My Year Is a Day

Every day, at least fifty thousand men — a full house at Yankee Stadium — wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.)

Read Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker piece about the American prison system and try not to have feelings. And if you just can’t get enough of reading super-depressing stuff about solitary confinement, check this out.