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The Prison Issue

Employees of the Month

Meet some of our awesome contributors from the October issue of VICE Magazine.

KRISTEN GWYNNE

Kristen Gwynne is the granddaughter of a former Philadelphia cop, so it's only natural that she decided to write about drugs for a living. With curiosity about policing and criminal justice in her blood, Kristen focuses on how to use illicit substances without dying or getting hurt. When she isn't at police protests or writing for publications like the Nation, Guardian US, and RollingStone.com, she is an avid consumer of female-fronted garage rock because—she claims—it's objectively the best stuff out there right now. She also regularly and earnestly uses words like "hoagie," which we think pretty much speaks for itself.

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ERIKA ALLEN

Erika Allen is VICE magazine's newest senior editor. She comes from an obscure little rag called the New York Times, where, among other things, she edited the Times Insider; wrote for the style, travel, and arts sections; and profiled Baby Boomer couples about why they've stayed married for 25 years or longer. (Hint: Selective hearing.) She applies all of the lessons she learned from them to co-editing the sex and relationship website Slutever. Erika lives in Manhattan's East Village, where her hobbies include binge-watching murder-mystery television, binge-eating Italian food, and buying slightly different versions of the same pair of black shoes.

ANDREW BRININSTOOL

Andrew Brininstool is a National Endowment for the Arts fellow currently at work on a nonfiction novel about the 1980 riot at the Penitentiary of New Mexico, during which inmates high on Demerol took over the prison for three days, killing 33 people—a story he also wrote about for this issue. His life has only been threatened twice while researching, which is a blessing. He's also working on a novel about the death of Dallas's leading follicle-restoration expert. His collection of short stories, Crude Sketches Done in Quick Succession, was published by Queen's Ferry Press in January, and contains no sketches, which continually baffles bookstore browsers.

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ZORA J. MURFF

Zora J. Murff is an MFA candidate at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He graduated from the University of Iowa with a BA in photography and holds a BS in psychology from Iowa State University. His photography, which has been exhibited internationally, focuses on the experiences of youth in the juvenile justice system and the role of images in the correctional system. Zora was named a LensCulture 2015 Top 50 Emerging Talent, a 2014 Photolucida Critical Mass finalist, and is part of the Midwest Photographers Project through the Museum of Contemporary Photography. His first monograph, Corrections, will be published this fall by Aint-Bad Editions.

See Photos of Teenagers' Lives in Limbo Between Incarceration and Freedom

MAURICE CHAMMAH

Maurice Chammah is a staff writer at the Marshall Project, where he covers prisons, courts, and cops. This summer, he moved to Brooklyn after living most of his life in Austin, Texas, where he played violin in a bunch of different bands, including a 15-piece behemoth called Mother Falcon, and also at a megachurch. He spent a year in Cairo, Egypt, trying (and failing) to learn Arabic. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, Slate, and the Texas Observer, and for this month's issue of VICE, he visited Germany's finest prisons to see what they're doing right and what America's doing wrong.

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TAMMS YEAR TEN

The Photo Requests from Solitary project was initiated in 2009 by Tamms Year Ten, a grassroots coalition of artists, advocates, family members, and men formerly incarcerated in Tamms Correctional Center in southern Illinois, which was recently shuttered after years of opposition. In 2013, the project expanded its efforts to California and New York. Photo Requests from Solitary is currently filling requests from these states, and using the project to support local campaigns to abolish the use of solitary confinement in prisons. The initiative is run by Jean Casella, Lauren Denitzio, Jeanine Oleson, and Laurie Jo Reynolds.

See Photo Requests from Prisoners in Solitary Confinement

Illustrations by Geffen Refaeli