WP | Former CIA officer John Kiriakou is sentenced to 30 months in prison for leaks A former CIA officer who was among the first to go public with details about the agency’s use of waterboarding and other interrogation techniques was sentenced to 2½ years in prison Friday for disclosing a covert operative’s name to a reporter. John Kiriakou, 48, of Arlington has portrayed himself as a whistleblower concerned about the use of the harsh tactics, but U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema emphatically rejected that idea in federal court in Alexandria.

NYT | The inmates were massed in the prison carpentry workshop when somebody gave the signal. Wedging themselves into a tunnel almost 10 feet below ground, 131 prisoners slid one by one along 23 feet to emerge at the base of the north watchtower. There they bound and gagged three guards, according to an account provided by prison administrators, cut through a wire fence and walked to freedom.

Propublica.org | The growth of the private detention industry has long been a subject of scrutiny. A recent eight-part series in the New Orleans Times-Picayune chronicled how more than half of Louisiana’s 40,000 inmates are housed in prisons run by sheriffs or private companies as part of a broader financial incentive scheme. The detention business goes beyond just criminal prisoners.

Daily Mail | Taliban fighters armed with rocket-propelled grenades stormed a prison in north west Pakistan and freed 400 prisoners, it emerged today. The raid by more than 100 fighters was a dramatic display of the strength of the insurgency gripping the nuclear-armed country. Police said at least 20 of the inmates set loose were 'very dangerous'. Authorities fear the escaped prisoners may now rejoin the fight, giving momentum and a propaganda boost to a movement that has killed thousands of Pakistani officials and ordinary citizens since 2007.

Reuters | Four former New Orleans policemen convicted of shooting unarmed people following Hurricane Katrina were sentenced to lengthy prison terms on Wednesday in what the U.S. government described as the most important police misconduct case since the Rodney King beating nearly two decades ago. The four former officers - Kenneth Bowen, Robert Faulcon, Robert Gisevius and Anthony Villavaso - were sentenced by a federal judge to between 38 and 65 years in prison. A fifth former officer - Arthur "Archie" Kaufman - who did not participate in the killings but engineered a four-year cover-up of the crimes was sentenced to six years.

NaturalNews.com | If you ever needed proof that the so-called "war on drugs" is an abject and costly failure, you need not look any further than the California penal system. The latest tragic example of this failure manifested itself in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last month in which the court found that overcrowding in California's prison system amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, which is a violation of the Constitution's Eighth Amendment, and in so finding, ordered the state to release 30,000 inmates.