Angolite
Author:
Publisher:
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 464
ISBN-13:
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Life Sentences
Author: Wilbert Rideau
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Published: 1992
Total Pages: 356
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDrawing on their award-winning reporting for the Louisiana State Penitentiary's uncensored newsmagazine, The Angolite, Wilbert Rideau and Ron Wikberg present the stark reality of life behind bars and the human, political, and fiscal costs of our long-running war on crime.
In the Place of Justice
Author: Wilbert Rideau
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2011-01-06
Total Pages: 529
ISBN-13: 1847654649
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 1961, young, black, eighth-grade dropout Wilbert Rideau despaired of his small-town future in the segregated deep south of America. He set out to rob the local bank and after a bungled robbery he killed the bank teller, a fifty-year-old white female. He was arrested and gave a full confession. When we meet Rideau he has just been sentenced to death row, from where he embarks on an extraordinary journey. He is imprisoned at Angola, the most violent prison in America, where brutality, sexual slavery and local politics confine prisoners in ways that bars alone cannot. Yet Rideau breaks through all this and finds hope and meaning, becoming editor of the prison magazine, going on to win national journalism awards. Full of gritty realism and potent in its evocation of a life condemned, Rideau goes far beyond the traditional prison memoir and reveals an emotionally wrought and magical conclusion to his forty-four years in prison.
Instrument of the State
Author: Benjamin J. Harbert
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2023
Total Pages: 369
ISBN-13: 0197517501
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Angola Prison is the largest and one of the most notorious state prisons in the United States, built into a slave plantation that Louisiana bought in 1901. It has also been the most musically significant. Following a documentary film project, author Benjamin J. Harbert visited Angola, gathered oral histories, and conducted archival research to piece together an account of how prisoners and the administration have used music for over 120 years. The book brings together well-known musicians who served time there, including Lead Belly, Charles Neville, and James Booker, as well as a litany of musicians who made significant contributions to the prison's music scene only to die there or unable to establish careers upon release. Instrument of the State: A Century of Music in Louisiana State Penitentiary traces how musicians find small but essential freedoms by playing jazz, R&B, country, gospel, rock, and fusion. In doing so, Harbert expands folkloric definitions of "prison music." The book considers the broader musicality of the prison as a way of understanding state power and the fragments of hope and joy that remain in its wake. Music connects to the prison's shifting and often conflicting missions: rehabilitation, slavery, and abandonment. The perspectives of incarcerated musicians will reveal how music responds to violence, reform, prisoner rights, sensationalism, and power through the twentieth century. Instrument of the State is an indictment of the brutality of prison, its disproportionate effects on African-Americans, and the desperate profiteering of a deliberately underfunded state agency"--
The Meaning of Life
Author: Marc Mauer
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2018-12-11
Total Pages: 154
ISBN-13: 162097410X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"I can think of no authors more qualified to research the complex impact of life sentences than Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis. They have the expertise to track down the information that all citizens need to know and the skills to translate that research into accessible and powerful prose." —Heather Ann Thompson, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Blood in the Water From the author of the classic Race to Incarcerate, a forceful and necessary argument for eliminating life sentences, including profiles of six people directly impacted by life sentences by formerly incarcerated author Kerry Myers Most Western democracies have few or no people serving life sentences, yet here in the United States more than 200,000 people are sentenced to such prison terms. Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis of The Sentencing Project argue that there is no practical or moral justification for a sentence longer than twenty years. Harsher sentences have been shown to have little effect on crime rates, since people "age out" of crime—meaning that we're spending a fortune on geriatric care for older prisoners who pose little threat to public safety. Extreme punishment for serious crime also has an inflationary effect on sentences across the spectrum, helping to account for severe mandatory minimums and other harsh punishments. A thoughtful and stirring call to action, The Meaning of Life also features moving profiles of a half dozen people affected by life sentences, written by former "lifer" and award-winning writer Kerry Myers. The book will tie in to a campaign spearheaded by The Sentencing Project and offers a much-needed road map to a more humane criminal justice system.
Prison Capital
Author: Lydia Pelot-Hobbs
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2023-11-28
Total Pages: 393
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEvery year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. This is the first detailed account of Louisiana's unprecedented turn to mass incarceration from 1970 to 2020. Through extensive research, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs illuminates how policy makers enlarged Louisiana's carceral infrastructures with new prisons and jail expansions alongside the bulking up of police and prosecutorial power. At the same time, these infrastructures were the products of multiscalar crises: the swings of global oil capitalism, liberal federal court and policy interventions, the rise of neoliberal governance and law-and-order austerity, and racist and patriarchal moral panics surrounding "crime." However, these crises have also created fertile space for anticarceral social movements. From incarcerated people filing conditions of confinement lawsuits and Angola activists challenging life without parole to grassroots organizers struggling to shrink the New Orleans jail following Hurricane Katrina and LGBTQ youth of color organizing against police sexual violence, grassroots movements stretch us toward new geographies of freedom in the lineage of abolition democracy. Understanding Louisiana's carceral crisis extends our understanding of the interplay between the crises of mass criminalization and racial capitalism while highlighting the conditions of possibility for dismantling carceral power in all its forms.
