Prison Journal: Day 8,152 Yesterday I heard a news report on NPR and CNN announcing that the Deputy Attorney General had resigned. He said that goals had been achieved, but the reporters insinuated that the Deputy Attorney General—who is like the Chief Operating Officer of the Department of Justice—did not have the requisite expertise to [...]
I’m sitting in my cubicle, with my feet posted on the steel post that holds up my rack. It’s 4:04 on Thursday afternoon, and after a long day of writing, I’m waiting for the guards to walk by for the daily census count. Once they pass, and I finish writing this entry, I’ll lie down [...]
A federal appeals court recently ordered the state of California to reduce its prison population by 40,000 people. Many other states are also finding that the prison systems they operate are unsustainable and waste billions in taxpayer resources by confining too many offenders for too long. I’m used to these news reports that showcase the [...]
During the 22 years I’ve been confined, I’ve never heard a U.S. Attorney General say that America’s dependence on incarceration is economically unsustainable. Yet that was what Attorney General Eric Holder told the nation’s lawyers at the annual meeting of the American Bar Association. Mr. Holder isn’t the first high profile government leader to call [...]
The early morning news announced that Senator Ted Stevens, or former senator, would not be coming to prison. The new attorney general determined that prosecutors had handled the case inappropriately and violated the former senator’s rights to a fair trial. Rather than defend the prosecutorial misconduct, the attorney general made arrangements to dismiss the indictment [...]
