IDS 101: The Devil's Echo: Prison Narratives and the U.S. Penal System: Films and Websites

Founded in 1971, the PEN Prison Writing Program believes in the restorative, rehabilitative power of writing and provides hundreds of inmates across the country with skilled writing teachers and audiences for their work.

A site where incarcerated people can bear witness to the conditions in which they live, to what is working and what is not inside American prisons, and where they can contribute to public debate about the American prison crisis.

An independent space providing information and resources for people creating art in and around the American prison system.

In a trend reported recently in The New York Times Magazine, the number of juveniles in adult prisons has doubled in the last 10 years. There is no doubt many violent, repeat offenders deserve to be there. But are too many troubled kids being swept up in the dragnet - serving adult time?

'Couldn't Keep It To Myself' is an anthology of stories written by female inmates at Connecticut's only maximum-security prison for women. But the story of how this critically acclaimed book came to be, and what happened to the women who wrote it, is as interesting as the book itself. Steve Kroft reports.

In Monte Cristo (1922), adapted from the novel by Alexandre Dumas, and directed by Emmett J. Flynn, John Gilbert is Edmond Dantes, a sailor unjustly imprisoned for twenty years, time he spends acquiring education and finesse. Later the accidental heir to a vast fortune, Dantes reinvents himself as the Count of Monte Cristo, and wreaks revenge on those symbols of the decadent monarchy that wronged him.

Scarcely half a mile long, one of a group of three islands, Devil's Island in French Guiana, is part of the most famous penal colonies of France. Newsreel from 1936.

Alcatraz, ‘the Rock’, was home to America’s most notorious prisoners. Set on an island in the middle of San Francisco Bay, surrounded by guards and swirling treacherous waters - no one was supposed to escape from it and live. There were some who attempted to escape off this Devil’s island; most never made it but in at least one case it is almost certain that two desperate men defied all the odds and escaped to the mainland.

In Chicago Friday, 55-year-old Alton Logan, who spent 26 years in jail for a murder he did not commit, was exonerated. Over the years who knows how many Americans have been wrongly convicted and imprisoned -- or even executed? And even when the mistake is realized, as it was for Logan, what then?

Bob Simon visits a prison where inmates serving long sentences have found a way to free their minds through college education provided by elite Bard College.

In this remarkable documentary, filmmaker Brett Story excavates the often unseen links and connections that prisons – and our system of mass incarceration – have on communities and industries all around us. Widely acclaimed, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is an essential documentary, a portrait of our criminal justice system in which we never see a penitentiary.

Prison State takes an intimate look at the cycle of mass incarceration in America and a statewide effort to reverse the trend, following four residents of a housing project in Louisville, KY. as they cycle in and out of jail and prison.

Look into the minds and hearts of women inmates of a New York prison. Go inside a writing workshop led by Eve Ensler, where the women create works of poetry and prose which ends in the performance of their writing by critically acclaimed actors.