The Life Inside A Memoir Of Prison Family And Learning To Be Free

Author : Andy West
Publisher : Picador
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2023-02-09
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1529032024

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The Life Inside by Andy West Pdf

An Irish Times and The i Book of 2022'Tense and intimate . . . an education' - Geoff Dyer'Enriching, sobering and at times heartrending. A wonder' - Sir Lenny Henry'Authentic, fascinating and deeply moving' - Terry Waite__________Can someone in prison be more free than someone outside? Would we ever be good if we never felt shame? What makes a person worthy of forgiveness?Andy West teaches philosophy in prisons. Every day he has conversations with people inside about their lives, discusses their ideas and feelings, and listens as they explore new ways to think about their situation.When Andy steps into a prison, he also confronts his inherited shame: his father, uncle and brother all spent time behind bars. While Andy has built a different life for himself, he still fears that their fate will also be his. As he discusses pressing questions of truth, identity and hope with his students, he searches for his own form of freedom too.Moving, sympathetic, wise and frequently funny, The Life Inside is an elegantly written and unforgettable memoir. Through a blend of storytelling and gentle philosophical questioning, it offers a new insight into our stretched justice system, our failing prisons and the complex lives being lived inside.__________'Inspiring' - The Observer'Strives with humour and compassion to understand the phenomenon of prison' - Sydney Review of Books'Expands both heart and mind' - Ciaran Thapar'A fascinating and enlightening journey . . . A legitimate page-turner' - 3AM

Author : Andy West
Publisher : Picador
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2022-01-25
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781761260179

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The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Learning to Be Free by Andy West Pdf

Andy West teaches philosophy in prisons. He has conversations with prisoners about their lives, discusses their ideas and feelings, and offers new ways to think about their situation. These questions about how to live are ones we all share, but the extraordinary setting makes them more urgent. Can bad behaviour ever be justified? Do we have the right to forgive ourselves, whether we’ve committed a crime or offended a friend? Can a prisoner be free? Are they any less free than those of us with a mortgage to pay or a school-run to do? As his students discuss these knotty problems, West struggles with his own inherited guilt: his father, uncle and brother all spent serious time in jail. Was it inevitable that one day he would have to spend time inside too? Moving, sympathetic, wise and frequently funny, The Life Inside is an elegantly written and unforgettable book. Through its blend of memoir, storytelling and gentle philosophical questioning, readers will gain a new insight into our justice system and, more importantly, into themselves.

Author : Colleen Frakes
Publisher : Zest Books ™
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2019-08-01
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN : 9781541581951

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Prison Island by Colleen Frakes Pdf

McNeil Island in Washington state was the home of the last prison island in the US, accessible only by air or sea. It was also home to about fifty families, including Colleen Frakes' when she was growing up. Colleen's parents—like nearly everyone else on the island—both worked in the prison, where her father was the prison's captain and her mother worked in security. The island functioned as a "company town," where housing was assigned based on rank, and even children's actions could have an impact on a family's livelihood: If you broke a rule, your family could be kicked out of their home. In the graphic memoir Prison Island, Colleen tells her story of growing up on the McNeil Island. Beyond the irregularities of living in a company town near a prison, remote island life posed other challenges to Colleen and her sister. Regular teenage activities like ordering a pizza or going to the movies became extremely complicated endeavors on the island, and the small-town dynamics were amplified by their isolation from surrounding cities. Prison Island tells the story of a typical girl growing up in atypical circumstances using stark, engaging graphic novel panels. It's a story that is simultaneously familiar and foreign, and readers will be surprised to see parts of themselves in Colleen's unique experience.

