This year, Ava DuVernay became the first African-American woman to win Sundance’s best directing award for her second feature-length film, Middle of Nowhere. It’s about a young black woman who puts her life on hold while her husband is in prison. In research for the film, Ava conducted hundreds of interviews with women who visited loved ones behind bars. From the Fresh Air interview:

You get there early because the women want to get the full day. So they all arrive, and many of them will travel in the wee hours before dark, before visiting hours begin so they can be in line. And then the series of screenings. And then if one person has the wrong length of skirt, then that takes time — you’re behind her so you’ve got to wait for that. Bags are being checked. Children are involved. And then there may be issues with your incarcerated loved one even coming out. [There have] been several instances when we visited where the person that I was going to meet couldn’t come out that day. And yet, you’d gone through this whole trek to get there. These prisons are not centrally located either, so they’re usually a ways out, outside the city — certainly in California, they’re out in the high desert areas, so that’s quite a drive. And if you don’t have a car, then it’s quite a bus ride. So it’s an ordeal. …

And then you get in that chair, and you’re facing someone who you have to become reacquainted with. And you have to share what’s going on with you — it might be financial issues he can’t help with. And then also trying to balance that with what’s going on with him back there — it’s a very, very complicated experience.

1 out of every 86 adults in the state

— Louisiana currently leads the entire world in prisoners per capita. Here’s why.

Today there are more African-Americans under correctional control — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.

— Michelle Alexander, on the number of blacks in the criminal justice system. On Monday’s Fresh Air, Alexander details how President Reagan’s war on drugs led to a mass incarceration of black males and the difficulties these felons face after serving their prison sentences.

[The young black males are] shuttled into prisons, branded as criminals and felons, and then when they’re released, they’re relegated to a permanent second-class status, stripped of the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement — like the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, the right to be free of legal discrimination and employment, and access to education and public benefits. Many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again, once you’ve been branded a felon.

— In her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes that many of the gains of the civil rights movement have been undermined by the mass incarceration of black Americans in the war on drugs.

From NPR’s Tell Me More: One Maryland prison is seeing a waiting list for inmates to get into a weekly knitting class. Participants of ‘Knitting Behind Bars’ learn how to make hats, dolls and other small items. The program’s co-founder, Lynn Zwerling, talks with host Michel Martin about how knitting has benefited prisoners.

On today’s Fresh Air, what it’s like to defend death row inmates. Attorney David Dow explains why he’s made a career of defending prisoners sentenced to die: “The person that we’re executing is simply not the same person who committed the crime that landed that person on death row in the first place.”

For 25 years, Wilbert Rideau reported on events that were taking place within Angola’s walls — covering topics such as the mishandling of AIDS funds for prisoners, the brutality of electrocutions and the pervasive sexual violence inside the prison. During Rideau’s years as editor,The Angolite won the George Polk Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award — and Rideau became a correspondent for Fresh Air, reporting on what it was like to live in solitary confinement and how prisoners feared for their safety on a daily basis.