Download or read book Behind San Quentin s Walls written by William B. Secrest and published by Linden Publishing. This book was released on 2015-03-15 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: San Quentin is one of the most famous prisons in American history, featured in countless movies and novels, yet few know its colorful early history. In Behind San Quentin’s Walls, noted Old West historian William B. Secrest reveals the beginning of San Quentin, from its unlikely start as a real estate scheme to its essential role in taming the lawless California of the Gold Rush era. Featuring numerous citations from contemporary accounts, plus period photos, illustrations, newspaper clippings, and maps, Behind San Quentin’s Walls chronicles the political calculations that created San Quentin; the outsize egos of the men who built it; the mismanagement and frequent escapes that marred San Quentin’s early years; and the notorious ruffians and cutthroats who were housed there. Filled with exciting true stories of gunfights, brawls, prison riots, daring escapes, and intrepid manhunts, Behind San Quentin’s Walls is a rip-roaring Wild West tale of how men and women with immense talent for both good and evil tamed a new state and each other.
Download or read book Behind San Quentin s Walls written by William B. Secrest and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's one of the most famous prisons in American history, featured in countless movies and novels. Its inmates have included such diverse characters as Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan, Eldridge Cleaver, Merle Haggard, and Neal Cassady. It's the one of the oldest continually operating institutions of California state government. San Quentin State Prison is as iconic a symbol of California as the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hollywood sign, yet few people today know the prison's origins or colorful early history. Noted Old West historian William B. Secrest uncovers the forgotten beginnings of San Quentin in "Behind San Quentin's Walls: The History of the Legendary Prison and Its Inmates, 1851-1900." Going back to original source material of public records and contemporary newspaper accounts, Secrest tells of San Quentin's unlikely beginnings as a real estate scheme and its essential role in taming the violent and lawless California of Gold Rush days. "Behind San Quentin's Walls" presents the history of San Quentin as a microcosm of the settlement of California. Planned during the wildest days of Barbary Coast anarchy and Vigilante Committee lynch law in 1850s San Francisco, the state prison at San Quentin was the new state's first attempt to impose the rule of law on a violent frontier society. Featuring numerous citations from contemporary accounts, plus period photos, illustrations, newspaper clippings, and maps, Secrest chronicles the political calculations that created San Quentin; the outsize egos of the men who built it; the mismanagement and frequent escapes that marred San Quentin's early years; and the notorious ruffians and cutthroats who were housed there. Filled with exciting true stories of gunfights, brawls, prison riots, daring escapes, and intrepid manhunts, "Behind San Quentin's Walls" is also a rip-roaring Wild West tale of how men and women with immense talent for both good and evil tamed a new state and each other. "Behind San Quentin's Walls" is a bold mix of serious history and lively writing that no fan of Western history should miss.
Download or read book H Unit written by Keith Zimmerman and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2012-07-19 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bold account of launching an innovative creative writing class inside San Quentin and the journey of hardship, inspiration, & redemption of its members, from New York Times bestselling authors. San Quentin State Prison would be an unlikely place to look for writing talent. But Keith and Kent Zimmerman, twin brothers and New York Times bestselling co-authors of Operation Family Secrets, have found creative passion, a range of gritty, authentic voices, and a path to hope and redemption behind the guarded walls of the prison's H-Unit—through a creative writing course they founded almost a decade ago. H-Unit: A Story of Writing and Redemption Behind the Walls of San Quentin is the dramatic account of hope and purpose that explores Keith and Kent's experience teaching the class and their students' experience in the Literary Throwdown writing competition. Seen from the inside, H-Unit is written in an authentic voice and tells the story of real-life characters, from the recidivous "Big Bob" to the incorrigible "Midget Porn," whose lives are transformed by the written word.
