Jimmy Iakovos

Jimmy Iakovos is a pseudonym for a writer who is incarcerated in Georgia. It is illegal in some Southern states to earn a living while under a sentence of penal servitude. Writing has enabled Jimmy to endure over 30 years of continuous imprisonment.

How I Quit Cigarettes in Prison, After Smoking for 40 Years

I’m coming up on the three-year anniversary of the day I stopped smoking cigarettes. It’s strange to think that I…

February 23, 2023

How Drugs Grew in Our Prison Flower Beds for Over a Decade

[Read Part 1 of this story here.] Charlie was someone you’d expect to be an easy target in prison, and…

December 19, 2022

The Gardener Who Grew Our Health Care in Prison

For most of his time in Georgia Department of Corrections custody, Charlie was assigned to the horticulture crew. Over the…

December 15, 2022

Prison “K2”: The Hidden Center of a Chaotic New Drug War

Back when I was running with biker gangs, we used to play a game called Crash or Fly. Someone would…

November 28, 2022

How Prison and Parole Can Pull You Into a Debt Trap

In her late 20s, Laura* sold an eighth of Vitablend to a person who turned out to be an undercover…

July 20, 2022

Lifers, Lab Rats and the Mandatory Minimums Experiment

In the 1950s, John Hopkins University Professor Curt Richter ran a series of experiments on rats that involved placing them…

June 6, 2022

Tobacco Bans in Our Prisons Are Rich Pickings for Me—and the COs

The first time the Georgia Department of Corrections tried to go tobacco-free was 1994. In the mid-'90s it was trendy…

May 5, 2022