About a week after Thanksgiving of 2004, I stabbed a cop (prison guard) when I was at the Barrington Unit, located between Houston and Galveston. I spent the next fifteen years in administrative segregation, or, "ad-seg," as it's known. I was [...]
Flames surged out of cell A-250, well-fueled by rolled-up newspapers, cardboard, and clothing collected by the cell’s lone occupant, Ryan Nieves. He wanted the fire to be hot and quickly intense, and it was. An accelerant had been poured. The paint [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
Before 1977, ALL California prisoners were sentenced to Indeterminate sentences, a term that included “imprisonment for life” (i.e. five years to life for armed robbery). After serving a certain amount of time, a prisoner had to appear in front of a [...]
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 [...]
Mainstream media, the outside public, and the average layperson have no idea what goes on in the prison system that they support. America’s prisons are strategically placed in desolate, uninhabitable and rural parts of the U.S., which makes it hard for [...]
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 [...]
Once upon a time I was a Death Row inmate, Level 3. What that means is I was the residue at the bottom of the barrel. There is absolutely nothing below that in the world we call PRISON except one [...]
Editors Note: Mustafa Zulu spent 20 years in solitary confinement in the harshest Federal Prison in America: ADX Florence in Colorado. One day, he was told he was moving to a STATE prison in North Carolina. 1) STRESS MANAGEMENT: Stress kills. [...]
I spent the first few years of my natural life sentence muttering incoherently to myself and chewing my fingernails to bleeding nubs while I contemplated the most painless methods of suicide for American prisoners. How’s a 23-year old kid supposed to [...]
The hole, the new term for solitary confinement. It’s the place they take you when you break one of their “rules,” or at least they say you did. It’s supposed to be a deterrent from future acts of whatever they deem [...]
After spending 3 years in a medium security Ohio prison, a friend of mine once asked me if the time spent there had institutionalized me. At the time my idea of what it meant to be institutionalized consisted of simply forming [...]
After spending over five years in solitary confinement, I have finally come to realize that solitary confinement is known torture -- and the prisoners aren’t the only ones who know this. There have been extensive studies that have shown that lengthy [...]