National Journal
The year began with a line that was as much a lamentation as it was an astute observation. "The scale and brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life," Adam Gopnik wrote in a trenchant essay in the Jan. 30 issue of the New Yorker. "How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disemboweling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane condition?" The year ends with filmmaker Eugene Jarecki touring the country -- visiting prisons, prosecutors' conferences, schools -- showing off his heartbreaking documentary, The House I Live In, an acclaimed collection of interlocking stories about the mournful human impact of America Oklahoma
