Unit 29: Writing from Parchman Prison is a collection of writings from over 30 Mississippi inmates housed in the infamously brutal Unit 29 at Mississippi State Penitentiary, better known as Parchman Farm. The book is not a comfortable literary work, but rather a cry for help from deep within a monstrous and insatiable beast known as Unit 29, Parchman.
Paperback
List Price: 30.00*
* Individual store prices may vary.
Description
The long-awaited 3rd release of VOX’s Prison Writes Initiative’s inmate writing series features personal narratives and poetry from several Mississippi incarceration facilities from various prison demographics: inmate veterans, women, youth, men, death row, long-term segregation, elderly and handicapped writers are represented in this unprecedented collection.
Praise For Mississippi Prison Writing…
The writers in Mississippi Prison Writing share their inner-most thoughts, opening their diaries for readers to witness actual daily life in prison, void of sensationalism and drama. The reflections offer frank medita tions on regret, the monotony and isolation of incarceration, the often difficult and layered home lives before prison walls, the journey to self-realization. Though these writers are “reduced to living in a cage,” their words leap off the page, gifting us with complex human beings
fighting to keep spirit and creativity alive in a repressive system. They help us remember what happens on the other side of the wall, and why we should care.
Caits Meissner, Prison and Justice Program
VOX PRESS, 9780980194463, 256pp.
Publication Date: January 17, 2021
About The Author
VOX PRESS is a 501 (c) 3 arts organization based in Oxford, Mis sissippi. VOX was established to publish, perform, and disseminate the work of marginalized individuals and groups in the arts and education.
In this video, Wes Watson shares how a surfing, skating, snowboarding kid growing up in the beach City of Oceanside, California, can wind up doing 10 years in the California prison system
From Lucy Lang of the Institute of Innovation in Prosecution: Criminal Justice Reform has to start with Prosecutors. More than a decade into my career as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, I investigated a murder on upper Broadway, in which two masked men opened fire in a busy street, shooting four people nonfatally and point-blank murdering a fifth.
Nothing has changed more in the past couple of decades than attitudes toward the crisis of incarceration in America. What was largely an invisible civilization of confinement—millions of men and women locked up for, cumulatively, millions of years—is now a commonplace concern. Everyone running for the Democratic nomination pays lip service to the need to address mass incarceration, and what were once essential political instincts—to side with the police and the prosecutors in every instance, to “get tough on crime”—have become, at the very least, negotiable. We have gone from “Lock ’em up!” to “Lock ’em up?” to “Set ’em loose!,” all in a relatively short time.
Laura Delano recognized that she was “excellent at everything, but it didn’t mean anything,” her doctor wrote. She grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, one of the wealthiest communities in the country. Her father is related to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and her mother was introduced to society at a débutante ball at the Waldorf-Astoria.
While prisoners have the only confirmed American right to healthcare, the quality of services are at times lacking and unreliable. The dire need for mental health services especially for our prison population poses a grave challenge to finite resources.
With the impending decline of private prisons combined with the little known world of prison healthcare administration, the future health of our most indigent is at stake. We’ve never had a greater need for innovation in the provision of large scale healthcare and mental health.
WASHINGTON — The Senate overwhelmingly approved on Tuesday the most substantial changes in a generation to the tough-on-crime prison and sentencing laws that ballooned the federal prison population and created a criminal justice system that many conservatives and liberals view as costly and unfair.
The First Step Act would expand job training and other programming aimed at reducing recidivism rates among federal prisoners. It also expands early-release programs and modifies sentencing laws, including mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, to more equitably punish drug offenders.
Innovation for helping women through the criminal justice system are more important than ever. Interesting measures to help bring mothers and young women back into society after they’ve served their time:
With the emergence of DNA evidence there are important cautions and caveats to keep in mind for the criminal justice system. Prosecutorial reform is as important as ever:
