Inmate Details His First Riot: The Scourge of Tear Gas
Outside, the chow hall door opens. Spacemen enter. Gas masks and shields. Six black "fire extinguishers" fog the air, sending men scrambling. Human bug-spray.
Slave Work In the Fields: Digging a Trench Through Shit Creek
They call fields. You wake up. Comfort yourself. Cuddle your sheet and pretend it's a cat. Your cellie rushes to smoke a K2 stick (spice joint), to less feel the pain. Shit if you can. Sit. Get ready. You go outside, [...]
Solitary Suicide
Gabriele was an upbeat cat for a prisoner with a life sentence. I remember the day that I met him. I was having a difficult day trying to navigate all of the negativity that prison has to offer when suddenly [...]
Chain-Gang Mating Rituals
Courtesy of Charles Norman Big Willie Taylor came to my cell one evening after supper with a question. I knew it was a question because he never came to my cell unless he had a question that stumped [...]
Asst. Editor2020-07-19T10:18:46-04:00Hope & Change, Lifers & Solitary, My Crime, Violence & Corruption|
My Life on Death Row in San Quentin
From December 17,2003 to February 9, 2004, the prison guards and administration at this modem day plantation changed me, rearranged me, oppressed me, regressed me, repressed me, depressed me and undressed me in order to murder me. They had me bend [...]
I’ll Never Forget My 3rd Day in Prison
Reliving Day Three of a Thirty-Year Guilt Trip "Seven-Block, fourth tier, get ready for chow," booms the lady voice over the intercom. Try making up every day to that, I think. It reminds me of the lead juror's voice at my [...]
A Juvenile Lifer’s Story
I am prepared to die: My name is Edward Mike Ji, now age seventeen, newly minted adult duly dubbed and declared so by Collin County Juvenile Court, inmate number 207989, and death cannot come swiftly enough. I lay in this foul [...]
A Jailhouse Lawyer Explains How it Works
“You've got a thousand men in the water and maybe three life preservers. You better be okay with watching men drown. ”
- Melvin Tunstall, when I took a job in the prison law library.
Ask a Drug Dealer How to End the Drug Epidemic
Users use whatever is available, and all price does is move them from one drug to another. “White people are starting to figure that out,” added Edgar Lee. “When they can’t get their Oxycontin they move to heroin.
Police Brutality — And Then This?
THE JURORS GASPED when they saw the photo. I was on the witness stand in federal court when my attorney entered the photo as an exhibit, and even I had never seen my arrest picture displayed in such vivid detail. [...]
A Prisoner Writes: Schizophrenic Religiosity
Jeffery Hofstedter was our prime example of schizophrenia augmented by religiosity. White, late thirties, anorexically thin, he balanced a supersize pair of bifocal chominators to laboriously read his Bible aloud, one disconnected word at a time. He had been booted [...]
My Crime: Change in Places
Sixteen years later, that day still played in my head as clear as a Blu-ray movie. I still saw Frank's raised eyebrows when, in broad daylight, he announced, "We're taking that." A nine-millimeter semi-automatic stuck out of his jeans pocket. I [...]
My First Real Girlfriend in Prison: Aurora
The dark days we're stuck inside. The light is broken, and it's sweltering from the radiator-heater and no ventilation. Day- in and day-out, nights are the same. They don't have -never have had- a beginning. They'll never end on their own. [...]
He Says He’s Innocent. Do You Believe Him?
Let's be clear RIGHT from the start, I am an innocent man. Like 110% innocent. I know, everyone in prison says they are innocent, they say it so often and persistently that it holds no meaning, and if you really are innocent, no one believes you.
Long Live The Keist
In my 21 years of incarceration I have seen every hustle that you can think of- from smuggling hot pockets to cell phones, to selling ass to selling cash. And if it wasn't nailed down then it was up for grabs. [...]
Legal Practice of Mental and Psychological Torture in Prison
After spending over five years studying how prolonged periods of solitary confinement harms the brains, the only conclusion that I could come up with is that it’s torture and I’m not the only one who knows this. There have been extensive [...]