Matthew J. Parker: Prison Reform Envisioned by a Convicted Felon
I’ve had a lot of things done to me in both jail and prison, but coddling was never one of them. Yet in the late 1980s and 1990s, I heard this word used continually to describe prisons
Larry Levis: Make a Law So That the Spine Remembers Wings
So that the truant boy may go steady with the State,
So that in his spine a memory of wings
Will make his shoulders tense & bend
Like a thing already flown
Howard Zinn: Thoughts on Civil Disobedience
They’ll say we’re disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war.
Matthew J. Parker: A Junkie By Any Other Name
I was a junkie for 20-odd years, ten of which I spent locked up – one fed beef and four (Arizona) state, all drug-related. To feed my habit, I chose to shoplift. A lot.
Antoine Davis, Darrell Jackson: What Juneteenth looks like for prisoners
As Black men in prison, we live the tension between celebrating the abolition of slavery and struggling inside the system that replaced it.
Etheridge Knight: Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane
Hard Rock / was / “known not to take no shit
From nobody,” and he had the scars to prove it:
Video: The Facility
Detained inside an infamous American detention center as the pandemic spreads, a group of immigrants organize in protest to demand protection and release from confinement.
Edward Harkness: My Father’s Uncles Doing Time
Their sorry, sorry asses. Bad year, 1929.
Neither one is yet 30 in the grim prison photos
I received from the state archives.
Abby Zimet: Freedom Reads. Books Are a Lifeline To a Still-Flawed World
On Feb. 21, 1965, Malcolm X – former inmate, fierce civil rights warrior, “one of the greatest leaders this country has ever seen” and for what he proudly deemed Afro-Americans “our own … Continue reading
Video: Day Release (Freigang)
In this internationally acclaimed film, single mother Kathi receives day release from prison and finds her three-year-old son, who is living with her unstable mother, in bad circumstances. She is forced to find a way to enable a better future for him, while time is against her, she has to be back in prison at six pm.
Peter Makuck: Day on the River
It was during Christmas vacation that I first met Mr. Talbot. His son, Jean-Luc, was my good friend and classmate at a small Franciscan college in a French-Canadian enclave in … Continue reading
Video: Tower
This animated documentary from director Nádia Mangolini mines the memories the four Gomes da Silva siblings whose father went missing and whose mother was imprisoned in a tower during a period oppressive dictatorship in Brazil.
Video: My Brother’s Keeper
A former Guantánamo Bay prisoner and his guard reunite as equals 13 years later.
Video: Huntsville Station
Every weekday, dozens of inmates are released on parole from Huntsville State Penitentiary, the largest prison release center in Texas. With a bus ticket voucher and $100 release check, most of them spend their first minutes out of prison on phone calls, cigarettes, and quiet reflection at the Greyhound station up the block.
