An intimate first person non-fiction storytelling experience about incarceration in the United States.
The most overlooked aspects of incarceration are the victims that have no voice. Victims so young that they seldomly understand what has happened to them. These are the children of the fathers that are incarcerated.
Continue reading “Visiting Your Children While Incarcerated”
Your cellmate is the most important person you’ll interact with while you are incarcerated. You are forced to live with this individual 24-7, and you will spend many hours locked in the cell with each other. It’s important that you afford respect to your cellmate (or “celly” as we say around here), for you must close your eyes at night with this person only a few feet away from you. No matter how big and tough you may think you are, sleep is the great equalizer.
In my last post about Brexit (see Hotel California), I couldn’t help but sympathize with my British readers. The state of politics there are similar to the state of politics here. While we have different issues, we both suffer from division. You all have Brexit, we have Trump.
When I began my time, inmates had just lost access to college Pell grants with the passage of the1994 crime bill. A multi-year battle had raged within the public sphere about the benefits of providing higher education to inmates, and Pell Grants fell victim to this debate. The often cited lower recidivism rate that accompanies higher education has consistently lost to a vocal opposition minority, typically a misguided crowd that argues ‘why should a prisoner have access to a Pell grant when my own law abiding son or daughter can’t get one?’ Supporters of the grants commonly cite a nonpartisan Rand Corp study which found that prison education not only saves money but meaningfully reduces the recidivism rate. To this day, the vocal opposition has won the ‘no grants for higher education for inmates’ argument.
Continue reading “Inmates Should Be Allowed Higher Education”
Prison is unlike anything else in life. It’s not something you can master through reading, nor can you conquer it by talking to others. The best that you can do is learn as much as you can about the unwrittens of This World, because the unwrittens (the rules convicts live by) govern all that happens here.