Noting that its readership “ranges from the White House to the Big House,” The Atlantic today published a letter from the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, informing the magazine that its December 2011 issue would not be delivered to the subscriber incarcerated within the facility.

On State of the Union today, Candy Crowley pressed presidential candidate Herman Cain on whether disparities in education and incarceration rates between America at large and the African-American community were forms of institutionalized racism and whether black citizens are on the same economic playing field as everybody else in the United States.

If you’re in the prison documentary game, you know that you’re going to be spending plenty of time in Florida. For some reason, that’s where the bizarre crimes happen, and hence, the prisons are stuffed with some real choice inmates. So it’s no surprise the producers of MSNBC’s long-running Lockup signed a reported $100,000 contract that would allow the series to shoot inside the Santa Rosa Correctional Institution in Milton, FL. The Lockup team had done about a week’s work when Florida Governor Rick Scott stepped in, and pulled the plug. As Dara Kam writes in The Palm Beach Post, the Governor says his Department of Corrections secretary, Ed Buss, didn’t have the authority to sign the contract “because it did not deal with the day-to-day operations of the state prison system.”

If he has to serve “hard time,” one prisoner in a Michigan jail is demanding that his Constitutional rights afford him some pleasures that are currently being denied. Since he cannot have access to pornography, 21-year-old Kyle Richards has filed a lawsuit claiming his Constitutional rights are being violated as such a deprivation is “cruel and unusual punishment.”

AP is reporting that Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has been sentenced to three years in prison on conspiracy charges. In November, Delay was also convicted on money laundering charges for violating Texas law when he used corporate donations to support Republican candidates Delay supported.

Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio is famous, to put it somewhat euphemistically, for thinking outside the pen when it comes to punishing his state’s criminals. Now the man who made headlines for making inmates don pink underwear is in the news yet again, this time for organizing a caroling contest among inmates, with the most angelic rendition of “All I Want for Christmas is You” winning a festive Christmas dinner.

We may have a winner for “laugh to keep from crying” story of the year. Local news anchor Kim Chapman called the story possibly as strange as any she’d ever reported, and it’s easy to see why: a four-year-old Tennessee boy was found wearing a girl’s dress with a partially-consumed beer in hand. But wait – there’s more.

This morning’s New York Post report that Bernie Madoff was dying of pancreatic cancer spread like wildfire through the news, based only on quotes from anonymous inmates. As it turns out, the Post‘s “jailbirds” were far from reliable sources. The Federal Bureau of Prisons responds with an unequivocal rejection.