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 [...]
When I sat on death row for 20 years my favorite game to play was the “what if…?” This is an exercise that most people engage in, but none more so than prisoners. No inmate feels like they belong in prison. [...]
On October 31, 1984, Halloween Night at 7:00 pm, gunshots rained on the streets of the middle-class neighborhood of Mount Airy in Philadelphia, PA. I was just 17 years old at the time. My mom worked as an Executive Secretary and [...]
AN AMAZING SIDE NOTE about Leonard: Agnes Fury is the mother and grandmother of author Leonard Scoven's two victims. Years ago, she contacted Scovens in prison to find answers and closure. Amazingly, their relationship turned into a friendship after the two [...]
A Day in my Box By Dorothy Maraglino I try to sleep all day during the loud hours, so I can find peaceful silence alone overnight while others sleep. Here's how my reverse schedule works. 4 a.m. and the lights slam [...]
By: Daniel Harris, Contributing Writer If marijuana is a gateway drug, as some suppose, then the laws that make it illegal are the keys to the gate... and it's a prison gate. Everyone that smokes a joint, even future presidents, break the [...]
Before 1977, ALL California prisoners were sentenced to Indeterminate sentences, [or Life on Parole: 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 [...]
On September 14, 1979, Michael William Daniels’ sentencing order directed that he be executed “in a manner prescribed by law, before sunrise on March 28, 1980.” Within an hour he was triple-shackled and in a van on his way to [...]
BY JASON COOPER Brutal Murders. Victims Stabbed 83 Times. Those were just some of the headlines above stories filled with truth and lies. Stories about a sociopathic monster. Surely a villain made for novels and movies. Those were the only [...]
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 [...]