Sublime

We need to do better as a society, and understand that, yes, there are people in the system that deserve this kind of punishment, but a large majority of our prison population are just regular people… non-violent drug offenders like myself. There are plenty more, like me, that are capable of being responsible, productive, tax paying members of... See more

In Dogwood, reserved for the best-behaved inmates, prisoners get special privileges like extra television time, and many work outside the unit in places like the metal shop, the garment factory, or the chow hall. Some “trusties” even get to work in the front office, or beyond the fence washing employees’ personal cars. Birch holds most of the... See more

Mike Tyson’s reading habits in prison: “I really enjoyed Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization. I read Mao’s book, I read Che. I read Machiavelli, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Marx, Shakespeare, you name it.” “I was right there next to Mao on the long fucking march.” https://t.co/0v9gfWHLJu

We send people away for years, tell them exactly what to do every day and they get to make exacrly one choice every day: do you obey or not? That's the only choice you get to make. Then, after 3, 5, 10 years, we send them out into society and tell them, "Make better choices." But we haven't prepared them for that at all. We have given them almost... See more

Jails, more and more, have become warehouses for people with mental illness. The stats sum it up: of the almost two million jail and prison inmates in the United States, almost three hundred thousand are people with serious mental illness. Twenty percent of these mentally ill inmates were homeless when they were incarcerated. Seventy-five percent

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Our prisons are filled with people who entered as children or very young adults, who have spent their formative years learning to navigate a world that exists nowhere outside these walls