Tony has served almost three decades of a life with parole sentence in Tennessee. Before prison he lived as a closeted gay man; his Southern Baptist parents and an older brother have since died. While incarcerated he has worked as a tutor, clerk and newspaper editor. He’s also begun book clubs and writing workshops, and prisoner-led elder care programs. He writes about captivity in the hope of contributing to the prison reform movement.
Greg* has been incarcerated in Tennessee for about 18 months. He’s been on a waiting list for job placement for…
Louis Bell was a type of person we typically didn’t encounter in our Tennessee prison. A middle-aged white man with…
Travis learned to crochet from his grandmother. He was 10 when she showed him his first stitch, in 1986, and…
In the United States, anyone convicted of a sex offense is punished with two criminal sentences. The first is the…
I thought I was too old to have to worry about being raped in prison. But as his sweat dripped…
Like with so many prisons across the country, the pandemic sent Tennessee's South Central Correctional Facility (SCCF) into a state…
About seven years ago, the Tennessee private prison where I’ve been incarcerated for the past 26 years created a special…
The Tennessee private prison where I’ve been incarcerated since 2016 has long maintained that the supply of contraband drugs here…