Since 2002, the United States has operated military detention facilities at its Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to hold individuals detained during overseas counter-terrorism operations. In 2009, the President directed the closure of these facilities within one year. Since then, a number of statues have prohibited the transfer of Guantanamo Bay detainees to the United States. This book describes the current Guantanamo Bay detention facilities and infrastructure; examines the DoD corrections facilities and factors to be considered if these facilities were used to hold the detainees; and discusses other security and legal considerations.

To date, knowledge of the everyday world of the juvenile correction institution has been extremely sparse. Compassionate Confinement brings to light the challenges and complexities inherent in the U.S. system of juvenile corrections. Building on over a year of field work at a boys' residential facility, Laura S. Abrams and Ben Anderson-Nathe provide a context for contemporary institutions and highlight some of the system's most troubling tensions. This ethnographic text utilizes narratives, observations, and case examples to illustrate the strain between treatment and correctional paradigms and the mixed messages regarding gender identity and masculinity that the youths are expected to navigate. Within this context, the authors use the boys' stories to show various and unexpected pathways toward behavior change. While some residents clearly seized opportunities for self-transformation, others manipulated their way toward release, and faced substantial challenges when they returned home. Compassionate Confinement concludes with recommendations for rehabilitating this notoriously troubled system in light of the experiences of its most vulnerable stakeholders.

The crisis of borders and prisons can be seen starkly in statistics. In 2011 some 1,500 migrants died trying to enter Europe, and the United States deported nearly 400,000 and imprisoned some 2.3 million people--more than at any other time in history. International borders are increasingly militarized places embedded within domestic policing and imprisonment and entwined with expanding prison-industrial complexes. "Beyond Walls and Cages" offers scholarly and activist perspectives on these issues and explores how the international community can move toward a more humane future.
Working at a range of geographic scales and locations, contributors examine concrete and ideological connections among prisons, migration policing and detention, border fortification, and militarization. They challenge the idea that prisons and borders create safety, security, and order, showing that they can be forms of coercive mobility that separate loved ones, disempower communities, and increase shared harms of poverty. Walls and cages can also fortify wealth and power inequalities, racism, and gender and sexual oppression.
As governments increasingly rely on criminalization and violent measures of exclusion and containment, strategies for achieving change are essential. "Beyond Walls and Cages" develops abolitionist, no borders, and decolonial analyses and methods for social change, showing how seemingly disconnected forms of state violence are interconnected. Creating a more just and free world--whether in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands, the Morocco-Spain region, South Africa, Montana, or Philadelphia--requires that people who are most affected become central to building alternatives to global crosscurrents of criminalization and militarization.
Contributors: Olga Aksyutina, Stokely Baksh, Cynthia Bejarano, Anne Bonds, Borderlands Autonomist, Collective, Andrew Burridge, Irina Contreras, Renee Feltz, Luis A. Fernandez, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Amy Gottlieb, Gael Guevara, Zoe Hammer, Julianne Hing, Subhash Kateel, Jodie M. Lawston, Bob Libal, Jenna M. Loyd, Lauren Martin, Laura McTighe, Matt Mitchelson, Maria Cristina Morales, Alison Mountz, Ruben R. Murillo, Joseph Nevins, Nicole Porter, Joshua M. Price, Said Saddiki, Micol Seigel, Rashad Shabazz, Christopher Stenken, Proma Tagore, Margo Tamez, Elizabeth Vargas, Monica W. Varsanyi, Mariana Viturro, Harsha Walia, Seth Freed Wessler.

"Buried Lives" offers the first critical examination of the experience of imprisonment in early America. These interdisciplinary essays investigate several carceral institutions to show how confinement shaped identity, politics, and the social imaginary both in the colonies and in the new nation. The historians and literary scholars included in this volume offer a complement and corrective to conventional understandings of incarceration that privilege the intentions of those in power over the experiences of prisoners.
Considering such varied settings as jails, penitentiaries, almshouses, workhouses, floating prison ships, and plantations, the contributors reconstruct the struggles of people imprisoned in locations from Antigua to Boston. The essays draw upon a rich array of archival sources from the seventeenth century to the eve of the Civil War, including warden logs, petitions, execution sermons, physicians' clinical notes, private letters, newspaper articles, runaway slave advertisements, and legal documents. Through the voices, bodies, and texts of the incarcerated, "Buried Lives" reveals the largely ignored experiences of inmates who contested their subjection to regimes of power.

