new jail documentary

my take on the violent indignities of the hoosegow

Between 550,000 and 730,000 people in the United States are locked into jails on any given day. About 4/5ths of them have not been convicted of any crime. An increasingly large number of them — likely far more than half — have mental illness or drug addiction disorders.

The conditions people are currently enduring — as in now, as I write and as you read this — in these jails are miserable, sometimes torturous. They are beaten and humiliated by guards, subjected to solitary confinement, and refused medical treatment. One man in Pima County’s jail I spoke with recently told me that people inside are so hungry from being consistently underfed they supplement their diet with banana peels — that is, on the rare occasion they get fresh fruit.

l’ve been reporting on the Pima County Jail for over two years, and recently produced my first documentary about the place. It’s a recap of a lot of that reporting, as well as a broad look at the system-wide problems that send so many people to jail and leave them stuck there.

Here’s a clip:

Watch the full documentary here.

To read more about jails and the sheriffs who run them, I also recommend Jessica Pishko’s recent book, The Highest Law in the Land. I spoke with Pishko recently, and she told me: “Sheriffs have not shown themselves to be good stewards of jails, which are currently more unsafe than they ever have been.”

She added: “Every sheriff will tell you their jail is the largest hospital in the county. They’ll say, oh, we run the largest mental health institution in the county. And they say it like it’s a job that they should be doing. But if it is, in fact, the largest mental health institution, then why on earth is a law enforcement officer running it?”

Good question.

Reading 2025

I vowed to kick off the new year with history and non-fiction, focusing on substance over style, and (but?) the first book I finished of 2025 is a novel of such weird and original style that it becomes substance. David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress is one of those books in which you can feel the language do something.

It’s not an easy work, and it’s quite quirky, the conceit being as much a standard plot (a woman is the last human, maybe the last animal, on earth, and she roams widely) as an investigation into the logic and psychology of language.

Markson is very much a “writer’s writer.” Here’s Pulitzer Prize-winner Hernan Diaz: “Anyone who loves David Markson, for example, is an instantaneous friend.” (Am I auditioning to become Diaz’s friend?) (Yes. His first novel, In the Distance, is one of my favorite recent books.)

Wittgenstein’s Mistress was also loved by David Foster Wallace, who, in his singular and brilliant way, wrote that Markson’s language “flouts the ordinary cingula of ‘sense’ and through its defiance of sense’s limits manages somehow to ‘show’ what cannot be ordinarily ‘expressed.’”

To give a sense of the oddness, here is a moment that feels — in the world of the novel — almost breathtakingly suspenseful:

All I had started to say, I think, is that I am seeing a painting that Van Gogh did not paint, and which has now become a reproduction of that painting, and which to begin with is of a fire that I myself have not built.

Although what I have entirely left out is that the painting is not actually of the fire either, but of a reflection of the fire.

Seeing Alice

From a very long, beautiful, unflinching New Yorker article by Rachel Aviv on Munro’s legacy and her silence about her husband’s sexual abuse of her daughter. Like a lot of people, I adore some of Munro’s stories, though I haven’t revisited them since the news broke. Without wading into the controversy, I’ll sign off with a meditation from Munro on seeing the world:

In a letter from the early seventies, Alice described surviving a period where she “absolutely lived by will—having to wind myself up to speak, smile, move, caring for nothing.” Then one day she went to a coffee shop. “I was looking at those thick glass dishes they put ice-cream in—and this is the hard part to explain without seeming silly—I started to see those dishes with the most peculiar clarity and respect.” The counter looked different, too. “I don’t know if you just have to wait for this ‘seeing’ or if it can be managed by effort or faith,” she wrote. “But it is for me the final saving thing.”

In interviews, Alice tried to define this unique sort of “seeing,” describing it as a capacity to detect a kind of secret intensity lurking beneath the surfaces of everyday objects. “I can’t really claim that it is linked to any kind of a religious feeling about the world, and yet that might come closest to describing it,” she said. She characterized it as a fight against the knowledge that large swaths of the world, and of ourselves, are lost forever, every day. “Writing is a way of convincing yourself perhaps that you’re doing something about this,” she said. “I can’t stand to let go without some effort at this.”