3,576 articles
Prison
Prison: a state facility confining people after arrest or by court sentence. Covers penitentiary history, the Auburn and Pennsylvania systems, ~11.5 million people imprisoned worldwide, overcrowding, classification, rehabilitation evidence, and the Nelson Mandela Rules.
Prison abolition
Prison abolition is a movement and theory seeking to eliminate prisons and the prison-industrial complex, traced to Attica 1971 and figures like Angela Davis, Kropotkin, and Mathiesen, advocating gradual decarceration through alternatives.
Prison cell
Prison cell: the locked room that is the basic unit of confinement. Covers CPT minimums (6 m² single, 4 m² shared), the ECtHR 3 m² threshold, Mandela Rules fixtures, certified versus crowded occupancy, and documented overcrowding.
Prison escape
Prison escape: unlawful departure from lawful custody, a separate criminal offense in most jurisdictions. Rare today (about 0.1% of US prisoners); famous cases include the unsolved 1962 Alcatraz breakout and the 1983 Maze escape.
Prison food
Prison food: meals provided in prisons and jails, governed by dietary scales, nutrition standards, and religious accommodation, from Pentonville's 1840s diet experiments to modern Ramadan caloric litigation.
Prison gangs in the United States
Prison gangs in the United States: organized criminal groups formed inside prisons, structured along racial or ethnic lines, including the Mexican Mafia, Aryan Brotherhood, and Black Guerrilla Family, trafficking narcotics and controlling contraband markets.
Prison officer
Prison officer, also called correctional officer, jail officer, or prison guard, is the uniformed staff role responsible for custody, safety, and daily supervision of incarcerated people in prisons and jails, with duties spanning security, welfare, and rehabilitation.
Prison rape
Prison rape is sexual violence against incarcerated people by inmates or staff. Key facts: U.S. PREA of 2003, NIS-4 2023-24 rate 4.1%, pooled meta-analytic prevalence 12.4%, 5% grant penalty.
Prison rape in the United States
Prison rape in the United States covers sexual victimization of incarcerated people by inmates or staff. PREA (2003) mandates BJS statistics; surveys report 2.0-4.5% prevalence, allegations rising from 7,575 (2012) to 18,884 (2018).
Prison reform
Prison reform: efforts to change how prisons are built, run, and used, from John Howard's 1774 reforms and the 1779 Penitentiary Act to modern rehabilitation, solitary confinement limits, and alternatives to incarceration.
Prison sexuality
Prison sexuality covers sexual relationships, identities, coercion, and regulation among incarcerated people, including Sykes's deprivation framework, gay-for-the-stay behavior, PREA, conjugal visits, and LGBTQ+ incarceration disparities.
Prison ship
Prison ships, or prison hulks, are decommissioned vessels moored as floating prisons. Britain's convict hulks began with the 1776 Act and Duncan Campbell's Justitia, held prisoners awaiting transportation, and lasted about 80 years in England.
Prison slang
Prison slang is the informal vocabulary of incarcerated people, spanning slang, jargon, argot, and cant. It varies by institution and region, marks in-group status, and has been documented since Vaux's 1819 flash-language dictionary.
Prison uniform
Prison uniform: standardized clothing issued to incarcerated people for identification, escape prevention, and control. Includes Australian convict 'magpie' uniforms, 1820s New York stripes, Nazi camp striped uniforms, and Mandela Rules standards.
Prison warden
Prison warden: the chief executive officer of a prison, also called superintendent, institutional head, or prison manager. Holds final authority over custody, security, staff, and budget; role shifted from rehabilitation overseer to complex manager since 1975.
Prison–industrial complex
Prison-industrial complex (PIC): term for the network of government, private corporations, and institutions with interests in incarceration, in use since the 1970s. Includes private prisons holding about 8% of US prisoners, prison labor, and abolitionist critiques.
Prisoner
Prisoner: a person deprived of liberty and held in custody, also called inmate, detainee, or incarcerated person. Covers legal definitions, prisoners' rights, prison culture research, and prison slang.
Prisoner security categories in the United Kingdom
Prisoner security categories in the UK (A, B, C, D for adult men in England and Wales) classify prisoners by escape risk, harm if they escaped, and threat to prison control, after the 1966 Mountbatten Report following the George Blake escape.
Prisons in North Korea
Prisons in North Korea: kuryujang pretrial detention, kyohwaso labor prisons, and denied kwanliso political camps holding an estimated 80,000-200,000 people under documented torture and forced labor.
Prisons in Russia
Prisons in Russia: FSIN-administered system of remand prisons and correctional colonies descending from the Gulag; about 282,000 prisoners by 2026, mass wartime recruitment of convicts, chronic overcrowding and disease.
Private prison
Private prison: a correctional facility run by a for-profit company (CoreCivic, formerly CCA; GEO Group) under government contract. Revived in the 1980s US amid overcrowding; holds about 8% of US incarcerated people; measured cost savings about 1%.
Prizzi's Honor
Prizzi's Honor is a 1985 American black comedy crime drama directed by John Huston, starring Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner, and Anjelica Huston, about two hitmen who fall in love.
Probable cause
Probable cause is the Fourth Amendment standard, undefined in the Constitution's text, that must generally be met before US police arrest, search, or obtain a warrant; governed by the Illinois v. Gates totality-of-the-circumstances test.
Probation
Probation, from Latin probare (to test), is a court sentence served in the community under conditions and a probation officer instead of jail; founded by John Augustus in Boston in 1841, first codified in Massachusetts in 1878.
Procuring (prostitution)
Procuring (prostitution) is the offense of recruiting or facilitating another person's prostitution, historically targeting third parties. Covers England's 1885 CLAA origins, France's 1946 Marthe Richard law, US 18 USC 2422, and regime comparisons.
Properties of Jeffrey Epstein
Properties of Jeffrey Epstein: his Manhattan townhouse, Palm Beach mansion, Zorro Ranch, Little St. James and Great St. James islands, and Paris apartment; all sold by his estate after 2019, funding victim compensation and the $105 million USVI settlement.
Proposition Joe
Proposition Joe (Joseph Stewart) is an East Baltimore drug kingpin in HBO's The Wire, played by Robert F. Chew. Known for the catchphrase "I've got a proposition for you," the New Day Co-Op co-founder appears in 24 episodes across all five seasons.
Proscription
Proscription is the public posting of death lists condemning enemies of the state without trial, used in the late Roman Republic by Sulla and the Second Triumvirate.
Prosecution of Donald Trump in New York
New York criminal case (People v. Trump) charging Donald Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records over 2016 hush-money payments; first felony conviction of a former US president, May 2024, unconditional discharge January 2025, on appeal.
Prosecution of James Comey
Federal prosecution of former FBI director James Comey, indicted September 25, 2025 in the Eastern District of Virginia for false statements and obstruction over 2020 congressional testimony; dismissed November 24, 2025 after Judge Currie ruled prosecutor Lindsey Halligan was unlawfully appointed, with the Fourth Circuit appeal pending.