Ek kyk op en ek tel: Een, twee, drie...sewe-en-twintig, agt-en-twintig. Daar is drie groepe van agt-en-twintig klein, horisontale, reghoekige ruite. Dit lyk soos tralies, maar dis plat, met glas tussenin. Ek kan nie slaap - soos al die vorige aande. Gedagtes maal deur my kop: Sal ek ooit slaap in die hel? Vrae en nogmaals vrae is al wat by my opkom waar ek op my bed le en opkyk. Hoe het ek hierin beland? Gaan ek ooit weer die buitewereld sien? Wat gaan ek doen as ek eendag uitkom? Ek, TRex, le en ruite tel in 'n half donker sel in Pretoria-Sentral gevangenis. 'n Storie soos in 'n fliek of boek is dit beslis nie.......

He was a suspected Cold War spy. She became the glamorous KGB double agent in a Bond movie. When a prisoner writes to a movie star, the best he can hope for is a signed photo. But when Alex wrote to the glamorous Fiona Fullerton she was beguiled by the artistry of his letters and poems. In this heartfelt memoir, Fiona Fullerton recalls-for the first time-her 12 year correspondence with Prisoner 789959 Alexander Alexandrowicz -including his wise counsel about her marriage, divorce and career at the forefront of cinema, TV and theatre. Based on their original letters, the narrative is one of contrasts-about a man in the darkest days of his prolonged incarceration and a woman surrounded by the brightest lights of show business. Shocked by his long sentence, Alex protested his innocence and railed against the system, often from solitary confinement-whilst she roamed the world, a celebrity and a nomad. From this unlikely juxtaposition developed the friendship at the centre of this book. The true story of how two people from social extremes forged a 30 year bond of friendship against all odds. It also tells of how they came to rely on each other and the author's search for him after he disappeared. 'Have you ever heard of Nadejda Philaretovna von Meck? She and Tchaikovsky were corresponding for years, they never met-and yet he produced his finest work for her. My finest work shall be for you... It is you alone who has given me strength while I have been in prison, the strength to restore lost and dying hope into burning resolution'. 'Yes, the bond between us will get stronger, Alex. It will never die now. I'll always be here when you need me. I need you too, don't forget, so together we'll muddle through'. Reviews 'What a lovely, lovely book... compelling, gripping, moving, insightful': Erwin James, Guardian correspondent. Author Fiona Fullerton was one of Britain's most well known and versatile actresses, starring in movies, television and West End theatres, holding a high profile media presence for over 20 years. She then became a Property Columnist, writer and property investment guru, reaching a vastly different audience. Foreword Edward Fitzgerald CBE QC is one of the UK's leading lawyers specialising in criminal law, public law and international human rights law. He has featured in many leading cases at home and abroad. He was Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year in 2009, Silk of the Year in 2005 and winner of The Times Justice Human Rights Award in 1998.

Jere Van Dyk was on the wrong side of the border. He and three Afghan guides had crossed into the tribal areas of Pakistan, where no Westerner had ventured for years, hoping to reach the home of a local chieftain by nightfall. But then a dozen armed men in black turbans appeared over the crest of a hill.

"Captive" is Van Dyk's searing account of his forty-five days in a Taliban prison, and it is gripping and terrifying in the tradition of the best prison literature. The main action takes place in a single room, cut off from the outside world, where Van Dyk feels he can trust nobody--not his jailers, not his guides (who he fears may have betrayed him), and certainly not the charismatic Taliban leader whose fleeting appearances carry the hope of redemption as well as the prospect of immediate, violent death.

Van Dyk went to the tribal areas to investigate the challenges facing America there. His story is of a deeper, more personal challenge, an unforgettable tale of human endurance.

