When Ernie Lopez was a boy selling newspapers in Depression-era Los
Angeles, his father beat him when he failed to bring home the
expected eighty to ninety cents a day. When the beatings became
unbearable, he took to petty stealing to make up the difference. As
his thefts succeeded, Ernie's sense of necessity got tangled up
with ambition and adventure. At thirteen, a joyride in a stolen car
led to a sentence in California's harshest juvenile reformatory.
The system's failure to show any mercy soon propelled Lopez into a
cycle of crime and incarceration that resulted in his spending
decades in some of America's most notorious prisons, including four
and a half years on death row for a murder Lopez insists he did not
commit.
To Alcatraz, Death Row, and Back is the personal life story of a
man who refused to be broken by either an abusive father or an
equally abusive criminal justice system. While Lopez freely admits
that "I've been no angel," his insider's account of daily life in
Alcatraz and San Quentin graphically reveals the violence,
arbitrary infliction of excessive punishment, and unending monotony
that give rise to gang cultures within the prisons and practically
insure that parolees will commit far worse crimes when they return
to the streets. Rafael Perez-Torres discusses how Ernie Lopez's
experiences typify the harsher treatment that ethnic and minority
suspects often receive in the American criminal justice system, as
well as how they reveal the indomitable resilience of Chicanos/as
and their culture. As Perez-Torres concludes, "Lopez's story
presents us with the voice of one who--though subjected to a system
meant to destroy his soul--not only endured but survived, andin
surviving prevailed."
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