Jailhouse Journalism
Author: James McGrath Morris
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-12
Total Pages: 277
ISBN-13: 1351511238
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the 1980s alone, some 100 periodicals were published by and for inmates of America's prisons. Unlike their peers who passed their sentences stamping out licence plates, these convicts spent their days like reporters in any community - looking for the story. Yet their own story, the lengthy history of their unique brand of journalism, remained largely unknown. In this volume James McGrath Morris seeks to address the history of this medium, the lives of the men and women who brought it to life, and the controversies that often surround it.
A Wall Is Just a Wall
Author: Reiko Hillyer
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2024-01-05
Total Pages: 229
ISBN-13: 1478025883
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThroughout the twentieth century, even the harshest prison systems in the United States were rather porous. Incarcerated people were regularly released from prison for Christmas holidays; the wives of incarcerated men could visit for seventy-two hours relatively unsupervised; and governors routinely commuted the sentences of people convicted of murder. By the 1990s, these practices had become rarer as politicians and the media—in contrast to corrections officials—described the public as potential victims who required constant protection against the threat of violence. In A Wall Is Just a Wall Reiko Hillyer focuses on gubernatorial clemency, furlough, and conjugal visits to examine the origins and decline of practices that allowed incarcerated people to transcend prison boundaries. Illuminating prisoners’ lived experiences as they suffered, critiqued, survived, and resisted changing penal practices, she shows that the current impermeability of the prison is a recent, uneven, and contested phenomenon. By tracking the “thickening” of prison walls, Hillyer historicizes changing ideas of risk, the growing bipartisan acceptance of permanent exile and fixing the convicted at the moment of their crime as a form of punishment, and prisoners’ efforts to resist.
A Life in the Balance
Author: Billy Wayne Sinclair
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2012-02-14
Total Pages: 443
ISBN-13: 162872014X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSentenced to death in 1965 at age twenty for an unpremeditated murder during the bungled holdup of a convenience store, Billy Wayne spent his first seven prison years on death row. When the death penalty was abolished, his sentence was life. Three-and-a-half decades later, Billy Wayne is still behind bars—feared by many politicians and prison officials for his well-known incorruptibility and unrelenting crusade for prison reform. This is his memoir. A Life in the Balance begins with an almost unbearable account of his early years—when he was so abused by his father one wonders how he survived—and his “escape” into a crowd of hooligans, which led him to the fateful day in 1965 when he held up the convenience store. His story takes you behind the metal doors of the Angola State Penitentiary to reveal the brutal truth of life inside. Here you will meet Billy Ray, Billy Wayne’s blood brother; old Emmitt Henderson, who died of prison neglect; Jamie Parks, a seventeen-year-old kid whose fate was sealed the day he arrived in Angola; Big Mick, who ran drugs in the prison to earn money to put his handicapped sister through college; Wilbert Rideau, Billy Wayne’s coeditor on The Angolite; the Dixie Mafia; and Richard Clark Hand, the young lawyer who took on Billy Wayne’s case and has been fighting for his release for thirty years.
When Texas Prison Scams Religion
Author: Michael G. Maness
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Published: 2023-05-22
Total Pages: 683
ISBN-13: 1728377552
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhen Texas Prison Scams Religion exposes corruption in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, especially in the abuse of religion. In many ways, this book is a literature review of 1,800-plus works that defends freedom of conscience in prison while exposing the unconstitutionality of the seminary program that “buys faith with favor” from prisoners. The state veritably ordains the prisoner a “Field Minister” that represents the offices of the Governor, TDCJ Director, and wardens throughout the prison. Therein, TDCJ lies about neutrality in a program all about Christian missions and lies again in falsely certifying elementary Bible students as counselors. Why is the director sponsoring psychopaths counseling psychopaths? In fact, TDCJ pays $314 million a year to UTMB for psychiatric care and receives not a single report of the care given, and worse, for UTMB generates no reports itself. The underbelly TDCJ’s executive culture of cover up is exposed. TDCJ has hired the lowest qualified of the applicant pool many times in the last 25 years and regularly destroys statistics on violence. TDCJ Dir. Collier led the prison to model Louisiana Warden Burl Cain, the most scandal-ridden in penal history according to a host of published news stories for 20 years. Therein, Collier led TDCJ to favor the smallest segment of religious society within Evangelical Dominionism. Texas has no business endorsing the truth of any religion over another. We close with a proposal that utilizes the 400,000,000 hours of officer contact over ten years as a definitive influence in contrast to a commissioner that spends less than 10 minutes on each decision. Maness has been lobbying Austin for 15 years to definitively access staff for his “100,000 Mothers’ 1% Certainty Parole Texas Constitutional Amendment,” which would revolutionize prison culture and save Texans millions of the dollars.
