No one cares that Al died—not his family, not the folks at the halfway house where he lived, not even those of us who had served time with him. Only old man Bob on the third floor of B-Building mourned Al’s passing. Al used to clean Bob’s cell and wash his laundry. But Bob is as cr

Overseas, the war in Iraq has exposed the limits of American military might at an enormous and still-growing cost to taxpayers. At home, meanwhile, this nation’s three-decades-long preference for hiding away social problems behind penitentiary walls has produced the ironic result that the land

There is a chip in the paint on my bunk bed where Keith hanged himself. Like everything else in prison, penitentiary paint is cheap. Even a suicide’s shoestring rope is enough to nick it. That scratch is all that is left of Keith now. In the year or so that we shared a cell, Keith and I never

When I saw Joe again, my first thought was: I want to kill him! Slowly if possible, though quickly would do in a pinch. Just so long as I could tell him why he had to die before he breathed his last.Joe had come back to prison, and to old-timers like me that was the worst crime imaginable. Back in t

Two thousand years ago, three young men—a revolutionary and two thieves—were executed by the governing civil authority of the Roman province of Palestine. One of those three condemned convicts turned out to be the Son of God, much to everyone’s embarrassment. Naturally, we would al