"Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States."

Gopnik on prisons (and crime, generally) in the New Yorker. I’d like to read the book he spends a third of the piece quoting from (you’ll know it when you get there).