These essays represent the worldviews of 52 offenders, introducing the reader to the forces that shaped their lives and compelled them to commit crimes, their struggles with their own feelings, and their experiences--often rocky--with prison life and the criminal justice system.

Crime and Punishment: Inside Views is useful as a supplement for courses in criminal justice, corrections, and criminology. It illuminates a wide array of individuals, settings, and issues, offering a stimulating introduction to the study of crime and punishment. These writings will sharpen student's critical thinking skills as they compare and judge these offenders' own words against the context of their textbooks. Editors Johnson and Toch's insightful introductions and commentaries at the beginning of each section and each essay serve as a useful "road map," framing the various writings and putting them into perspective.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Section I: Doing Crime

1. Astro Creep
Kent Williams
A day in the life of a middle level drug dealer with lingering misgivings about the costs--to him and his customers--of the drug trade.

2. The St. Francis Hotel 
Darell Jordan
Details the powerful and almost sensuous lure of drugs and the drug culture before one becomes addicted.

3. Wasted Days, Wasted Nights
Michael Gabrish
Reveals in personal terms the grim, dead-end life that becomes, sooner or later, the fate of most alcohol and drugs abusers. 

4. Perfectly Impaired
Rita Biggs
Takes the reader a step further down the path of drug-induced self-destruction, depicting the author's decline from a picture of adult middle class health to a cadaverous and almost amoral street person, "a virtual skeleton with sunken eyes," all due to drugs.

5. Robbery 
Travis Lewis
Captures the chillingly single-minded focus of the criminal predator when he has selected his prey and moves in for the score. 

6. Interstate Flight
Lance E. Fleming
A story of murder and a man on the run, of a life taken by crime and a life lost due to criminality, told with gripping attention to detail.

7. Better You Than Me
Michael Aquilar
Provides insight into impulsive crimes driven by a casual selfishness that leaves others, even one's friends, at lethal risk.

8. We Are All Human Beings
Michael B. Majors
Explores the experiences and rationalizations of a self-defined sex addict who carried on a long-term sexually abusive relationship with his step-daughter that lands him in prison. 

9. Reflections From Death Row 
Michael B. Ross
An account of a serial sexual sadist who is on death row and wants to accept responsibility for his crimes and face execution, even though his crimes were arguably the result of a mental disorder. 

10. Socio-Economic Suppression and Crime
Marcus Johnson 
A historically informed and personally inspired account of why "black men are murdering one another without a shred of compassion or remorse."

Section II: Rehabilitation

11. My Rehabilitation
Josh Wesley Elam
A story of self-discovery behind bars, aided and abetted by fellow outcast prisoners. 

12. A True Story
Kenny Rogers
An account of the various emotional pains of imprisonment, for the offender and those who love him and who must live without him, first due to drugs, then due to incarceration. 

13. Freedom Within
Jennifer Howard
An offender ponders how she came to crime, giving up her life and her family for so little in return, finding answers in scars from an unexamined past. 

14. After the War 
James G. Fuller
Tells the story of a vulnerable small town boy who turns bad after a traumatic experience in Vietnam, for whom healing comes, slowly and painfully, in a prison cell.

15. Prison, Crime, and Addiction 
Gary James Boyle
An account of lessons in good thinking and personal responsibility learned after years of bad living and irresponsibility; the transformation of a man from a self-defined victim of an unjust world to an autonomous actor responsible for his own destiny.

16. Facing Your Problem 
Brandon Buckles
A young inmate discovers a basic truth, that one must face suffering, work it through, and take control of one's life.

17. No One Ever Asked Me, Why? 
Gerald V. Murphy
Recounts a long life of crime and punishment in which no one in authority offered to help or even inquired in any meaningful way about the problems that drove the author to crime. 

18. A View From Within 
Rudolph Churchill
Offers an account of decline--that of the author and the prisons he's known--together with an agenda for reform drawn from his personal experience behind bars.

Section III: Finding Faith

19. Prayer 
Selvyn Tillett
A life marred by delinquency, crime, and general disillusion, turned around through the faith of a devoted mother.

20. Paradox Shrugged
Terry Patterson 
Prison comes at the end of a long string of broken hopes and personal setbacks for a long-term addict, who sinks into a depression that is only lifted when he discovers the inner peace and sense of purpose offered by faith in God.

21. A Life Restored 
Brad Barnes
Relates the story of a troubled homosexual man for whom the approval of other gays "was my drug of choice," but a choice that led to prison and an HIV infection, culminating in a plea to God for help restoring his broken life.

22. Reflections From the Cell 
Timothy J. Lippa
The story of a life that bottoms out in an act of explosive violence, then takes new form with the aid of faith.

23. Blessed in Prison 
Tiberius Mays
A man finds religious belief serves as a shield against the rigors of prison life, featuring an unlikely link to key gang members through the medium of prayer. 

24. Mending a Broken Heart 
Blanca Chavez
A story of heartache and heartbreak that begins with abandonment by her biological father and ends with the dedication of her life to her heavenly Father. 

Section IV: Being Imprisoned

25. Freedom: A Magnificent Possession 
Janelle Cole
Clear and compelling memories of a "carefree childhood" are routinely summoned by daily scenes in prison life, psychologically transporting the author in and out of prison, bringing a haunting depth to our understanding of the loss associated with confinement. 

