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It's 2011 and Don is homeless. He's a hard-core, street-level drug addict. He's a secluded loner, and he's been declared by the courts to be insane. And as if that weren't enough, he's also served over twenty years in prison for bank robberies - and he's been charged with yet another one. It's 2018 and Don is a homeowner. He's sober and has genuine friends. He's married and he's become the father of two young boys. He's the Director of Software Development for an international financial services company. He's also a transformational speaker, helping others by spreading a message of hope and self-forgiveness. The Prison Within: A Memoir of Breaking Free is the true, inspirational story of how despair and extreme isolation miraculously turned to hope, connection, and true success. The journey begins as an out of control train wreck, twisting downward through the madness of seedy drug motels, mental institutions, and prison yards. But Don's path takes a desperate turn, and a slow climb leads to personal awakening, transformation, and healing that propels him upward to make an astonishing comeback.
A “profound, sometimes hilarious, often heartbreaking” (The New York Times) view of prison life, as told by currently and formerly incarcerated people, from the co-creators and co-hosts of the Peabody- and Pulitzer-nominated podcast Ear Hustle “A must-read for fans of the legendary podcast and all those who seek to understand crime, punishment, and mass incarceration in America.”—Piper Kerman, author of Orange Is the New Black When Nigel Poor and Earlonne Woods met, Nigel was a photography professor volunteering with the Prison University Project and Earlonne was serving thirty-one years to life at California’s San Quentin State Prison. Initially drawn to each other by their shared interest in storytelling, neither had podcast production experience when they decided to enter Radiotopia’s contest for new shows . . . and won. Using the prize for seed money, Nigel and Earlonne launched Ear Hustle, named after the prison term for “eavesdropping.” It was the first podcast created and produced entirely within prison and would go on to be heard millions of times worldwide, garner Peabody and Pulitzer award nominations, and help earn Earlonne his freedom when his sentence was commuted in 2018. In This Is Ear Hustle, Nigel and Earlonne share their own stories of how they came to San Quentin, how they created their phenomenally popular podcast amid extreme limitations, and what has kept them collaborating season after season. They present new stories, all with the same insight, balance, and rapport that distinguish the podcast. In an era when more than two million people are incarcerated across the United States—a number that grows by 600,000 annually—Nigel and Earlonne explore the full and often surprising realities of prison life. With characteristic candor and humor, their moving portrayals include unexpected moments of self-discovery, unlikely alliances, inspirational resilience, and ingenious work-arounds. One personal narrative at a time, framed by Nigel’s and Earlonne’s distinct perspectives, This Is Ear Hustle reveals the complexity of life for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people while illuminating the shared experiences of humanity that unite us all.
A groundbreaking contribution to the study of nontheatrical film exhibition, Carceral Fantasies tells the little-known story of how cinema found a home in the U.S. penitentiary system and how the prison emerged as a setting and narrative trope in modern cinema. Focusing on films shown in prisons before 1935, Alison Griffiths explores the unique experience of viewing cinema while incarcerated and the complex cultural roots of cinematic renderings of prison life. Griffiths considers a diverse mix of cinematic genres, from early actualities and reenactments of notorious executions to reformist exposés of the 1920s. She connects an early fascination with cinematic images of punishment and execution, especially electrocutions, to the attractions of the nineteenth-century carnival electrical wonder show and Phantasmagoria (a ghost show using magic lantern projections and special effects). Griffiths draws upon convict writing, prison annual reports, and the popular press obsession with prison-house cinema to document the integration of film into existing reformist and educational activities and film's psychic extension of flights of fancy undertaken by inmates in their cells. Combining penal history with visual and film studies and theories surrounding media's sensual effects, Carceral Fantasies illuminates how filmic representations of the penal system enacted ideas about modernity, gender, the body, and the public, shaping both the social experience of cinema and the public's understanding of the modern prison.
By quadrupling the number of people behind bars in two decades, the United States has become the world leader in incarceration. Much has been written on the men who make up the vast majority of the nation’s two million inmates. But what of the women they leave behind? Doing Time Together vividly details the ways that prisons shape and infiltrate the lives of women with husbands, fiancés, and boyfriends on the inside. Megan Comfort spent years getting to know women visiting men at San Quentin State Prison, observing how their romantic relationships drew them into contact with the penitentiary. Tangling with the prison’s intrusive scrutiny and rigid rules turns these women into “quasi-inmates,” eroding the boundary between home and prison and altering their sense of intimacy, love, and justice. Yet Comfort also finds that with social welfare weakened, prisons are the most powerful public institutions available to women struggling to overcome untreated social ills and sustain relationships with marginalized men. As a result, they express great ambivalence about the prison and the control it exerts over their daily lives. An illuminating analysis of women caught in the shadow of America’s massive prison system, Comfort’s book will be essential for anyone concerned with the consequences of our punitive culture.
An Insightful Book from the Little Books of Justice and Peacebuilding Series, Which Has Sold Over 170,000 Copies The more than 2.3 million incarcerated individuals in the United States are often regarded as a throw-away population. While the criminal-justice system focuses on giving offenders "what they deserve," it does little to restore the needs created by crime or to explore the factors that lead to it. Restorative justice, with its emphasis on identifying the justice needs of everyone involved in a crime, is helping to restore prisoners' sense of humanity while holding them accountable for their actions. In this book, Barb Toews, with years of experience in prison work, shows how people in prison can live restorative-justice principles. She shows how these practices can change prison culture and society. Written for an incarcerated audience and for all those who work with people in prison, this book also clearly outlines the experiences and needs of this under-represented and often overlooked part of our society.
