In 1987, at the time of my arrest, I was living in Miami.  Federal marshals had the responsibility of transporting me to Seattle where I faced criminal charges for bad decisions I had made in my early 20s to traffic in cocaine.  While boarding the airplane the marshals used to transport prisoners, I remember being [...]

In 1987, DEA agents arrested me.  Soon thereafter, a jury convicted me for bad decisions I made as a young man to traffic in cocaine.  As a consequence of my convictions, a federal judge sentenced me to serve a 45-year sentence.  While confined in the Pierce County Jail awaiting my transfer to prison, I remember [...]

I’ve learned many lessons as a man who has been imprisoned for the past 25 years. One of those lessons suggested that regardless of the contributions social scientists and scholars made to improve the effectiveness of our nation’s criminal justice system, they faced enormous resistance from those within who wanted the system to continue growing. [...]

In 1987 I was 23 years old and taking the first steps through a 45-year sentence in federal prison.  I had never been incarcerated before, so I did not know what to expect from the experience.  All I knew was that when I emerged from an odyssey that would carry me through prisons of every [...]

Three scholars from Temple University’s School of Criminal Justice collaborated to write chapter 19, “Understanding the Impact of Drug Treatment in Correctional Settings” in The Oxford Handbook of Sentencing and Corrections. Professors Steven Belenko, Kimberly A. Houser, and Wayne Welsh did an excellent job of presenting facts showing why legislators and prison administrators should allocate [...]

Many years ago, while I was confined in a federal prison in Florence, Colorado, I saw pictures from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal on the television news. Those images of prisoner abuse influenced public opinion on the war in Iraq. As horrific as they were, I wondered why American citizens expressed so much disgust over [...]

Many of the men who served time alongside me inside the Federal Prison Camp in Atwater lacked an appreciation for the conditions under which we lived.  I understood their perspective.  Whereas I’ve been incarcerated since 1987 in prisons of every security level, most of the other minimum-security prisoners recently surrendered to serve terms that would [...]

When I was arrested in 1987 I was first held in lockup, then a detention center, then a series of jails until my judicial proceedings concluded and I was shipped off to a high-security penitentiary.  At the time, I was in my early 20s and new to the experience of imprisonment.  Since that initial arrest, [...]

For the past 25 years, since 1987, I’ve lived as a prisoner, experiencing our nation’s commitment to mass incarceration first hand.  Later this year, I am scheduled to transition from prison to a halfway house and supervised release.  Since I don’t know much of anything about community-based corrections, I’m grateful to Faye S. Taxman, Professor [...]

I’m pleased to have begun reading Part III of The Oxford Handbook of Sentencing and Corrections.  Two Florida professors coauthored the first chapter in this section, titled “American Corrections: Reform Without Change.”   Karol Lucken, one of the authors, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at the University of Central Florida.  Her [...]