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 [...]
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 [...]
This morning at 1:40 am I resumed work on chapter six of my manuscript for Earning Freedom. I wrote through page 262. Then I went outside to exercise, running 10 miles and boosting my tally to 2,062 miles over the past 233 days. In the afternoon, I wrote more, advancing chapter six to page 265. [...]
I’m grateful to the people who take time to write me after they read my work. I have a stack of envelopes from people who’ve read my book, Inside: Life Behind Bars, some of my other books, or articles that my wife publishes for me on our Web site. I’ve not been able to keep [...]
This morning, at 1:44 am, I carried my writing gear to the quiet room and sat to outline chapter six of my new manuscript, Earning Freedom. When I write “Chapter Six,” I know that I mislead readers, as that doesn’t sound as if I’ve written much. but I began page 238 this morning, and by [...]
After a long day of writing, I’m pleased to have advanced the manuscript of Earning Freedom to page 189. That concludes my first draft of chapter four, bringing the reader through early 1992. This writing project really fulfills me, and I’m grateful for every hour I have available to write in peace. I began this [...]
I read an article in a magazine about a famous rapper who performs under the name T.I. His real name is Clifford Harris, Jr. It seems that T.I. is a repeat felon, though his criminal history did not deter him from accumulating an assortment of unregistered machine guns and silencers. Federal authorities arrested the rapper [...]