Inside the Broken California Prison System by veteran jailhouse journalist Boston Woodard provides an insider 's view of California's dysfunctional prison industrial complex in crisis. On May 23, 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that due to massive overcrowding, California is in violation of the Eighth Amendment, which constitutionally prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Because its 33 prisons are at nearly 200 percent capacity, the state has been ordered to release or find new accommodations for more than 30,000 prisoners within two years. With the harshest sentencing laws, toughest parole policy, and highest recidivism rate in the nation, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is a failure on all counts except for those who profit from the $10 billion spent annually to maintain it. Woodard describes how it came to this, as well as the day-to-day reality of the impact on prisoners in a corrupt system effectively accountable to no one.Inside the Broken California Prison System is a collection of more than 40 articles originally published over a period of six years in the Community Alliance, a small monthly newspaper in Fresno, California. They detail subjects such as restricted media access to prisoners, the brutal impact of overcrowding, medical and mental health treatment failures, rogue prison staff, religious and racial discrimination, an omnipotent prison guard union, and shipping prisoners out of state to private prisons. At the same time he offers real solutions to the overcrowding problem that would not endanger public safety.Woodard is a writer, musician, literacy tutor, event organizer, and prisoners rights advocate who has been writing about what goes on inside the California prison system for almost two decades in both free world and prison publications. His articles have embarrassed and angered prison officials used to operating without public oversight, and he 's paid a price for exercising his First Amendment right to define his surroundings. He 's been put in the Hole, had his mail tampered with, lost his typewriter, subjected to verbal threats, had his personal property stolen or destroyed, and been illegally and adversely transferred from prison to prison. Still he refuses to be intimidated. My writing is not about prison rights, he says. It 's about the public 's right to know about the good and bad within these prison walls and how their money is being spent. It 's also about the positive efforts of men and women given up for lost by society. I just want the guards and prison officials to do what is demanded of me and every other prisoner in the system, and that is to obey the law and follow the regulations.
San Quentin State Prison, California’s oldest prison and the nation’s largest, is notorious for once holding America’s most dangerous prisoners. But in 2008, the Bastille-by-the-Bay became a beacon for rehabilitation through the prisoner-run newspaper the San Quentin News. Prison Truth tells the story of how prisoners, many serving life terms, transformed the prison climate from what Johnny Cash called a living hell to an environment that fostered positive change in inmates’ lives. Award-winning journalist William J. Drummond takes us behind bars, introducing us to Arnulfo García, the visionary prisoner who led the revival of the newspaper. Drummond describes how the San Quentin News, after a twenty-year shutdown, was recalled to life under an enlightened warden and the small group of local retired newspaper veterans serving as advisers, which Drummond joined in 2012. Sharing how officials cautiously and often unwittingly allowed the newspaper to tell the stories of the incarcerated, Prison Truth illustrates the power of prison media to humanize the experiences of people inside penitentiary walls and to forge alliances with social justice networks seeking reform.
Children of the Prison Boom describes the devastating effects of America's experiment in mass incarceration for a generation of vulnerable children. Wakefield and Wildeman find that parental imprisonment leads to increased mental health and behavioral problems, infant mortality, and child homelessness which translate into large-scale increases in racial inequality.
The Struggle Within is an accessible yet wide-ranging historical primer about how mass imprisonment has been a tool of repression deployed against diverse left-wing social movements over the last fifty years. Berger examines some of the most dynamic social movements across half a century: black liberation, Puerto Rican independence, Native American sovereignty, Chicano radicalism, white antiracist and working-class mobilizations, pacifist and antinuclear campaigns, and earth liberation and animal rights. Berger’s encyclopedic knowledge of American social movements provides a rich comparative history of numerous social movements that continue to shape contemporary politics. The book also offers a little-heard voice in contemporary critiques of mass incarceration. Rather than seeing the issue of America’s prison growth as stemming solely from the war on drugs, Berger locates mass incarceration within a slew of social movements that have provided steep challenges to state power.
In the 1970s, while politicians and activists outside prisons debated the proper response to crime, incarcerated people helped shape those debates though a broad range of remarkable political and literary writings. Lee Bernstein explores the forces that sparked a dramatic "prison art renaissance," shedding light on how incarcerated people produced powerful works of writing, performance, and visual art. These included everything from George Jackson's revolutionary Soledad Brother to Miguel Pinero's acclaimed off-Broadway play and Hollywood film Short Eyes. An extraordinary range of prison programs--fine arts, theater, secondary education, and prisoner-run programs--allowed the voices of prisoners to influence the Black Arts Movement, the Nuyorican writers, "New Journalism," and political theater, among the most important aesthetic contributions of the decade. By the 1980s and '90s, prisoners' educational and artistic programs were scaled back or eliminated as the "war on crime" escalated. But by then these prisoners' words had crossed over the wall, helping many Americans to rethink the meaning of the walls themselves and, ultimately, the meaning of the society that produced them.