Author : Dwayne Betts
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2009-08-06
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781101133361

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A Question of Freedom by Dwayne Betts Pdf

A unique prison narrative that testifies to the power of books to transform a young man's life At the age of sixteen, R. Dwayne Betts-a good student from a lower- middle-class family-carjacked a man with a friend. He had never held a gun before, but within a matter of minutes he had committed six felonies. In Virginia, carjacking is a "certifiable" offense, meaning that Betts would be treated as an adult under state law. A bright young kid, he served his nine-year sentence as part of the adult population in some of the worst prisons in the state. A Question of Freedom chronicles Betts's years in prison, reflecting back on his crime and looking ahead to how his experiences and the books he discovered while incarcerated would define him. Utterly alone, Betts confronts profound questions about violence, freedom, crime, race, and the justice system. Confined by cinder-block walls and barbed wire, he discovers the power of language through books, poetry, and his own pen. Above all, A Question of Freedom is about a quest for identity-one that guarantees Betts's survival in a hostile environment and that incorporates an understanding of how his own past led to the moment of his crime.

Author : Cyntoia Brown-Long
Publisher : Atria Books
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2020-05-05
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781982141110

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Free Cyntoia by Cyntoia Brown-Long Pdf

NAACP Image Award nominee for Outstanding Biography/Autobiography In her own words, Cyntoia Brown-Long shares the riveting and redemptive story of how she changed her life for the better while in prison, finding hope through faith after a traumatic adolescence of drug addiction, rape, and sex trafficking led to a murder conviction. “Those...years in prison hadn’t just turned me into woman. They transformed me. The girl who desperately wanted to belong, who felt powerless, who clawed, and scratched her way out of every corner she was backed into, was gone.” At the age of sixteen, Cyntoia Brown, a survivor of human trafficking, was arrested for killing a man who had picked her up for sex. Two years later, she was sentenced to life in prison. Brown reflects on the isolation, low self-esteem, and sense of alienation that drove her straight into the hands of a predator. Once in prison, she attempts to build a positive path and honor the values her beloved adoptive mother, Ellenette, taught her, but Cyntoia succumbs to harmful influences that drive her to a cycle of progress and setbacks. Then, a fateful meeting with a prison educator turned mentor offers Cyntoia the opportunity to make the pivotal decision to strive for a better future, even if she’s never freed. In these pages, Cyntoia shares the details of her transformation, including a profound encounter with God, an unlikely romance, an unprecedented outpouring of support from social media advocates and A-list celebrities, and her release from prison. A coming-of-age memoir set against the shocking backdrop of a life behind bars, Free Cyntoia takes you on a spiritual journey as Cyntoia struggles to overcome a lifetime of feeling ostracized and abandoned by society.

Author : Lea Ypi
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2022-01-18
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780393867749

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Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History by Lea Ypi Pdf

Shortlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Biography Award The Sunday Times Best Book of the Year in Biography and Memoir A Financial Times Best Book of 2021 (Critics' Picks) The New Yorker, Best Books We Read in 2021 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2021 A Guardian Best Book of the Year A reflection on "freedom" in a dramatic, beautifully written memoir of the end of Communism in the Balkans. For precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi, Albania’s Soviet-style socialism held the promise of a preordained future, a guarantee of security among enthusiastic comrades. That is, until she found herself clinging to a stone statue of Joseph Stalin, newly beheaded by student protests. Communism had failed to deliver the promised utopia. One’s “biography”—class status and other associations long in the past—put strict boundaries around one’s individual future. When Lea’s parents spoke of relatives going to “university” or “graduating,” they were speaking of grave secrets Lea struggled to unveil. And when the early ’90s saw Albania and other Balkan countries exuberantly begin a transition to the “free market,” Western ideals of freedom delivered chaos: a dystopia of pyramid schemes, organized crime, and sex trafficking. With her elegant, intellectual, French-speaking grandmother; her radical-chic father; and her staunchly anti-socialist, Thatcherite mother to guide her through these disorienting times, Lea had a political education of the most colorful sort—here recounted with outstanding literary talent. Now one of the world’s most dynamic young political thinkers and a prominent leftist voice in the United Kingdom, Lea offers a fresh and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political, between values and identity, posing urgent questions about the cost of freedom.

