmail operations.

Compared to other developed nations, the United States is an extreme outlier in the severity of its criminal legal system. Police in the United States kill civilians at between five and forty times the rate of similarly rich countries, for instance, and the United States imprisons people at about seven times the rate of economically comparable countries. The brunt of this aggressive penal regime is borne of course by poor Americans, particularly poor black Americans. Recently, all of the states in the US have begun to impose fees and charges and costs on offenders and their families: people now have to pay for staying in prison as if they're guests in a hotel. Or if they're on probation instead of being sent to jail, they have to pay for the probation supervision, or they have to pay for a urine test. In one police department in Missouri, offenders who have been tasered have to pay $25 toward the cost of using the taser. In this country, particularly in the neoliberal era, the local state simply doesn't have the capacity or resources to invest in communities and provide housing, schools, jobs, income support, health care services, and so on. What it does have is police and jails, and states have prisons. The politics of the day ... mean that it's always going to be much more likely that the police and the punishment are the first resort, rather than long-term investments in communities, work, families, income support, and jobs.

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On Jan. 22, "The Alabama Solution" was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film. Since 2019, roughly 1,380 incarcerated people have died or been killed while in custody of the state. The documentary – which features footage shot on cell phones by several incarcerated men – zooms out to explore why, despite federal inquiry and a lawsuit brought by the U.S. Justice Department, officers are still able to neglect, harm and kill incarcerated people with seeming impunity. Perhaps less familiar are the lengths Alabama officials go in the film to cover up the disorder and state lawmakers' callous disregard for incarcerated lives. Prisons are state institutions ... but it's the only institution that the public and the media have no access to. The men at the center of the film have spent a large share of their incarceration advocating for change from the inside out. They credit their activism to a self-directed course of study organized by prisoners who were active in freedom movements during the civil rights era. In the study groups, the men learned about their constitutional and legal rights. Eventually, they founded the Free Alabama Movement and began rallying family members to push for prison reforms from the outside. In 2016, the federal Justice Department ... began an official investigation. In 2020, the department filed a lawsuit alleging widespread constitutional violations, including rampant violence, homicide and sexual assault. The film explores the impetus for a 2022 work stoppage across all of Alabama's prisons [which] triggered a class-action lawsuit, alongside several labor unions, accusing the state and corporations of practicing modern-day slavery. The Associated Press traced nearly $200 million dollars in sales of agricultural products and livestock over a period of six years to prison labor across the country. The figure is likely an underestimate. Their investigation uncovered a sprawling shadow workforce of the incarcerated that produces goods and services sold by major corporations such as McDonald's and Walmart.

Note: Alabama's incarcerated workers produce $450 million in goods and services every year. The truth about US prisons is usually hidden from the public. If you want an honest look in to the broken system, this is the film to watch to deeply understand the humanitarian crisis and egregious human rights abuses perpetuated by mass incarceration. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on prison system corruption and inspiring articles on prison system reform.

Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.