I am a commercial contractor highly involved with the construction and renovation of prisons, and I think your review of this particular piece was hypocritical, immature and uninformed. You admitted being manipulated and indeed you were. Not one of them. They could spend seven years at Disney World and you still wouldn't. Look into the cost differential.
Prisons are good and criminals are bad.
In short, these modern prisons offer the first viable opportunity to make prisons nonviolent, nonexploitative, drug-free and even rehabilitative. Whether these opportunities are actually realized is, of course, the real question. Russo's racism in implying that the largely black prison population is mentally ill, or her victim-blaming denigration of the mentally ill by implying that they deserve to be in prison. Persons with schizophrenia are, in fact, on average less violent than the general population. I'm sure Russo didn't mean to even mention mental illness in her article.