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The Prison Break's Lovelorn Tabloid Villain Is No Mere "Shaw-Skank"Sometime on the night of June 5, two convicted murderers popped out of a sewer near Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York and started running. It took three weeks to stop them; the aftermath left one dead, and the other shot and recaptured. Two prison workers who aided that stunning esca...

We Are All Escape Artists: What Night Is Like In PrisonEach of the approximately 3,740 days I spent incarcerated in the prisons of New York State was divided into three shifts. The changeovers were marked by counts; the number of convicts in a prison has to agree with the central office’s official tally. The outgoing crew spends the final moments of its...

A 21st-Century Rip Van Winkle: What Changed In My Decade Behind BarsWhen the New World was two centuries newer, Washington Irving set a fable, "Rip Van Winkle," in the oldest parts of New York State, where the original Dutch settlers' culture still lingered. Life was European then—just set in America. But progress stops for no man. The story's hero evades his naggin...

Spend Your Holiday Season In Prison

If Deadspin gave out Rookie of the Year awards, 2014 might belong to Daniel Genis, who finished a 10-year prison bid in February and has already written several books' worth of raw, incredible, visceral, and profoundly human dispatches about his time inside. There's no better day to revisit the stuf...

The Prison Forger's Christmas Miracle

I learned to love Christmas and see the good in all mankind on Christmas Eve 2006, which I spent in Greenhaven, a maximum-security prison in New York State. Two years of heroin addiction culminating in five convictions for armed robbery had brought me there, and it was already my fourth holiday se...

Drugs, Chess, Books, Or Gambling: How To Fight Boredom In Prison

Leisure time, unstructured and purposeless, generally makes up most of an American prison inmate's day. Most convicts are just sent to the yard, where they socialize, exercise, play games and sports, and make their deals. Entire lives are spent in the incarcerated world, typified by the sexual com...

Violence Is Currency: A Pacifist Ex-Con's Guide To Prison Weaponry

The most common weapon inside is simply a can top. Pulled off a tin of beans and folded over, it doesn't even need to be sharpened to leave a jagged scar. A shank, also known as a shiv, is not for cutting but for stabbing. It's called a "gun" in jailhouse vernacular, and the most valuable kind i...

A Gentleman's Guide To Sex In Prison

When I tell people that I recently finished serving a 10-year prison sentence for armed robbery, mostly in maximum-security facilities, I often feel a question lingering in the air. The moment I sense it, I try to respond to the awkward silence in some offhanded way, though it is hard to be blithe...