Download or read book San Quentin Inside the Walls written by Nancy Ann Nichols and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book H Unit A Story of Writing and Redemption Behind the Walls of San Quentin written by and published by Turner. This book was released on 2013-09-10 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 The Prisoner in His Palace written by Will Bardenwerper and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song, this haunting, insightful, and surprisingly intimate portrait of Saddam Hussein provides “a brief, but powerful, meditation on the meaning of evil and power” (USA TODAY). The “captivating” (Military Times) The Prisoner in His Palace invites us to take a journey with twelve young American soldiers in the summer of 2006. Shortly after being deployed to Iraq, they learn their assignment: guarding Saddam Hussein in the months before his execution. Living alongside, and caring for, their “high value detainee and regularly transporting him to his raucous trial, many of the men begin questioning some of their most basic assumptions—about the judicial process, Saddam’s character, and the morality of modern war. Although the young soldiers’ increasingly intimate conversations with the once-feared dictator never lead them to doubt his responsibility for unspeakable crimes, the men do discover surprising new layers to his psyche that run counter to the media’s portrayal of him. Woven from firsthand accounts provided by many of the American guards, government officials, interrogators, scholars, spies, lawyers, family members, and victims, The Prisoner in His Palace shows two Saddams coexisting in one person: the defiant tyrant who uses torture and murder as tools, and a shrewd but contemplative prisoner who exhibits surprising affection, dignity, and courage in the face of looming death. In this thought-provoking narrative, Saddam, known as the “man without a conscience,” gets many of those around him to examine theirs. “A singular study exhibiting both military duty and human compassion” (Kirkus Reviews), The Prisoner in His Palace grants us “a behind-the-scenes look at history that’s nearly impossible to put down…a mesmerizing glimpse into the final moments of a brutal tyrant’s life” (BookPage).
Download or read book Behind the Wall written by Michelle Marie Sullivan and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book H unit written by Kent Zimmerman and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bold account of launching an innovative creative writing class inside San Quentin and the journey of hardship, inspiration, & redemption of its members, from New York Times bestselling authors. San Quentin State Prison would be an unlikely place to look for writing talent. But Keith and Kent Zimmerman, twin brothers and New York Times bestselling co-authors of Operation Family Secrets, have found creative passion, a range of gritty, authentic voices, and a path to hope and redemption behind the guarded walls of the prison's H-Unit—through a creative writing course they founded almost a decade ago. H-Unit: A Story of Writing and Redemption Behind the Walls of San Quentin is the dramatic account of hope and purpose that explores Keith and Kent's experience teaching the class and their students' experience in the Literary Throwdown writing competition. Seen from the inside, H-Unit is written in an authentic voice and tells the story of real-life characters, from the recidivous “Big Bob” to the incorrigible “Midget Porn,” whose lives are transformed by the written word.
Download or read book The San Quentin Chronicles written by Frank Frogge and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2017-04-17 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The San Quentin Chronicles is a raw, hard look at prison life as a white peckerwood and the countless days in the walls of San Quentin. It talks about heroin addiction and the price one pays behind barsfrom losing a wife to a disease to losing a daughter after getting clean. It tells how a hateful man can come back from all that bitterness and hatefulness and build a normal life, saving others like him. Its a story that will leave the readers spellbound and wanting more.
Download or read book Behind These Walls written by Albert Ru-Al Jones and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This state often referred to as "Killer Cali" has 33 adult prisons and hundreds of county jails that house a majority of active gang members. I have been to five different prisons and have seen, and done, some crazy things. I have rightfully earned my prison "stripes" fighting with Crips. Before we get transferred to these prisons we experience th biggest test of our reputation, in L.A. County Jail. You cannot hide in there because your enemy is right there waiting on you. The weak are preyed upon with no mercy. Even the sheriff's custody staff has become a gang their own, acting without restraits as if the Law or rules don't apply to them. They are crazy too, taking a great deal of satisfaction violating and beating inmates to a bloody mess. These pigs are building a formidable reputation of their own, and they have not yet hit the streets. So many men have lost their manhood--tortured and raped--Behind These Walls. -Albert "Ru-Al" Jones Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy has taught America how to attend to the whole lives of our men and women on Death Row. Behind These Walls was written from the Death Row in California's San Quentin Prison. The author, Albert "Ru-al" Jones, has been on the Row since 1997. Jones is a proud member of the Blood street gang and a devout Christian. In prison he has completed his High School degree and nearly completed a college degree. He is the author of "Our Last Meals?: San Quentin Death Row Cook Book" and of "I'm in God's Confinement", which tells of his life of Christian faith in prison. Behind These Walls is the final book in Jones' trilogy of memoirs. It tells of events that happen at the same time as the second book of the trilogy, 10 Toez Down, when Jones is in his late teens and his twenties. The book is just three chapters. In the first, Jones goes into great detail into the experience of his first trial and of the process, over several days, of being sent into a County Jail and his harrowing experience of acclimation into a hazardous new world. The tension between Bloods and Crips is only intensified in the jail, with the added complexity of prison guards and other gangs. In the second chapter, The Blood Modules, Jones makes it clear that he went in and out of that jail several times and so is able to add depth and nuance to his portrayal of life behind bars. He includes affectionate portrayals of some of the men whose wisdom help him negotiate the perils and temptations of jail. The third chapter, Prison Life, tells of Jones' experiences in five different State Prisons, which turn out to be relatively safe and stable compared to the LA County Jail. He is baptized, makes some unusual connections and alliances and needs to continually negotiate new challenges and sub-cultures. The first book of the trilogy, Put on the Shelf to Die, tells of his childhood up until the time he is recruited by the Bloods, and then jumps ahead to the time he is arrested for murder, tried by a nearly all white jury, sent to San Quentin's Death Row and then settles into life there. The next book, 10 Toez Down, spares no details of his life as a "gangsta" out on the streets with stories of drugs, sex and violence as well as the brotherhood among the Bloods and his intimate relationships with his family and his girlfriend. -Reverence Christopher Martin
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 Don t Shoot I m the Guitar Man written by Buzzy Martin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-09-07 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of lifelong musician Buzzy Martin, music teacher to the hardened criminals inside the walls of San Quentin Prison-and what he learned, note by incredible note.
