July 10, 2020

  21st Century Scarlett Letter When I was kid growing up out in Odessa, Texas, The Scarlet Letter was required reading. The premise of the story is that it was wrong for the Puritan society of early America to heap scorn upon the story’s protagonist/adultress by forcing her to wear a scarlet “A” on her […]

  Troubling Deeds I’d like to tell you about some things in here that can get you in real trouble, and things I see all the time that the officers here don’t seem to care about at all. To be honest, I think some of them will surprise you, because, if you think about these

  Slopping The Hogs (Part II) I’d like to tell you more about what is happening in the Texas prison chow halls, because if there’s one place that a lot of taxpayer money is being outright stolen, or at least badly wasted, it’s in the prison kitchens. There is a game that’s being played out

  Maintaining The Stevenson Unit was built in 1994. “Inmate.com”, what we like to call the rumor mill around here, informs me that this unit has a shelf-life of 20 years. For those of you, like me, that are not math whizzes, that means that this unit should have been done in 2014. That’s four

  The Other Side Of The Coin In my past chapters, I have talked a lot about the abuses in the Texas prison system. I have spoken about the gang wars that have left prisoners stabbed, beat or killed. And before I continue on through the later part of the 1990s into the 2000s, I

  A New Type Of Manipulation I have been talking about the early 1990s, and all of the violence, and I’ve talked about the big prison boom that took Texas from around 50 some thousand inmates to almost 200,000 we have today. And, they went from a few dozen prisons to over one hundred. The

  Medical Melodrama Allow me to show you how insane our medical system can be inside the Texas prisons. Back before the David Ruiz lawsuit, when an inmate showed up to the medical department, instead of being seen by a nurse or someone in the medical field, you would be greeted by another prisoner. This

  Shes Back! This seems like the perfect time to tell you about the day that turned me into a “writ-writer”, or “jailhouse lawyer”. Why? Because one of the authors of one of the worst days of my life has just come back into the picture, and I think it’s time you heard about it.

  A Stevenson First I am at the Stevenson Unit my first day, and I get off the bus, and I notice right away that it’s really clean down here. Of course, we have to strip out again, but by now, I’m used to this. Then, we go and wait in the cage at the

  All This Stuff Although I lost everything I owned when I came to prison, I immediately began to accumulate more stuff- the meager bit of personal property that the TDCJ will allow me to have now that I’m incarcerated. The first, and most valuable of these items is my personal Bible. Over the dozen