It’s 4:30 in the afternoon and I’m about ready to climb onto my steel rack, in cubicle 15, to rest. I had a productive day that began at 1:15 this morning. Some days my writing flows easier than others, and I’m beginning to write about this second half of my imprisonment, that, all in all, [...]
Last Friday, after visiting with Carol, I returned to my housing unit and saw that I had received a book in the mail. The book was written by two professors, both of whom have experience with the prison system, from different perspectives: one of the professors served time in the 1980s for a pot conviction, [...]
This morning, at 2:00 AM, I resumed my work on chapter eight of my manuscript Earning Freedom. In this chapter, I describe the years 1998 through 2002, and today I wrote about the month of August, 1998. I had just completed my 11th year inside. To bring some perspective, that was the month President Clinton [...]
I woke early this morning, at 1:07, invigorated after my wonderful visit with Carole yesterday. She looked radiant, and I can’t believe my good fortune to have married such a lovely woman while I still had so much time to serve in prison. Carole brought some news from my friend Justin Paperny. Justin served a [...]
I’m happy to have received a message from my wife, Carole, that my mom reads my daily blog. The Bureau of Prisons likes to promote itself as being family friendly, but the policies it enforces seem designed to isolate prisoners from families and communities. I’ve lived with those policies since 1987, and as a consequence [...]
Another prisoner who serves time with me at Taft Camp asked me what it has been like to spend so many years in prison. That’s a question I can’t answer easily, and it’s the reason I keep writing books and articles on the subject. To describe 22 years in prison is going to become a [...]
Yesterday I received a new pair or running shoes. I ordered the shoes last month, and I’ve been waiting patiently for the commissary here at Taft Camp to deliver them. In the higher-security prisons where I was held before 2003, the commissary kept shoes in stock. Here in the camp, we preorder from an institutional [...]
It’s now eight minutes past one on a Tuesday afternoon. Ordinarily I’d be in a small room in my housing unit at Taft Camp writing at this hour. Today I’m in the library, sitting amidst thousands of books, with the rat-a-tat-tat of typewriter keys coming from the adjacent room on my left. I’m not writing [...]
Today I complete my 1,144th week in prison. I arrive at that number because today I complete my 22nd full year. The number isn’t exact because of the several leap years, but with 8,036 days in, I don’t think that anyone would dispute it’s been a long time. Yet the time hasn’t been wasted. Those [...]
This manuscript I’m writing for Earning Freedom may require a higher word count than I originally anticipated. When I first wrote the proposal, I thought I could tell the story in 110,000 words. That would have translated into a book of 300 pages. After writing the first two sample chapters, I revised the proposal upward [...]
