Men in Prison
Men in Prison

Author: Victor Serge

Publisher: PM Press

Published: 2014-04-01

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 1604869062

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“Everything in this book is fictional and everything is true,” wrote Victor Serge in the epigraph to Men in Prison. “I have attempted, through literary creation, to bring out the general meaning and human content of a personal experience.” The author of Men in Prison served five years in French penitentiaries (1912–1917) for the crime of “criminal association”—in fact for his courageous refusal to testify against his old comrades, the infamous “Tragic Bandits” of French anarchism. “While I was still in prison,” Serge later recalled, “fighting off tuberculosis, insanity, depression, the spiritual poverty of the men, the brutality of the regulations, I already saw one kind of justification of that infernal voyage in the possibility of describing it. Among the thousands who suffer and are crushed in prison—and how few men really know that prison!—I was perhaps the only one who could try one day to tell all… There is no novelist’s hero in this novel, unless that terrible machine, prison, is its real hero. It is not about ‘me,’ about a few men, but about men, all men crushed in that dark corner of society.” Ironically, Serge returned to writing upon his release from a GPU prison in Soviet Russia, where he was arrested as an anti-Stalinist subversive in 1928. He completed Men in Prison (and two other novels) in “semi-captivity” before he was rearrested and deported to the Gulag in 1933. Serge’s classic prison novel has been compared to Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead, Koestler’s Spanish Testament, Genet’s Miracle of the Rose, and Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch both for its authenticity and its artistic achievement. This edition features a substantial new introduction by translator Richard Greeman, situating the work in Serge’s life and times.

The Haunted History of the West Virginia Penitentiary
The Haunted History of the West Virginia Penitentiary

Author: Sherri Brake

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2011-12-31

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781452835044

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Afterlife with no parole.If you die in prison, your soul stays in prison. At least that's what many inmates believed. 998 murders and suicides combined with 85 hangings and 9 electrocutions all make for a dark and violent past. The Cincinnati Ohio Enquirer called it a "Hell On Earth" in 1886. The New York Times branded it as "One of the Most Violent in the Country". Inmates called it "Bloody Alley" and for good reasons.The Haunted History of the West Virginia Pen is brought to light by Paranormal Investigator, Haunted Heartland Tours owner and author, Sherri Brake. Built in 1866 in Moundsville, West Virginia and situated on 10 acres, this mammoth fortress held some of the country's worst criminals. Explore Moundsville's bloody frontier history, the Grave Creek Mound, the building of the Pen, and the Wardens. Read first hand accounts from past guards and inmates along with newspaper articles, some collected from over 100 years ago. Accounts of executions, torture, escapes and notorious inmates are revealed. Examine over 100 ghostly accounts as paranormal investigators look for Shadow Men, ghosts and proof of the afterlife. Check out the Paranormal Directory and Vocabulary section. Use the Paranormal Guide to the Pen to help you investigate on site or simply read about the Sugar Shack, the Boiler Room and North Hall, all from the safety of your chair.This book is an excellent resource for gaining insight on the history and hauntings of this gothic prison. It is a first hand look into the dark dimensions of one of America's most haunted locations.

Down in the Chapel
Down in the Chapel

Author: Joshua Dubler

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2013-08-13

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 146683711X

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A bold and provocative interpretation of one of the most religiously vibrant places in America—a state penitentiary Baraka, Al, Teddy, and Sayyid—four black men from South Philadelphia, two Christian and two Muslim—are serving life sentences at Pennsylvania's maximum-security Graterford Prison. All of them work in Graterford's chapel, a place that is at once a sanctuary for religious contemplation and an arena for disputing the workings of God and man. Day in, day out, everything is, in its twisted way, rather ordinary. And then one of them disappears. Down in the Chapel tells the story of one week at Graterford Prison. We learn how the men at Graterford pass their time, care for themselves, and commune with their makers. We observe a variety of Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, and others, at prayer and in study and song. And we listen in as an interloping scholar of religion tries to make sense of it all. When prisoners turn to God, they are often scorned as con artists who fake their piety, or pitied as wretches who cling to faith because faith is all they have left. Joshua Dubler goes beyond these stereotypes to show the religious life of a prison in all its complexity. One part prison procedural, one part philosophical investigation, Down in the Chapel explores the many uses prisoners make of their religions and weighs the circumstances that make these uses possible. Gritty and visceral, meditative and searching, it is an essential study of American religion in the age of mass incarceration.

Decades Behind Bars
Decades Behind Bars

Author: Gaye D. Holman

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2017-04-11

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1476628483

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More than two million people are incarcerated in America's prisons--one in nine is serving a life sentence. Mass long-term imprisonment devours state budgets, adversely affects community well-being and skews our collective moral compass. This study examines the human costs of keeping the convicted out of sight, out of mind. Beginning in 1994, the author began recording the personal stories of 50 incarcerated felons--17 of them were still in prison 20 years later. The men candidly discuss what it means to commit a serious crime and to be confined for perhaps the remainder of their lives. Their stories are balanced by conversations with correctional officers, prison administrators, chaplains and parole board members. The author identifies circumstances that ruin some prisoners and save others and presents insights for possible improvements in the criminal justice system.