Activists and policymakers often rattle off figures to get Americans to care about their country's mass-incarceration problem: More than two million people are locked up in prisons and jails in the United States. In state prisons, African-American men are imprisoned at a rate around five times higher than that of white men. The U.S. accounts for a little over 4 percent of the world's population, yet holds 21 percent of the world's prison population. But PBS's new documentary The Prison in Twelve Landscapes takes a different approach: Leaving the statistics behind, it puts a spotlight on settings that demonstrate prison culture's effects outside of the bars, from playgrounds to the Black Lives Matter movement.

[For more of this story, written by Kristina Kutateli, go to https://psmag.com/magazine/exp...s-a-societal-problem]