An early scene in The Shawshank Redemption has the old-school convicts watching the new fish get off the bus and placing bets on which one will break first. Some guys, you can immediately tell, don’t belong here. They ain’t gonna make [...]
With light being shed on police abuse against suspected lawbreakers this summer, I wonder if the public has taken that newfound knowledge a step further. Black lives matter, but do incarcerated lives matter? Have they thought: “If that level of abuse [...]
The movie, THE STANFORD EXPERIMENT, is a fictionalized account of the notorious study conducted by Stanford Professor Phil Zombardo in 1971. The research team used local newspaper ads to recruit 18 male students. Participants were told they’d be paid $15/hour to [...]
Welcome to Zombie Land. Those are the words that rattle around inside my skull every time I step away from my cell during this Coronavirus meltdown. Here in the Great State of Michigan, some might argue that our Governor was a [...]
Courtesy of Jason Walker While this Texas prison, Clements Unit, has well over one-thousand documented mentally ill prisoners, its not considered a psych unit at all. In fact it has one small ward that has a program for [...]
This is a look at prison life from both sides of the glass. I am a former corrections officer, now serving a 7-year sentence. I used to be employed by a private corrections provider. I worked for 3 years as an [...]
Gilbert Paliotta, Department of CorrectionsAfter almost 20 years of being in maximum, I’ve come to notice the types of individuals that choose to work in places like this. It’s the unmotivated, lazy types. It’s the failed at other career choices type. [...]
“Stop fighting!” The tower guard is yelling. He’s out on the catwalk of the nearest tower, rifle up. His voice isn’t as urgent, not as commanding as it could be, as it has been on other occasions. The fight he’s looking [...]
The alarm went off, signaling that once again the prison was about to be shut down and placed on lock-down because of the major fights going on between rival gangs within the prison walls. So now, as usual, we were [...]
Most of us will get out. Some will stay in prison for only a few months; others will stay for a few years, but only a small percentage will die behind prison walls without ever again walking free. Most of [...]
In one sense, prisoners with mental disabilities have the same needs as everybody else. But in a crucial sense, our situation is dramatically different. Let me tell you about it. In Texas, they put the MH/MR [mental health/mental retardation] inmates [...]
BY CHARLES SELBY For three decades, I have witnessed countless occasions in which Emergency Response Teams are assembled to carry out chemical cell extractions of disruptive prisoners, in this case an African-American prisoner. Equally-hued guards are dissuaded by the more [...]