Author : Sara Lunsford
Publisher : Sourcebooks, Inc.
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2012-11-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781402270789

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Sweet Hell on Fire by Sara Lunsford Pdf

"A gritty, raw, and engrossing voice."—Publishers Weekly I was a bad mother, a bad daughter, a bad wife, a bad friend. Boozed out and tired, with no dreams and no future. But I was a good officer. Sara Lunsford helped cage the worst of the worst, from serial killers to sex criminals. At the end of every day, when she walked out the prison gate, she had to try to shed the horrors she witnessed. But the darkness invaded every part of her life, no matter how much she tried to immerse herself in a liquor bottle. She couldn't hide from the things that hurt her, the things that made her bleed, the things that still rise up in the dark and choke her. With a magnetic, raw voice that you won't soon forget, Sweet Hell on Fire grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go. It's a hardscrabble climb from rock bottom to the new ground of a woman who understands the meaning of sacrifice, the joy of redemption, and the quiet haven to be found in hope.

Author : Stanley "Tookie" Williams,Barbara Cottman Becnel
Publisher : Chronicle Books
Page : 90 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2001-02
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN : 1587170930

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Life In Prison by Stanley "Tookie" Williams,Barbara Cottman Becnel Pdf

Williams, the cofounder of the Crips gang and a nominee for both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature, became an anti-gang crusader before he was executed in December 2005. In this work he debunked urban myths about prison life and challenged young people to choose the right path. Selected for the Young Adult Library Services Association's Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults list.

Author : Chris Wilson,Bret Witter
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 434 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2019-02-05
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780735215603

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The Master Plan by Chris Wilson,Bret Witter Pdf

The inspiring, instructive, and ultimately triumphant memoir of a man who used hard work and a Master Plan to turn a life sentence into a second chance. Growing up in a tough Washington, D.C., neighborhood, Chris Wilson was so afraid for his life he wouldn't leave the house without a gun. One night, defending himself, he killed a man. At eighteen, he was sentenced to life in prison with no hope of parole. But what should have been the end of his story became the beginning. Deciding to make something of his life, Chris embarked on a journey of self-improvement--reading, working out, learning languages, even starting a business. He wrote his Master Plan: a list of all he expected to accomplish or acquire. He worked his plan every day for years, and in his mid-thirties he did the impossible: he convinced a judge to reduce his sentence and became a free man. Today Chris is a successful social entrepreneur who employs returning citizens; a mentor; and a public speaker. He is the embodiment of second chances, and this is his unforgettable story.

Author : Megan Comfort
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 275 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2009-05-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780226114682

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Doing Time Together by Megan Comfort Pdf

By quadrupling the number of people behind bars in two decades, the United States has become the world leader in incarceration. Much has been written on the men who make up the vast majority of the nation’s two million inmates. But what of the women they leave behind? Doing Time Together vividly details the ways that prisons shape and infiltrate the lives of women with husbands, fiancés, and boyfriends on the inside. Megan Comfort spent years getting to know women visiting men at San Quentin State Prison, observing how their romantic relationships drew them into contact with the penitentiary. Tangling with the prison’s intrusive scrutiny and rigid rules turns these women into “quasi-inmates,” eroding the boundary between home and prison and altering their sense of intimacy, love, and justice. Yet Comfort also finds that with social welfare weakened, prisons are the most powerful public institutions available to women struggling to overcome untreated social ills and sustain relationships with marginalized men. As a result, they express great ambivalence about the prison and the control it exerts over their daily lives. An illuminating analysis of women caught in the shadow of America’s massive prison system, Comfort’s book will be essential for anyone concerned with the consequences of our punitive culture.

