Download or read book Angolite written by and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Life Sentences written by Wilbert Rideau and published by Three Rivers Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on their award-winning reporting for the Louisiana State Penitentiary's uncensored newsmagazine, The Angolite, Wilbert Rideau and Ron Wikberg present the stark reality of life behind bars and the human, political, and fiscal costs of our long-running war on crime.
Download or read book In the Place of Justice written by Wilbert Rideau and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2011-01-06 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1961, young, black, eighth-grade dropout Wilbert Rideau despaired of his small-town future in the segregated deep south of America. He set out to rob the local bank and after a bungled robbery he killed the bank teller, a fifty-year-old white female. He was arrested and gave a full confession. When we meet Rideau he has just been sentenced to death row, from where he embarks on an extraordinary journey. He is imprisoned at Angola, the most violent prison in America, where brutality, sexual slavery and local politics confine prisoners in ways that bars alone cannot. Yet Rideau breaks through all this and finds hope and meaning, becoming editor of the prison magazine, going on to win national journalism awards. Full of gritty realism and potent in its evocation of a life condemned, Rideau goes far beyond the traditional prison memoir and reveals an emotionally wrought and magical conclusion to his forty-four years in prison.
Download or read book Instrument of the State written by Benjamin J. Harbert and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Angola Prison is the largest and one of the most notorious state prisons in the United States, built into a slave plantation that Louisiana bought in 1901. It has also been the most musically significant. Following a documentary film project, author Benjamin J. Harbert visited Angola, gathered oral histories, and conducted archival research to piece together an account of how prisoners and the administration have used music for over 120 years. The book brings together well-known musicians who served time there, including Lead Belly, Charles Neville, and James Booker, as well as a litany of musicians who made significant contributions to the prison's music scene only to die there or unable to establish careers upon release. Instrument of the State: A Century of Music in Louisiana State Penitentiary traces how musicians find small but essential freedoms by playing jazz, R&B, country, gospel, rock, and fusion. In doing so, Harbert expands folkloric definitions of "prison music." The book considers the broader musicality of the prison as a way of understanding state power and the fragments of hope and joy that remain in its wake. Music connects to the prison's shifting and often conflicting missions: rehabilitation, slavery, and abandonment. The perspectives of incarcerated musicians will reveal how music responds to violence, reform, prisoner rights, sensationalism, and power through the twentieth century. Instrument of the State is an indictment of the brutality of prison, its disproportionate effects on African-Americans, and the desperate profiteering of a deliberately underfunded state agency"--
Download or read book Prison Capital written by Lydia Pelot-Hobbs and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2023-11-28 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. This is the first detailed account of Louisiana's unprecedented turn to mass incarceration from 1970 to 2020. Through extensive research, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs illuminates how policy makers enlarged Louisiana's carceral infrastructures with new prisons and jail expansions alongside the bulking up of police and prosecutorial power. At the same time, these infrastructures were the products of multiscalar crises: the swings of global oil capitalism, liberal federal court and policy interventions, the rise of neoliberal governance and law-and-order austerity, and racist and patriarchal moral panics surrounding "crime." However, these crises have also created fertile space for anticarceral social movements. From incarcerated people filing conditions of confinement lawsuits and Angola activists challenging life without parole to grassroots organizers struggling to shrink the New Orleans jail following Hurricane Katrina and LGBTQ youth of color organizing against police sexual violence, grassroots movements stretch us toward new geographies of freedom in the lineage of abolition democracy. Understanding Louisiana's carceral crisis extends our understanding of the interplay between the crises of mass criminalization and racial capitalism while highlighting the conditions of possibility for dismantling carceral power in all its forms.
Download or read book Jailhouse Journalism written by James McGrath Morris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1980s alone, some 100 periodicals were published by and for inmates of America's prisons. Unlike their peers who passed their sentences stamping out licence plates, these convicts spent their days like reporters in any community - looking for the story. Yet their own story, the lengthy history of their unique brand of journalism, remained largely unknown. In this volume James McGrath Morris seeks to address the history of this medium, the lives of the men and women who brought it to life, and the controversies that often surround it.