In April 1981, two white Texas prison officials died at the hands of a black inmate at the Ellis prison farm near Huntsville. Warden Wallace Pack and farm manager Billy Moore were the highest-ranking Texas prison officials ever to die in the line of duty. The warden was drowned face down in a ditch. The farm manager was shot once in the head with the warden's gun. The man who admitted to killing them, a burglar and robber named Eroy Brown, surrendered meekly, claiming self-defense. In any other era of Texas prison history, Brown's fate would have seemed certain: execution. But in 1980, federal judge William Wayne Justice had issued a sweeping civil rights ruling in which he found that prison officials had systematically and often brutally violated the rights of Texas inmates. In the light of that landmark prison civil rights case, Ruiz v. Estelle, Brown had a chance of being believed. The Trials of Eroy Brown, the first book devoted to Brown's astonishing defense, is based on trial documents, exhibits, and journalistic accounts of Brown's three trials, which ended in his acquittal. Michael Berryhill presents Brown's story in his own words, set against the backdrop of the chilling plantation mentality of Texas prisons. Brown's attorneys-Craig Washington, Bill Habern, and Tim Sloan-undertook heroic strategies to defend him, even when the state refused to pay their fees. The Trials of Eroy Brown tells a landmark story of prison civil rights and the collapse of Jim Crow justice in Texas.

A unique and telling insight into life in a claustrophobic and sometimes violent atmosphere. An ideal primer on women's issues within the penal system. With 8 pages of colour illustrations.

IRA Jailbreaks 1918-1921 features the factual accounts of 25 daring rescues, rescue attempts and jailbreaks which raised the morale of nationalist Ireland and brought world-wide ridicule and discredit on the prison and internment camp systems in Britain and Ireland. With stories of their resistance to the degrading criminal code by the political prisoners, the hunger strikes and jail riots, the savage beatings and punishments the prisoners suffered during their incarceration, their accounts offer a window on the world of the men who fought and were imprisoned during the struggle for Ireland's independence. Here is history documented by the men who made it.

'Compelling, urgent and devastating. A triumph' The Secret Barrister 'Funny, heart-breaking and utterly authentic' Dr Amanda Brown, author of THE PRISON DOCTOR 'A breath-taking account of the UK's crumbling prison system. Every politician and decision-maker involved in our prisons should be placed on 23-hour lockdown and made to read this book' Nick Pettigrew, author of ANTI-SOCIAL "I was what the older generation of prison officers called a 'care bear'. It was my job to work with the prisoners most in danger of falling through the cracks and, if not deliver them safely to the community upon release, fully rehabilitated, then at least stop them from killing themselves or anyone else..." Come with Angela Kirwin for a journey inside prison like no other. For over a decade she was a social care worker in some of Britain's most notorious prisons. Now she wants to tell the stories of the men she met, because she believes that prison is failing everyone, damaging the most vulnerable people in our societies, creating habitual criminals, leaving us all less safe and contributing to a society that is immeasurably less humane. Every year, we spend billions of pounds on a system that fundamentally doesn't work. Rather than a separate world full of people that aren't like us, prison is where the most damaged and vulnerable people in our society end up and we all need to urgently care about that, so we can change it. Because the state of our prisons is criminal.

Fatna El Bouih was first arrested in Casablanca as an 18-year-old student leader with connections to the Marxist movement. Over the next decade she was rearrested, forcibly disappeared, tortured, and transferred between multiple prisons. While imprisoned, she helped organize a hunger strike, completed her undergraduate degree in sociology, and began work on a Master x2019;s degree. Beginning with the harrowing account of her kidnapping during the heightened political tension of the 1970s, Talk of Darkness tells the true story of one woman x2019;s struggle to secure political prisoners x2019; rights and defend herself against an unjust imprisonment. Poetically rendered from Arabic into English by Mustapha Kamal and Susan Slyomovics, Fatna El Bouih x2019;s memoir exposes the techniques of state-instigated x201C;disappearance x201D; in Morocco and condemns the lack of laws to protect prisoners x2019; basic human rights.

Norman Parker spent twenty-five years of his life in a high security Category A prison. Convicted of murder and manslaughter in the 1970s, he was sentenced to life at the notorious Parkhurst Prison. An institution filled with the most sinister and violent criminals, Parkhurst is certainly not for the faint-hearted. Norman Parker has certainly seen a lot during his time on the inside, and this is his complete collection of tales from behind the bars. During his gruelling years on the inside, he encountered some of the highest-profile criminals in Britain, from the Kray twins to the Great Train Robbers. With so many dangerous characters, and their deep and dark pasts, there are plenty of stories to tell. From a real-life Hannibal Lector and his murderous cannibal past to a petty thief whose experiences in prison turned him into a brutal and cold-hearted killer. The IRA bomber who deems theft as morally wrong and Vic, a loose cannon who proved that prison was no safer than the outside world as inmates feared for their lives. "The Complete Parkhurst Tales" is a shockingly powerful and intimate portrayal of the prison system is filled with Norman Parker's sharp intelligence and witty observations on every aspect of the secret world in one of Britain's toughest jails.