26. Life in a Microwave
Dianne Hamill Metzger
Prison is the antithesis of the free world; like a microwave, prison "destroys you on the inside long before its effects are evident on the outside."

27. Meaning of Life in Prison 
Ernest Patrick
A thoughtful iteration--a kind of psychological and existential checklist--of the deprivations and hurts of prison life.

28. Big Trouble in Li'l Chilli 
Kim Redifer 
An irreverent and engaging characterization of her prison, Chillicothe Correction Center--"They call it chilli w/crackers, because it is the only woman's institution that Missouri has that lets you take psych drugs."

29. A Single Unheard Voice 
Donald D. Hairgrove
A world without "emotional nourishment," prison too often dulls the mind and hardens the heart, deforming rather than reforming everyone it touches--staff as well as inmate.

Section V: Living in Prison

30. Behind the Wall 
Mike York
A day in the life of a prisoner, marked by routine and habit.

31. Control 
James W. Harkleroad
Explores the paradoxical notions of strength and weakness in prison, where personal deficiencies like low self-control and promiscuous violence are paraded as strengths to be admired and emulated. 

32. Prison Is a Place
James W. Harkleroad
A list, simple but striking, of the routine injustices and hurts of daily prison life.

33. A Career Statement 
Joseph A. Johnson
A personal account of adjustment changes that take place over a career in confinement, from troublemaker to productive citizen of the prison.

34. Michael 
Christina Nankervis
An account of wrenching personal loss and the struggle to readjust, aided by prison programs and a will to reclaim one's capacity for healthy human relationships. 

35. Foreigner 
Selvyn Tillett
A somewhat whimsical look at American prisons from a native of Belize, who reflects on the curious and parochial world that emerges behind bars.

36. Beethoven 
Marshall Earl Fitzgerrel
The story of a "dimwitted" convict who would comfort his fellow prisoners with song, and whose untimely death leaves his fellow convicts saddened and cynical. 

37. A Weekend With the Inmate Plumber
Raymond E. Williams
A light and occasionally humorous glimpse of life in a minimum security prison, a place where plumbers and their helpers roam free, able to observe the ebb and flow of daily prison existence.

38. A Deadly Game
Antonio A. Gilbreath and Joshua D. M. Rogers, IV
Describes men who seek out unprotected sex, often with partners known to be HIV positive, in service of "a preternatural thirst for love and affection in an impersonal and violent world."

39. The Sixth Commandment 
Michael Wayne Hunter
We meet a rogue prison officer with a taste for violence and learn of the horror such a figure can create in the closed world of death row. 

40. The Long-Awaited Day of Freedom 
Eliseo E. Padron
Though eager to be free, ties still bind the departing inmate to the prisoners he leaves behind. Freedom, long awaited, is a mixed blessing. 

Section VI: Justice and Injustice 

41. Number Twenty-Seven 
Christopher L. McIntire
Injustice is rampant in our justice system but need not be; accommodations can be made to treat one another with dignity, just as our author tries to work out a decent accommodation with his aging cell mate. 

42. The L.A. County Jail
Noah Lhotsky
"Welcome to the Jungle," writes Lhotsky, introducing a theme that applies all too well to the workings of this big city jail, temporary home to criminals of all types (whose offenses range from minor traffic violations to premeditated murder) as well as a few unlucky inmates who are not guilty of any crime at all.

43. California Cesspool 
Noah Lhotsky
Prison injustices, we learn, follow lines similar to those found in big city jails; both settings feature impersonality and a fair amount of gratuitous violence that is ignored by a complacent public, unaware that such injustices might one day touch their lives as well.

44. The Manipulation Game 
Diane Hamill Metzger
The prospect of release, however distant and unlikely for long-term inmates, makes them vulnerable to a "manipulation game" wittingly or unwittingly run by the justice system, in which "The only rules are to have enough hope in happy endings to be gullible, and to want something so badly that you'll grasp at any straw."

45. Prisoners, Poverty, and the Politics of Slavery
Ronald A. Young
Young makes the troubling argument that prison labor and welfare labor (workfare) in Texas (and by implication, in many states in the nation) "are converging into a common practice--state-sanctioned slavery."

46. In Search of Win 
Hal Elkins
The system is run by people, and people let their egos get in the way of justice; too often, the ideal is to win at any cost. 

47. There Is No Justice in Florida 
Mr. Brown
Tells the seemingly Kafkaesque story of a man who claims to have been wrongfully convicted of child molestation at the hands of a zealous detective and an unresponsive justice system.

48. I'm Not Guilty, But Kill Me Anyway 
Michael Ross
A man slated to be resentenced because of flaws in his original capital sentencing declines to pursue a legal technicality that may save his life; he sees life in prison as a kind of death, and hopes that a larger moral purpose may be served by his execution. 

49. Adjudicated Probation
Gary Jay Walker
A first offender describes his journey through the system and the sometimes substantial hazards it offers to the uninitiated, who may assent to a sanction like adjudicated probation without fully appreciating what they are getting into. 

50. Unmasking the Face of Death 
Michael Ross
A death row prisoner argues that "the death penalty is a complete renunciation of all that is embodied in our concept of humanity."