Letters From Inside the Prison

  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

  Justice Is As Justice Does Eventually, I’m going to continue with my history of the problems the TDCJ has in keeping its “treatment industrial complex” running, but first I wanted to bring up a few things that have meant a lot to me, like my chapters on executing the innocent and super seg. There’s

  Have Your Cake And Eat It Too I’d written a few chapters ago about our medical department and a nurse that works here, but I also wanted to show how the Texas prison system will steal from the taxpayers. The depth of their heartlessness will surprise you, although it comes as no shock to

  The Dirty Darrington II I wish I could have confined the shortcomings of the Dirty Darrington to just one chapter. Alas, it’ll take at least two. We saw last time that laundry, food service, housing, and transportation were utterly inept. Now I’d like to focus my attention on the one thing that, any reasonable