The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum houses an extraordinary collection of 'prisoners' objects'. These were made by prison inmates and presented to the ICRC delegates who visited them, as provided for by the Geneva Conventions. For over a century, these objects have borne mute witness to the numerous violent episodes that continue to ravage our planet, from Chile, Vietnam, Algeria and Yugoslavia, to Rwanda and Afghanistan. Made from simple materials - whatever comes to hand in a prison - these objects express the need to escape the world of the jailbird. As a Lebanese inmate puts it, 'Creating is a way of acquiring freedom of expression, it gives us a means to say what we think while everything we see around urges us to keep quiet and to forget who we are.' While some of these works touch us through their simplicity, others astonish us with their beauty or ingeniousness. Each bears the imprint of a personal story loaded with emotion, inviting us on a journey through time and collective history.

Imagine that your house spans six by nine feet, your mattress is just two inches thick, you are known to your neighbors by an identification number, and items most consider crucial to everyday existence are outlawed. How do inmates in prisons like this throughout the United States make such lives bearable? In 2001, the artists' collective Temporary Services asked an incarcerated artist named Angelo to share with them the ways in which inmates adapt to their confinement. Angelo responded with over one hundred pages of meticulously detailed ink drawings and text. The resulting compilation, Prisoners' Inventions, is a unique guide to prison life, covering subjects ranging from how to cook a grilled cheese sandwich in a locker to how to chill a soda using a toilet. Many of the documented items--such as cigarette lighters, condoms, even alarm clocks--are considered contraband, and Angelo includes anecdotes describing their creation and use. Already featured in Playboy, Harper's, Le Monde, and on This American Life, Prisoners' Inventions provides powerful testimony to life "on the inside" as it is endured by over two million individuals in the United States alone.

This volume brings together a selection of the most important published research articles from the ongoing debate about the moral rights of prisoners. The articles consider the moral underpinnings of the debate and include framework discussions for a theory of prisoners? rights as well as several international documents which detail the rights of prisoners, including women prisoners. Finally, detailed analysis of the moral bases for particular rights relating to prison conditions covers areas such as: health, solitary confinement, recreation, work, religious observance, library access, the use of prisoners in research and the disenfranchisement of prisoners.

On March 11, 1985, a van was pulled over in Warsaw for a routine traffic check that turned out to be anything but routine. Inside was Marek Kaminski, a Warsaw University student who also ran an underground press for Solidarity. The police discovered illegal books in the vehicle, and in a matter of hours five secret police escorted Kaminski to jail. A sociology and mathematics major one day, Kaminski was the next a political prisoner trying to adjust to a bizarre and dangerous new world. This remarkable book represents his attempts to understand that world. As a coping strategy until he won his freedom half a year later by faking serious illness, Kaminski took clandestine notes on prison subculture. Much later, he discovered the key to unlocking that culture--game theory. Prison first appeared an irrational world of unpredictable violence and arbitrary codes of conduct. But as Kaminski shows in riveting detail, prisoners, to survive and prosper, have to master strategic decision-making. A clever move can shorten a sentence; a bad decision can lead to rape, beating, or social isolation. Much of the confusion in interpreting prison behavior, he argues, arises from a failure to understand that inmates are driven not by pathological emotion but by predictable and rational calculations. Kaminski presents unsparing accounts of initiation rituals, secret codes, caste structures, prison sex, self-injuries, and of the humor that makes this brutal world more bearable. This is a work of unusual power, originality, and eloquence, with implications for understanding human behavior far beyond the walls of one Polish prison.

This is an essential book for all academics, heritage professionals, collectors and museum curators who seek to understand the range of objects which give testimony to the creativity of prisoners of war. From sheet music and theatre, to painting, embroidery, newspaper articles and metalwork, this book is the first to address creativity behind barbed wire.

Examining testimonial production in Southern Cone Latin America (Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay), Haunted Objects analyzes how the changed relationship between the subject and the material world influenced the way survivors narrate the stories of their detentions in the wake of the political violence of the 1970s and 80s. It explores descriptions of objects within testimonial narratives and uses these descriptions to inform an analysis of how the objects that survived the violence--items recovered by archeologists from former detention centers, the personal belongings of disappeared peoples, the prison craftwork created by political prisoners during their detention, and the bodies of the second generation children of the disappeared, all join together in memory projects in the post-dictatorship to offer "spectral testimony" about the past.

He lied about his age to enlist. Now he'll have to lie about everything else to survive! Survive the war. Outlast the enemy. Stay alive. That's what Henry Forrest has to do. When he lies about his age to join the Marines, Henry never imagines he'll face anything worse than his own father's cruelty. But his unit is shipped off to the Philippines, where the heat is unbearable, the conditions are brutal, and Henry's dreams of careless adventuring are completely dashed.Then the Japanese invade the islands, and US forces there surrender. As a prisoner of war, Henry faces one horror after another. Yet among his fellow captives, he finds kindness, respect, even brotherhood. A glimmer of light in the darkness. And he'll need to hold tight to the hope they offer if he wants to win the fight for his country, his freedom . . . and his life. Michael P. Spradlin's latest novel tenderly explores the harsh realities of the Bataan Death March and captivity on the Pacific front during World War II.