Letters From Inside the Prison

  Law? What Law? By Mike Powers            In the Government Code that lays out how the TDCJ’s parole system is supposed to work, there is a law that says that the parole board cannot penalize an inmate who has filed a civil suit or other legal writs, like habeas corpus, against the prison system. […]

  Give Yourself a Chance to Change By Jay Goodman Here I sit in my prison cell looking back over the last fourteen years of my life, I feel many different emotions. Naturally, when you lose that many years of your life it will cause you to either do everything in your power to not

  Trafficking and Trading By Jay Goodman When you think of trafficking and trading, all sorts of nefarious activities probably come to mind- drug deals over the border, arms sales to Middle Eastern terrorists, moonshiners racing their alcohol-laden hot rods through the Carolinas. But the TDCJ reality of what happens when someone is trafficking is

  No Tomorrow [Author’s Note: This story is dedicated to the memory of Matthew Wade McClenny, June 3, 1991 to February 8, 2017.] Since coming to prison, I’ve read countless biographies and testimonies concerning people who have found themselves on the wrong side of the razor wire. Seems like the majority of the time, the

  Hold Accountable  By Jay Goodman When I started my book about the Texas prisons I could not believe what I was seeing happen at each prison they sent me to. At first I thought it was an isolated case, but as I was transferred from place to place, I soon realized that the same

  Life of the Potty By Mike Powers Some things about life in prison you can easily imagine. Others you might not think of at all. And still others are what you think you can easily imagine, yet still haven’t he foggiest notion of what the experience is actually like. Using the bathroom is just

  Retaliation By Jay Goodman By now, the reader of this literature, either has the opinion, something is very wrong inside the Texas prisons, or this is the best fantasy writer of all time. I will say this for Texas. They have made it easy for people to look up the decades and decades of

  A Christmas Blessing in Prison by Mike Powers   I was on the chain again last week for my first followup visit after my surgery for hammer toe. With my usual
 luck, I managed to draw an appointment that took me on my travels (or should I say “travails”) during one of the most

  Hope And Sleep Hope and sleep are probably the two best friends of the prisoner. That is probably also why they are the two greatest tools of torturous interrogators. Keep a man awake long enough, and he’ll be confessing to having kidnapped the Lindbergh baby and shooting John F. Kennedy all while flying a

  Useful Carnage I want to show you how the Puppetmasters began to spin their web of deceit, manipulation and lies, and left a slew of inmates dead along their path to trying to regain control of the state prison system after Ruiz. With everything I’ve written so far, I’m sure you can see the