The United States has more than two million people locked away in federal, state, and local prisons. Although most of the U.S. population is non-Hispanic and white, the vast majority of the incarcerated-and policed-is not. In this compelling collection, scholars, activists, and current and former prisoners examine the sensibilities that enable a penal democracy to thrive. Some pieces are new to this volume; others are classic critiques of U.S. state power. Through biography, diary entries, and criticism, the contributors collectively assert that the United States wages war against enemies abroad and against its own people at home.Contributors consider the interning or policing of citizens of color, the activism of radicals, structural racism, destruction and death in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, and the FBI Counterintelligence Program designed to quash domestic dissent. Among the first-person accounts are an interview with Dhoruba Bin Wahad, a Black Panther and former political prisoner; a portrayal of life in prison by a Plowshares nun jailed for her antinuclear and antiwar activism; a discussion of the Puerto Rican Independence Movement by one of its members, now serving a seventy-year prison sentence for sedition; and an excerpt from a 1970 letter by the Black Panther George Jackson chronicling the abuses of inmates in California's Soledad Prison. Warfare in the American Homeland also includes the first English translation of an excerpt from a pamphlet by Michel Foucault and others. They argue that the 1971 shooting of George Jackson by prison guards was a murder premeditated in response to human-rights and justice organizing by black and brown prisoners and their supporters. Contributors. Hishaam Aidi, Dhoruba Bin Wahad (Richard Moore), Marilyn Buck, Marshall Eddie Conway, Susie Day, Daniel Defert, Madeleine Dwertman, Michel Foucault, Carol Gilbert, Sirene Harb, Rose Heyer, George Jackson, Joy James, Manning Marable, William F. Pinar, Oscar Lopez Rivera, Dylan Rodriguez, Jared Sexton, Catherine voen Bulow, Laura Whitehorn, Frank B. Wilderson III

Prisons are on the increase from the United States to China, as ever-larger proportions of humanity find themselves behind bars. While prisons now span the world, we know little about their history in global perspective. Rather than interpreting the prison's proliferation as the predictable result of globalization, Cultures of Confinement underlines the fact that the prison was never simply imposed by colonial powers or copied by elites eager to emulate the West, but was reinvented and transformed by a host of local factors, its success being dependent on its very flexibility. Complex cultural negotiations took place in encounters between different parts of the world, and rather than assigning a passive role to Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the authors of this book point out the acts of resistance or appropriation that altered the social practices associated with confinement. The prison, in short, was understood in culturally specific ways and reinvented in a variety of local contexts examined here for the first time in global perspective.

Leading edge information and ideas from two of the UK's most respected practitioners and authorities. A handbook for people who want to make a difference when working with prisoners. It suggests the tools for this and offers guidance - and is wholly up to speed with what is happening in UK prisons. * Essential reading for every RJ practitioner and student * One of the most important penal reform books for years - Part of a major initiative across UK prisons * Designed to be used in conjunction with the free toolkits available for download from www.WatersidePress.co.uk/RJTools Restorative Justice in Prisons was launched at Brixton Prison in 2006. Prison as an institution is sometimes taken to represent the opposite of restorative justice. The culture of prisons includes coercion, highly structured and controlled regimes, banishment achieved through physical separation, and blame and punishment - whereas restorative justice values empowerment, voluntarism, respect, and treating people as individuals. Recent developments in some prisons demonstrate a far more welcoming environment for restorative work. Examples such as reaching out to victims of crime, providing prisoners with a range of opportunities to make amends and experimenting with mediation in response to conflicts within prisons show that it is possible to implement restorative justice principles in everyday prison activities. Guided by restorative justice, prisons can become places of healing and personal transformation, serving the community as well as those directly affected by crime: victims and offenders. This new book advocates the further expansion of restorative justice in prisons. Building on a widespread interest in the concept and its potential, the authors have produced a guide to enable prisons and the practitioners who work in and with them to translate the theory into action. Reviews 'This book is evidence that restorative approaches have much to offer the prison services in seeking to make their operations effective in meeting prisoner and public needs ...It successfully translates theory into practice and provides a model for organisational and cultural change in prisons': International Review of Victimology 'What strikes you as you read through this text is the sheer simplicity with which Edgar and Newell have captured the changes that are so apparently needed in the prison system today': Andy Bain, Institute of Criminal Justice Studies, University of Portsmouth

Containing 200 archive images from the NCCL Galleries of Justice in Nottingham, this book is intended for those with an interest in the history of prisons and prison life in Britain from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.

