prison
Should Murderers Be Allowed State-Funded Sex Changes?
After dragging on for years, the request of Michelle Kosilek, a.k.a. Robert Kosilek, to have the state pay her medical costs for sex-reassignment surgery has finally reached the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
The Trials of Job
After my sweet release from prison last year, I struggled for about a year looking for a decent job. I badly wanted to work, but I quickly became discouraged when my first ten applications were shot down, probably thanks to my status as a felon. Those...
Bert Meets a Real Rapper Who’s a Year Out of Prison
A lotta dudes in prison are rappers, but I don’t pay them much mind. But in the case of SunBlaze, I had a feeling that he was serious bizness—the way he kept to himself, quietly writing and not talking a lotta shit like lotsa dudes do. He got out last...
Addiction Isn't a Disease, I'm Just a Dick
When you’ve been sent back to prison multiple times for dirty pee like I have, you end up thinking a bunch about addiction—whether you’re a screwup or a bona fide addict, and if you’re an addict, what that means. Lots of people define addiction as a...
Dying of a Dirty Mouth
Don’t think appearance matters? I once saw an old man get killed in prison for having bad breath. He was Puerto Rican, but we called him Miagi 'cause he had a very Asian look and resembled Pat Morita. Unfortunately, his mouth was completely decayed and...
Olympia’s Grand Jury Resistors Speak
In a rather harrowing act of modern civil disobedience, Matt Duran and Katherine "Kteeo" Oleknik refused to rat on their friends' political beliefs after being scooped up by the FBI after May Day protests last year in Seattle. They spent five months in...
Does Don Draper Want to Legalize Heroin?
The idea that mass incarceration and the war on drugs are racist as well as massive failures has gained a lot of traction over the years. But it wasn’t until the past few days that the movement to end the drug war achieved the mark of every mainstream...
Don’t Stick Dominoes in Your Dick
Some guys in prison like to get together in the bathroom, puncture their penises with a little slice, and then insert an implant. From what I hear, usually they break off a piece of a domino and insert it up under the foreskin area, or sometimes, down...
Home Is Where the Prison Is
The latest article I’ve seen about reforming the prison system is from something called GovLab, and it’s all about “data analytics” and “geo-driven decision making” and “virtual incarceration.” It sounds all nice and fancy when they say it, but it’s...
Abandoned Estonian Prisons Are a Little Slice of Hell
Back in 1820, Russian Tzar Nicholas I built a massive prison on the Baltic coast just outside of Tallinn, Estonia, which was so good at making prisoners cower remorsefully before the might of the hegemony, that it remained in commission right up until...
A Letter From Chopper to my Sister
Back in the ‘90s my sister was a PR hound for a bunch of of Australian record labels. She worked in converted car-hold office spaces all over Melbourne and when I was 13 she roped me in to pack CDs for her. Most of those bands and labels don’t exist...
Romanian Prison Vogues
For the last few years, prisoners in Romania have been able to dress however they want as long as they maintain minimum standards of decency. This got our Romanian counterparts wondering: What do chicks wear when they're surrounded by the awfulness and...