Publisher Description

Michael Santos helps audiences understand how to overcome the struggle of a lengthy prison term. Readers get to experience the mindset of a 23-year-old young man that goes into prison at the start of America's War on Drugs. They see how decisions that Santos made at different stages in the journey opened opportunities for a life of growth, fulfillment, and meaning.Santos tells the story in three sections: Veni, Vidi, Vici.In the first section of the book, we see the challenges of the arrest, the reflections while in jail, the criminal trial, and the imposition of a 45-year prison term.In the second section of the book, we learn how Santos opened opportunities to grow. By writing letters to universities, he found his way into a college program. After earning an undergraduate degree, he pursued a master's degree. After earning a master's degree, he began work toward a doctorate degree. When authorities blocked his pathway to complete his formal education, Santos shifted his energy to publishing and creating business opportunities from inside of prison boundaries.In the final section, we learn how Santos relied upon critical-thinking skills to position himself for a successful journey inside. He nurtured a relationship with Carole and married her inside of a prison visiting room. Then, he began building businesses that would allow him to return to society strong, with his dignity intact.Through Earning Freedom! readers learn how to overcome struggles and challenges. At any time, we can recalibrate, we can begin working toward a better life. Santos served 9,135 days in prison, and another 365 days in a halfway house before concluding 26 years as a federal prisoner. Through his various websites, he continues to document how the decisions he made in prison put him on a pathway to succeed upon release.

The first authoritative volume to look back on the last 50 years of The Open University providing higher education to those in prison, this unique book gives voice to ex-prisoners whose lives have been transformed by the education they received. Offering vivid personal testimonies, reflective vignettes and academic analysis of prison life and education in prison, the book marks the 50th anniversary of The Open University.

At present, prisons are seen as a logical response to crimes of poverty and crimes of violence. And yet, the desolation, degradation, and violence of prisons may be causing our communities far more harm than good. This book offers a glimpse inside the world of prisons as well as documenting inspiring work in a range of communities in Australia, New Zealand, and North America that is offering to take us beyond the prison. Most particularly, this book is written to offer company and practical ideas to those working with adults and young people whose lives are lived in the shadow of prisons.

Liberty's Prisoners examines how changing attitudes about work, freedom, property, and family shaped the creation of the penitentiary system in the United States. The first penitentiary was founded in Philadelphia in 1790, a period of great optimism and turmoil in the Revolution's wake. Those who were previously dependents with no legal standing—women, enslaved people, and indentured servants—increasingly claimed their own right to life, liberty, and happiness. A diverse cast of women and men, including immigrants, African Americans, and the Irish and Anglo-American poor, struggled to make a living. Vagrancy laws were used to crack down on those who visibly challenged longstanding social hierarchies while criminal convictions carried severe sentences for even the most trivial property crimes. The penitentiary was designed to reestablish order, both behind its walls and in society at large, but the promise of reformative incarceration failed from its earliest years. Within this system, women served a vital function, and Liberty's Prisoners is the first book to bring to life the e xperience of African American, immigrant, and poor white women imprisoned in early America. Always a minority of prisoners, women provided domestic labor within the institution and served as model inmates, more likely to submit to the authority of guards, inspectors, and reformers. White men, the primary targets of reformative incarceration, challenged authorities at every turn while African American men were increasingly segregated and denied access to reform. Liberty's Prisoners chronicles how the penitentiary, though initially designed as an alternative to corporal punishment for the most egregious of offenders, quickly became a repository for those who attempted to lay claim to the new nation's promise of liberty.

"Dreaming of Freedom" presents poignant firsthand accounts of Palestinian minors held in Israeli detention facilities in the occupied West Bank.

Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era

There are many forms of liberation—some that exist at the mercy of circumstance and others that can never be taken away. In this stirring and timely collection of stories, essays, poems, and letters, Jarvis Jay Masters explores the meaning of true freedom on his road to inner peace through Buddhist practice. He reveals his life as a young African American man surrounded by violence, his entanglement in the criminal justice system, and—following an encounter with Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche—an unfolding commitment to nonviolence and peacemaking. At turns joyful, heartbreaking, frightening, and soaring with profound insight, Masters’s story offers a vision of hope and the possibility of freedom in even the darkest of times.

In its most brutal form, the prison in British India was an instrument of the colonial state for instilling fear and dealing with resistance. Exploring the lived experience of select political prisoners, this volume presents their struggles and situates them against the backdrop of the freedom movement. From Mohamed Ali, Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, the Nehru family, and Gandhi, to communists like M.N. Roy—we get a vivid glimpse of their lives within the confines of the prison in a narrative that is at times deeply personal and yet political. The struggles of some remarkable women of the time are also brought to the fore—be it the feisty doctor Rashid Jahan, Aruna Ali, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, or Sarojini Naidu. Extensively researched, the volume draws upon the records at the National Archives of India, private papers, creative writings of the prisoners, newspapers, memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies. The volume also brings to light the differences between Indian and European prisons during the colonial period and the conception of ‘criminal classes’ in the colony. Capturing the sharp pangs of loneliness, the poetry born out of solitude, and the burning desire for independence, Roads to Freedom breathes new life into accounts and tales long forgotten.