Author : Don Cummins
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 330 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2020-11-20
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1734892609

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The Prison Within by Don Cummins Pdf

It's 2011 and Don is homeless. He's a hard-core, street-level drug addict. He's a secluded loner, and he's been declared by the courts to be insane. And as if that weren't enough, he's also served over twenty years in prison for bank robberies - and he's been charged with yet another one. It's 2018 and Don is a homeowner. He's sober and has genuine friends. He's married and he's become the father of two young boys. He's the Director of Software Development for an international financial services company. He's also a transformational speaker, helping others by spreading a message of hope and self-forgiveness. The Prison Within: A Memoir of Breaking Free is the true, inspirational story of how despair and extreme isolation miraculously turned to hope, connection, and true success. The journey begins as an out of control train wreck, twisting downward through the madness of seedy drug motels, mental institutions, and prison yards. But Don's path takes a desperate turn, and a slow climb leads to personal awakening, transformation, and healing that propels him upward to make an astonishing comeback.

Author : Michael Smith
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 44,9 Mb
Release : 2016-12-16
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 0998374601

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Sixteen Years to Redemption by Michael Smith Pdf

Author : Albert Woodfox
Publisher : HarperCollins
Page : 448 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2019-03-12
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781443458368

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Solitary by Albert Woodfox Pdf

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION Named One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2019 Named the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, Publishers Weekly, BookBrowse, and Literary Hub Winner of the BookBrowse Award for Best Debut of 2019 A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Solitary is the unforgettable life story of a man who served more than four decades in solitary confinement?in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell, 23 hours a day, in notorious Angola prison in Louisiana?all for a crime he did not commit. That Albert Woodfox survived was, in itself, a feat of extraordinary endurance against the violence and deprivation he faced daily. That he was able to emerge whole from his odyssey within America’s prison and judicial systems is a triumph of the human spirit, and makes his book a clarion call to reform the inhumanity of solitary confinement in the U.S. and around the world. Arrested often as a teenager in New Orleans, inspired behind bars in his early twenties to join the Black Panther Party because of its social commitment and code of living, Albert was serving a 50-year sentence in Angola for armed robbery when on April 17, 1972, a white guard was killed. Albert and another member of the Panthers were accused of the crime and immediately put in solitary confinement by the warden. Without a shred of actual evidence against them, their trial was a sham of justice that gave them life sentences in solitary. Decades passed before Albert gained a lawyer of consequence; even so, sixteen more years and multiple appeals were needed before he was finally released in February 2016. Remarkably self-aware that anger or bitterness would have destroyed him in solitary confinement, sustained by the shared solidarity of two fellow Panthers, Albert turned his anger into activism and resistance. The Angola 3, as they became known, resolved never to be broken by the grinding inhumanity and corruption that effectively held them for decades as political prisoners. He survived to give us Solitary, a chronicle of rare power and humanity that proves the better spirits of our nature can thrive against any odds.

Author : Tara Westover
Publisher : HarperCollins
Page : 406 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2018-02-20
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781443452502

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Educated by Tara Westover Pdf

For readers of The Glass Castle and Wild, a stunning new memoir about family, loss and the struggle for a better future #1 International Bestseller Tara Westover was seventeen when she first set foot in a classroom. Instead of traditional lessons, she grew up learning how to stew herbs into medicine, scavenging in the family scrap yard and helping her family prepare for the apocalypse. She had no birth certificate and no medical records and had never been enrolled in school. Westover’s mother proved a marvel at concocting folk remedies for many ailments. As Tara developed her own coping mechanisms, little by little, she started to realize that what her family was offering didn’t have to be her only education. Her first day of university was her first day in school—ever—and she would eventually win an esteemed fellowship from Cambridge and graduate with a PhD in intellectual history and political thought.

Author : Erwin James
Publisher : Atlantic Books (UK)
Page : 232 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2003
Category : Life imprisonment
ISBN : PSU:000053607003

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A Life Inside by Erwin James Pdf

In the mid 1980s Erwin James was sentenced to life imprisonment. Over recent years, he has written powerfully about prison life for the Guardian. James writes candidly about learning the who, what, why and when of the prison world.