When someone goes to prison, we don't expect it to be like attending a country club. The media often paints famous prisons like a stay at summer camp. The truth is that Texas prisons are FAR from any vacation. In fact, they are a business established to keep people in as long a possible and consider it a victory when someone returns.
These letters are written by those who have first-hand experience as a prisoner to the atrocities going on each day. They tell of inhumane treatment by those in charge to people that were entrusted to ensure basic rights as a human.
It used to be that one consoling statement you might hear a condemned prisoner utter as he was cuffed by the bailiff to begin his sentence would be, “Well, at least I can get my teeth fixed.” This...
The vistation room in a penitentiary doesn’t follow the same laws of time as the rest of the universe. A two-hour visit passes in the same amount of time as a commercial break on the television, whi...
I’ve been promising to write for some time about the way-station all the inmates in this region of the TDCJ must pass through when either coming or going to Huntsville or, more importantly, the hosp...
Eventually, I’m going to continue with my history of the problems the TDCJ has in keeping its “treatment industrial complex” running, but first I wanted to bring up a few things that have meant ...
Although I lost everything I owned when I came to prison, I immediately began to accumulate more stuff- the meager bit of personal property that the TDCJ will allow me to have now that I’m incarcera...
This seems like the perfect time to tell you about the day that turned me into a “writ-writer”, or “jailhouse lawyer”. Why? Because one of the authors of one of the worst days of my life has j...
Allow me to show you how insane our medical system can be inside the Texas prisons. Back before the David Ruiz lawsuit, when an inmate showed up to the medical department, instead of being seen by ...
I am at the Stevenson Unit my first day, and I get off the bus, and I notice right away that it’s really clean down here. Of course, we have to strip out again, but by now, I’m used to this. Then,...
The Stevenson Unit was built in 1994. “Inmate.com”, what we like to call the rumor mill around here, informs me that this unit has a shelf-life of 20 years. For those of you, like me, that are not...
I have been talking about the early 1990s, and all ofthe violence, and I’ve talked about the big prison boomthat took Texas from around 50 some thousand inmates to almost 200,000 we have today....
In my past chapters, I have talked a lot about the abuses in the Texas prison system. I have spoken about the gang wars that have left prisoners stabbed, beat or killed. And before I continue on throu...
There are people who picture in their minds that everybody in prison is some street hoodlum that they see in the movies, but the truth is that the people in here come from every walk of life....