Download or read book Bulletin written by Dahlia Society of California and published by . This book was released on 1917 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Architecture of the Everyday written by Deborah Berke and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ordinary. Banal. Quotidian. These words are rarely used to praise architecture, but in fact they represent the interest of a growing number of architects looking to the everyday to escape the ever-quickening cycles of consumption and fashion that have reduced architecture to a series of stylistic fads. Architecture of the Everyday makes a plea for an architecture that is emphatically un-monumental, anti-heroic, and unconcerned with formal extravagance. Edited by Deborah Berke and Steven Harris, this collection of writings, photo-essays, and projects describes an architecture that draws strength from its simplicity, use of common materials, and relationship to other fields of study. Topics range from a website that explores the politics of domesticity, to a transformation of the sidewalk in Los Angeles' Little Tokyo, to a discussion of the work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Contributors include Margaret Crawford, Peggy Deamer, Deborah Fausch, Ben Gianni and Mark Robbins, Joan Ockman, Ernest Pascucci, Alan Plattus, and Mary-Ann Ray. Deborah Berke and Steven Harris are currently associate professors of architecture at Yale University, and have their own practices in New York City.
Download or read book Literary Journalism Goes Inside Prison written by David Swick and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary Journalism Goes Inside Prison: Just Sentences opens up a new exploration of literary journalism – immersive, long-form journalism so beautifully written that it can stand as literature – in the first anthology to examine literary journalism and prison. In this book, a wide range of compelling subjects are considered. These include Nelson Mandela and other prisoners of apartheid; the made-in-prison podcast Ear Hustle; women’s experiences of life behind bars; Behrouz Boochani’s 2018 bestseller No Friend but the Mountains; George Orwell’s artful writing on incarceration; Pete Earley’s immersion into the largest prison in the United States, The Hot House; Arthur Koestler and the Spanish Civil War; Ted Conover’s year as a prison guard in Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing and (most originally) Bruce Springsteen’s execution narrative Nebraska. This volume will benefit anyone who writes, studies or teaches any form of narrative nonfiction. Eleven international scholars articulate what makes the work they are analysing so exceptional. At the same time, they offer insights on a diverse range of vital topics. These include journalism ethics, journalism and trauma, media history, cultural studies, criminology and social justice.
Download or read book Lessons from San Quentin written by Bill Dallas and published by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If Bill Dallas didn’t have it all, he had most of it. A diploma from a prestigious university, a lucrative career as a top California real estate entrepreneur, and more than enough money to fund a life filled with sports cars, penthouses, and beautiful women. And then it all fell apart. Convicted of grand theft embezzlement, the former golden boy found himself in one of the nation’s most infamous institutions—San Quentin, home of “the worst of the worst.” He thought it was the end of everything. But the real story was about to begin. Lessons from San Quentin chronicles Bill’s journey from narcissistic playboy . . . to suicidal inmate . . . to spiritual apprentice. Along the way, it introduces us to his unlikely mentors—San Quentin’s “Lifers,” who guided Bill to an unexpected relationship with God. Through a vivid and transparent recounting of stories from his prison experience, Bill shares 12 life principles he had to learn the hard way—and that can help you triumph over even the most difficult circumstances.