A leading text of worldwide renown: available in Norwegian, Danish, English, Swedish, German, Spanish, Italian - and now being translated into Chinese. Highly acclaimed, Prison On Trial is the classic critique of prisons and imprisonment: a book for everyone's library shelf and collection. For anyone seeking to understand the modern trend towards locking-up ever more people, it distills the arguments for and against incarceration in a readable, accessible and authoritative way - gaining in status each time prison populations increase across large parts of the world. In this new Third Edition - with its New Preface, Epilogue and other Revisions (plus all the material from earlier editions) - the author expands on the control aspects of prison, the gear change brought about by responses to international terrorism post-September 11 and the London bombings and explains how contemporary events are changing the boundaries of crime and punishment and increasing the risks to civil liberties and the Rule of Law. Thomas Mathiesen also argues for an 'Alternative Public Space' where discussion of serious and fundamental issues of this nature can take place free from the superficial world of knee-jerk reactions from politicians and the entertainment-driven needs of the press and media. Prison On Trial distils the arguments for and against imprisonment in a readable, accessible and authoritative way - making Thomas Mathiesen's work a classic for students and other people concerned to understand the real issues. It is as relevant today as when it was first published - arguably more so as policy-making becomes increasingly politicized and true opportunities to influence developments diminish. Mindful of this, Mathiesen recommends an 'alternative public space' where people can engage in valid discussion on the basis of sound information, free from the survival priority of the media - to entertain.

Although they have existed in Britain for over a thousand years, it was not until the nineteenth century that prisons became the cornerstone of the penal system. This was a period when great interest was shown in penal theory, and rival systems fought for supremacy. More than fifteen million receptions into prison were made between 1837 and 1901, the vast majority into small, local prisons. This book looks at the development of prison.

The Criminals of Lima and Their Worlds is the first major historical study of the creation and development of the prison system in Peru. Carlos Aguirre examines the evolution of prisons for male criminals in Lima from the conception-in the early 1850s-of the initial plans to build penitentiaries through the early-twentieth-century prison reforms undertaken as part of President Augusto Leguia's attempts to modernize and expand the Peruvian state. Aguirre reconstructs the social, cultural, and doctrinal influences that determined how lawbreakers were treated, how programs of prison reform fared, and how inmates experienced incarceration. He argues that the Peruvian prisons were primarily used not to combat crime or to rehabilitate allegedly deviant individuals, but rather to help reproduce and maintain an essentially unjust social order. In this sense, he finds that the prison system embodied the contradictory and exclusionary nature of modernization in Peru.Drawing on a large collection of prison and administrative records archived at Peru's Ministry of Justice, Aguirre offers a detailed account of the daily lives of men incarcerated in Lima's jails. In showing the extent to which the prisoners actively sought to influence prison life, he reveals the dynamic between prisoners and guards as a process of negotiation, accommodation, and resistance. He describes how police and the Peruvian state defined criminality and how their efforts to base a prison system on the latest scientific theories-imported from Europe and the United States-foundered on the shoals of financial constraints, administrative incompetence, corruption, and widespread public indifference. Locating his findings within the political and social mores of Lima society, Aguirre reflects on the connections between punishment, modernization, and authoritarian traditions in Peru.