Download or read book A Wall Is Just a Wall written by Reiko Hillyer and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-05 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the twentieth century, even the harshest prison systems in the United States were rather porous. Incarcerated people were regularly released from prison for Christmas holidays; the wives of incarcerated men could visit for seventy-two hours relatively unsupervised; and governors routinely commuted the sentences of people convicted of murder. By the 1990s, these practices had become rarer as politicians and the media—in contrast to corrections officials—described the public as potential victims who required constant protection against the threat of violence. In A Wall Is Just a Wall Reiko Hillyer focuses on gubernatorial clemency, furlough, and conjugal visits to examine the origins and decline of practices that allowed incarcerated people to transcend prison boundaries. Illuminating prisoners’ lived experiences as they suffered, critiqued, survived, and resisted changing penal practices, she shows that the current impermeability of the prison is a recent, uneven, and contested phenomenon. By tracking the “thickening” of prison walls, Hillyer historicizes changing ideas of risk, the growing bipartisan acceptance of permanent exile and fixing the convicted at the moment of their crime as a form of punishment, and prisoners’ efforts to resist.
Download or read book The Meaning of Life written by Marc Mauer and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2018-12-11 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I can think of no authors more qualified to research the complex impact of life sentences than Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis. They have the expertise to track down the information that all citizens need to know and the skills to translate that research into accessible and powerful prose." —Heather Ann Thompson, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Blood in the Water From the author of the classic Race to Incarcerate, a forceful and necessary argument for eliminating life sentences, including profiles of six people directly impacted by life sentences by formerly incarcerated author Kerry Myers Most Western democracies have few or no people serving life sentences, yet here in the United States more than 200,000 people are sentenced to such prison terms. Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis of The Sentencing Project argue that there is no practical or moral justification for a sentence longer than twenty years. Harsher sentences have been shown to have little effect on crime rates, since people "age out" of crime—meaning that we're spending a fortune on geriatric care for older prisoners who pose little threat to public safety. Extreme punishment for serious crime also has an inflationary effect on sentences across the spectrum, helping to account for severe mandatory minimums and other harsh punishments. A thoughtful and stirring call to action, The Meaning of Life also features moving profiles of a half dozen people affected by life sentences, written by former "lifer" and award-winning writer Kerry Myers. The book will tie in to a campaign spearheaded by The Sentencing Project and offers a much-needed road map to a more humane criminal justice system.
Download or read book A Life in the Balance written by Billy Wayne Sinclair and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sentenced to death in 1965 at age twenty for an unpremeditated murder during the bungled holdup of a convenience store, Billy Wayne spent his first seven prison years on death row. When the death penalty was abolished, his sentence was life. Three-and-a-half decades later, Billy Wayne is still behind bars—feared by many politicians and prison officials for his well-known incorruptibility and unrelenting crusade for prison reform. This is his memoir. A Life in the Balance begins with an almost unbearable account of his early years—when he was so abused by his father one wonders how he survived—and his “escape” into a crowd of hooligans, which led him to the fateful day in 1965 when he held up the convenience store. His story takes you behind the metal doors of the Angola State Penitentiary to reveal the brutal truth of life inside. Here you will meet Billy Ray, Billy Wayne’s blood brother; old Emmitt Henderson, who died of prison neglect; Jamie Parks, a seventeen-year-old kid whose fate was sealed the day he arrived in Angola; Big Mick, who ran drugs in the prison to earn money to put his handicapped sister through college; Wilbert Rideau, Billy Wayne’s coeditor on The Angolite; the Dixie Mafia; and Richard Clark Hand, the young lawyer who took on Billy Wayne’s case and has been fighting for his release for thirty years.
