Christopher Boose awoke to see a sign for the paraplegic unit at the hospital where he had arrived five hours earlier, shackled and drifting in and out of consciousness. “Cut it off,” he remembered ...

One prisoner had been dead for so long that when he was discovered lying face down, his face was flattened. Another was tied up and tortured for two days while no one noticed. Bloody inmates screamed ...

J. B. Nicholas runs a news website called The Free Lance from his home in upstate New York, and, near the end of last year, he started obsessively tracking one story: a man confined at a state prison ...