The No.1 Bestseller! 'I was a very vulnerable young woman with three small children. I was lost ... Pat Quirke tried to come in and control everything' Bobby Ryan's disappearance in rural Tipperary in June 2011 mystified all who knew him. The truck-driver and part-time DJ (known as Mr Moonlight) was an easy-going fellow with no enemies. Or so everyone thought. When Ryan's body was found 22 months later on the farm of Mary Lowry, the wealthy young widow he had been seeing, it was clear that he had met a violent end. And the most likely person to have brought about that end? Pat Quirke, the man who had 'discovered' the body - Mary Lowry's brother-in-law, financial advisor, tenant and one-time lover. Following the longest running murder trial in Irish criminal history Quirke was convicted of murder in May 2019. Getting to that day had taken years of exhaustive work by gardai. The Murder of Mr Moonlight is the definitive account of their investigation as well as the compelling story of how an innocent man paid the price for another man's obsessions. Catherine Fegan, Irish Journalist of the Year (2017), and Chief Correspondent at the Irish Daily Mail, covered every day of Quirke's trial. Over many months she also conducted interviews in Tipperary and further afield. She has written an extraordinary insightful and meticulous account of the case that gripped the nation. '[An] excellent book that shows all the colours of the story that intrigued the nation' Irish Daily Mail 'Well-researched and highly readable ... Fegan proves her journalistic mettle, delivering forensic detail in accessible language ... Anyone who followed the trial will not be disappointed by Fegan's book' Sunday Business Post 'Absolutely compulsive reading (as I know because my wife wouldn't let me anywhere near it - but I did get it in the end!) ... a page-turner' Eamon Dunphy, The Stand

While the number of incarcerated women is dramatically escalating, women prisoners throughout the world are largely an invisible and neglected population. These comparative essays examine thoroughly the unique problems, challenges, and issues facing women inmates in the United States, Canada, England, New Zealand, Poland, and Thailand.
The insightful volume fills a major gap in criminal justice literature, and it provides a solid basis for further discussion of the too-long ignored subject of women's imprisonment.

Ursula Smartt's ground-breaking Grendon Tales lifts the lid on a highly acclaimed regime that was developed at Grendon Underwood in Buckinghamshire from the 1960s onwards. Grendon Tales is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand: What therapy with offenders consists of; What it can achieve; How Grendon Prison with its therapeutic communities became a world leader; What drives some people to commit heinous and unspeakable crimes; How 'prison democracy' works; Why Grendon is 'the last chance saloon'; Why some prisoners struggle to 'get into' Grendon whilst others avoid the place; The impact on prisoners when they first arrive at Grendon; What happens during their time there; The pressures they face on their return to the mainstream prison system; The approach in relation to different types of offenders (including sex offenders); The effect on prisoners' lives and relationships; The aims and mission of the those who work at Grendon; and Moves to replicate its success. Direct, raw, perceptive and at times shocking, Ursula Smartt's work gives a unique insight into a world famous prison. Based on unparalleled access to HMP Grendon and direct conversations with high-risk offenders, governors, prison officers, probation officers, psychologists and other prison staff as well as her own observations of the prison's day-to-day routines over 12 months, the book provides a modern-day account of the challenging environment that Tony Parker, writing in the 1970s, described as 'The Frying Pan'. A unique work from a criminologist whose researches have taken her to prisons across the UK and in other places, including Europe, the USA and India. Her words and penetrating insights repay close study and give cause for reflection about why such methods have not been embraced more widely by a Criminal Justice System whose key aims include crime prevention, crime reduction and ensuring public safety. Reviews 'As readable as a novel...I could not put it down until finished': The Magistrate 'A breathless personal slide through her year talking to some of the country's most difficult prisoners': Frances Crook, Community Care. 'The book is both comprehensive and thourough...This is not a book to engage with lightly, or to browse through. It needs to be read completely, with a degree of commitment, for it is, ultimately, encouraging and optimistic...I can firmly endorse Ursula Smartt's work': John Broughton, It's Wandsworth.

Behind the Walls is a detailed description of the world's largest prison system by a long-time convict trained as an observer and reporter. It spotlights the day-to-day workings of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice -- what's good, what's bad, which programs work and which ones do not, and examines if practice really follows official policy.

Written to inform about the processes, services, activities, issues, and problems of being incarcerated, this book is invaluable to anyone who has a relative or friend incarcerated in Texas, or for those who want to understand how prisoners live, eat, work, play, and die in a contemporary U.S. prison.

Containing a short history of Texas prisons and advice on how to help inmates get out and stay out of prison, this book is the only one of its kind -- written by a convict still incarcerated and dedicated to dispelling the ignorance and fear that shroud Texas prisons. Renaud discusses living quarters, food, and clothing, along with how prisoners handle money, mail, visits, and phone calls. He explores the issues of drugs, racism, gangs, and violence as well as what an inmate can learn about his parole, custody levels, and how to handle emergencies. What opportunities are available for education? What is the official policy for discipline? What is a lockdown? These questions and many others are answered in this one-of-a-kind guide.