Bert Burykill
The Ex-Con Who Wants to Explain Prison to Kids
Anthony Curcio was football star in high school with a charmed life, but got addicted to pills so bad that he tried to rob an armored car through an elaborate heist. Five years later, he's out of prison and creating children's books.
Just Close Down California's Prisons Already
California has to reduce its prison population by 8,000 because some judges said so, but apparently it's really hard to let people out of overcrowded cages.
Starve Yourself Free
Inmates in California just ended their hunger strike against conditions in solitary confinement after two months, and the fact that they starved themselves for that long as a protest shows you how cruel and unusual prisons' shit has gotten.
Prison Phone Calls Will Soon Be Less Criminally Expensive And Just As Stressful
Maybe it wouldn’t have been as bad 15 years ago, but now we’re so used to interacting all the time that inmates go crazy when they can’t even text their people.
Phone Calls from Jail Are Criminally Expensive
The FCC has finally put a cap on how much inmates can be charged for out-of-state calls, which is gonna provide some relief for prisoners and their families who were getting robbed blind by predatory companies like Global Tel Link.
‘Orange Is the New Black’ Through the Eyes of an Ex-Con
Orange Is the New Black is a damn good show about prison. It's based on Piper Kerman's memoir, which she wrote after spending some time in the clink-clink, and actually her story is similar to mine—we were both living upper-middle-class lives...
Some Advice for a Sex Offender on His Way to Prison
I received a particularly desperate letter last week. I won’t provide too many of the details 'cause the case is still going on but it appears the feller did some real rapist shit on a young girl—he says it was consensual, but when a girl is so young...
Remembering Independence Day Behind Bars
Other than getting some bonerable melon, there wasn't anything good about spending Independence Day in prison. It was another ugly reminder that us inmates were missing out on the real world. Anyone we talked to outside was going to tell us about the...
Piss Testing Is a Failure
It seems to me like they always pick on the people who are already down when it comes to intrusive nonsense like mandatory drug testing, so the criminals got it first, but it’s becoming more apparent to me that this is a big hustle, and it's not just...
The Guys Who Really Should Be Locked Up
You might think that someone who’s been locked up a lot like me might have more sympathy for inmates, regardless of what their crime is, but I doubt that I do. When I hear a guy sitting next to me in group say he just did 31 years, I really don’t want...
There's No Sex in Prison Showers
The average guy in jail is so scared of homosexuals or people thinking that he might be gay that we all wear our underwear in the shower. We’ve all seen the jail shows and heard the endless “Don’t drop the soap” jokes, but in all the years I was locked...
Burying the Dead and Unloved
Part of a 15-cent-an-hour job I had while in prison was burying inmates who died and had no one who could claim the bodies, or else didn’t have anyone who gave a shit to arrange a proper funeral. They had died over the winter and their bodies had been...