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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
November was warm. As I drove to work, it felt like fall might go on forever. I opened my sunroof and allowed the playlist on my iPod to pour out onto a sunny mid-Missouri morning. Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin yucked [...]
Courtesy, Joseph Dole I was on death row for many years before Illinois banned the death penalty in 2011. I’m a “lifer” now, serving a life-without-parole (LWOP) sentence. Does that mean I’m thrilled to be off death row? Quite [...]
2017 marks a tragic year in North Carolina prisons. Five Correctional Officers (COs) were murdered by inmates who believed they had nothing left to lose. In one incident, a CO was bludgeoned to death in front of a group of prisoners. [...]
By: Jeremy Busby Gabiele 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 [...]
An obese, red-faced prison guard, his grey hair greased back, gets up from his swivel chair and shouts, "Hey retard, get over here!" He points at me and then in the direction of a faded orange brick wall. Two rookie guards [...]