I’ve made note here, on this blog, on some interesting similarities between prisons and boarding schools: the discipline, the regulation of time, the uniforms, the social dynamics. Yet another similarity may be found in the ubiquity of informers: moles, spies, double-agents, leakers, snitches–call them what you will–conduits for the passage for information to administrative andContinue reading “Prisons And Boarding Schools: The Informer Phenomenon”
Tag Archives: imprisonment
‘Orange Is The New Black’ And Boarding Schools
As I make my way through the second season of Orange Is The New Black, Netflix’s original series based on Piper Kerman‘s memoir, Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison about her experiences at FCI Danbury, a minimum-security federal prison, I’m struck again by how much of the prison experience remindsContinue reading “‘Orange Is The New Black’ And Boarding Schools”
Debating Teams And The Prison-Industrial Complex
The news that a team of prisoners–incarcerated criminals from the Eastern New York Correctional Facility–had beaten, in debate, Harvard’s team, was not slow in spreading. After the initial informal reactions on social media–many of which expressed glee at Harvard’s comeuppance by plebes–had died down, a more measured response followed, one which stressed that such aContinue reading “Debating Teams And The Prison-Industrial Complex”
On Visiting a Prison
I first saw a jail–and its inhabitants–as a child. Our family car had been broken into and some of its contents stolen, so we drove to a police station to file a report. While seated in the waiting room outside the police officer’s den, I could see what must have been a holding cell, occupiedContinue reading “On Visiting a Prison”
Samir Chopra 