Boys, teenagers, are waiting. There are gestures of waiting (a plastic bottle crushed and chewed on to fill the boredom), the silence of waiting, the posture of waiting (a slumped back, the whole body seemingly liquified). What are they waiting for? That’s the point, the waiting has no purpose, or...

To understand the linkage that makes the very angry statement of Bring Down the Walls so magnificent and joyful throughout, we need to go back to the mid-1980s. While the American prison system had been evolving, since Nixon, into an aberrant machine producing social and racial discrimination, the embers of...