Download or read book When Texas Prison Scams Religion written by Michael G. Maness and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2023-05-22 with total page 683 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Texas Prison Scams Religion exposes corruption in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, especially in the abuse of religion. In many ways, this book is a literature review of 1,800-plus works that defends freedom of conscience in prison while exposing the unconstitutionality of the seminary program that “buys faith with favor” from prisoners. The state veritably ordains the prisoner a “Field Minister” that represents the offices of the Governor, TDCJ Director, and wardens throughout the prison. Therein, TDCJ lies about neutrality in a program all about Christian missions and lies again in falsely certifying elementary Bible students as counselors. Why is the director sponsoring psychopaths counseling psychopaths? In fact, TDCJ pays $314 million a year to UTMB for psychiatric care and receives not a single report of the care given, and worse, for UTMB generates no reports itself. The underbelly TDCJ’s executive culture of cover up is exposed. TDCJ has hired the lowest qualified of the applicant pool many times in the last 25 years and regularly destroys statistics on violence. TDCJ Dir. Collier led the prison to model Louisiana Warden Burl Cain, the most scandal-ridden in penal history according to a host of published news stories for 20 years. Therein, Collier led TDCJ to favor the smallest segment of religious society within Evangelical Dominionism. Texas has no business endorsing the truth of any religion over another. We close with a proposal that utilizes the 400,000,000 hours of officer contact over ten years as a definitive influence in contrast to a commissioner that spends less than 10 minutes on each decision. Maness has been lobbying Austin for 15 years to definitively access staff for his “100,000 Mothers’ 1% Certainty Parole Texas Constitutional Amendment,” which would revolutionize prison culture and save Texans millions of the dollars.
Download or read book Casey s Law written by Albert V. Casey and published by Arcade Publishing. This book was released on 1998-04 with total page 748 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Refreshing and optimistic commonsense observations about the pursuit of business.
Download or read book Prison Truth written by William J. Drummond and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Love Behind Bars written by Jodie Sinclair and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Powerful, Poignant Story of Love, Courage, and Redemption from Death Row, Where an Indomitable Woman Challenged Corruption in Order to Free her Husband When TV reporter Jodie Sinclair went to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as the Death House at Angola, in 1981, she expected to report about the death penalty and leave. She never expected to fall in love. Billy Sinclair was an inmate at Angola, sent there for an accidental murder during a robbery gone wrong. After facing a trial which was skewed against him and being sentenced to death, he saw first-hand the corruption and abuse rife in the criminal justice system, and he began an unrelenting crusade for reform. When the pair married by proxy a year after meeting, Jodie took up Billy’s fight. From then on, she lived with one foot in the outside world and one in the complex and dehumanizing bureaucracy of the prison world. This incredible memoir tracks her heroic twenty-five-year fight to save her husband from dying in prison, the professional setbacks she suffered for marrying a prisoner, and a pardons scandal in which she wore a wire for the FBI to help her husband expose corruption in the criminal justice system leading all the way to the governor's office, which put a target on Billy's back. It is the uplifting true story of a woman who stood by her man, and in doing so, exposed the horrors of our criminal justice system and became a voice for all those who have loved ones behind bars.
Download or read book A Life in the Balance written by Billy Wayne Sinclair and published by Skyhorse Publishing Inc.. This book was released on 2012-03 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Billy Wayne Sinclair's powerful tale about his time at one of the worst prison systems in...
Download or read book Demystifying the Big House written by Katherine A Foss and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2018-07-06 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays in this volume illustrate how shows such as Orange Is the New Black and Oz impact the public’s perception of crime rates, the criminal justice system, and imprisonment. Contributors look at prison wives on reality television series, portrayals of death row, breastfeeding while in prison, transgender prisoners, and black masculinity. They also examine the ways in which media messages ignore an individual’s struggle against an all too frequently biased system and instead dehumanize the incarcerated as violent and overwhelmingly masculine. Together these essays argue media reform is necessary for penal reform, proposing that more accurate media representations of prison life could improve public support for programs dealing with poverty, abuse, and drug addiction—factors that increase the likelihood of criminal activity and incarceration. Scholars from cultural and critical studies, feminist studies, queer studies, African American studies, media studies, sociology, and psychology offer critical analysis of media depictions of prison, bridging the media’s portrayals of incarcerated lives with actual experiences and bringing to light forgotten voices in prison narratives.
Download or read book Journal Chemical Society London written by Chemical Society (Great Britain) and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page 1158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Colfax Massacre written by LeeAnna Keith and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a large body of documents, including eyewitness accounts and evidence from the site itself, Keith explores the racial tensions that led to the Colfax massacre - during which surrendering blacks were mercilessly slaughtered - and the reverberations this message of terror sent throughout the South.
