Growing up, I spent a number of weekends over at my cousin Joy’s house. Joy, like Huckleberry Finn, didn’t like to wear shoes. She played kickball without shoes, her long brown hair bouncing, her thick athletic body moving swiftly around the bases; she raced me up and down the street without shoes; even walked to 7-Eleven and Have-a-Snack without shoes. Joy used to grab and swing me around and around in the air, making me dizzy, then put me back down, laughing as I struggled to stay on my feet. She’d tell me a scary story, then have me lay on my back, while she and her friend Sherry chanted, “Light as a feather, stiff as a board,” lifting me in the air with the tips of their fingers. I adore
“To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.” -John Burroughs Eric Holder, the U.S. Attorney General, recently unveiled new directives in federal law enforcement purposed to incarcerate fewer people for shorter periods of time, and to release current prisoners more quickly. Prefacing his outlined prescriptions, he observed that “too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no good law enforcement reason.” While “we must never stop being tough on crime,” the Attorney General continued, “We must also be smarter on crime.” With the nation’s collective incarceration system annually consuming $80 billion, overall crime rates the lo
“The world is what it is: Men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it A Bend in the River.” -V.S. Naipaal I recently had a conversation with another prisoner while waiting to see the doctor. With a look of dejection, he asked me if I’d heard anything about the house bill for first-time offenders serving life without the possibility of probation or parole. I said no, but added that I believe a prisoner has better odds at being granted executive clemency—or struck by lightning—than the Missouri State Senate passing the first-time offenders bill. Having served twenty years on a life without parole sentence, the guy expressed his frustration with the judicial
