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When I Get To Key West

In prison, despite the stereotypes, I am not raped by a gang of women with a toilet plunger; no muscled-up stud with tattooed tits claims me for her “wife”; no one corners me in the laundry room and beats the crap out of me.

Eavesdropping

Brothers, no-kidding eyes, bean holes

The Bathroom

Soaking in the tub, getting some privacy, having sex

Getting Free

Escaping The Prisons Of Our Own Making — An Interview With Bo Lozoff

Those three years of retreat were the hardest of my life. I’d been doing prison work for almost twenty years, but that one incident in Louisiana popped my balloon, and everything deflated. I had no energy. Had I been in a mainstream career, people would have pushed me to take Prozac. But I recognized that a very important spiritual development was occurring, and I needed to follow it to its conclusion.

Love, Michael

To me, my brother was his letters home. Even now, his lucid, correct handwriting remains more vivid in my mind than any picture.

Crimes Of Punishment

An Interview With Christian Parenti

I describe SWAT teams in Fresno as a kind of postmodern public execution — a highly ritualized, highly theatrical display of the sovereign’s power. Like an invading army, they occupy whole neighborhoods, harass the residents, and surround the houses. They have machine guns, barking dogs, and armored personnel carriers. This is state propaganda, political theater, directed not at the “perp” holed up in the house, but at the hundreds of community members watching.

Ghostwriting

Bull City looks like Fidel Castro: green fatigues, engineer’s cap, and mule-tail, anarchist beard. He’s from Missoula, Montana, but he took his fall — a life sentence — right up the road in Wilkes County, North Carolina. He carries a Bible, a dictionary, a prison-issue loose-leaf, and two sharpened pencils. He wants to be a writer.

Urban Renewal

The Resurrection Of An Ex-Gang Member — An Interview With Luis Rodríguez

Someone once pointed out to me that the word respect comes from the latin respectus, which means “to see again.” It’s a beautiful concept. We have to see each other again. We have to see the gang member again, and the poor farmer, too. As we see them again, we find they’re not that different from us, that a thread connects us all: the Indian on the reservation and the immigrant just arriving on these shores; the middle-class kid in the suburbs and the gang member in the inner city. The more we look, the thicker that thread becomes. Sometimes it may be invisible, but it’s there. We’ve got to make it more visible. There is no such thing as a separate reality. What we do here affects people over there.

Crimes And Misdemeanors

A partner in crime, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a double-dog dare

Windows

Moonies, congealing gravy, calls of the sandhill cranes across the river