Word: conviction
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This is theater of the prison cell, an unsparing, nerve-jarring mirror to the interior world of the convict. It is guided by the Geese Company, a remarkable troupe of nine young actors founded and led by a former University of Iowa drama teacher, John Bergman, 40. Since 1980 the actors have been crisscrossing the country in a rickety red-and-white bus, playing in penitentiaries and juvenile-detention centers, holding theatrical workshops and performing their largely improvised plays about prison life. One aim is to force prisoners to admit to themselves that criminal behavior is stupid and ugly...
Weeds starts out as stark prison drama. San Quentin inmate Lee Umstetter (Nick Nolte), fed up with the inhumanity of prison where wardens say things like "We don't have rehabilitation anymore, we have punishment," tries to kill himself. Failing that, he turns into the convict with a conscience, the old TV-movie standby. "Give me a thick book," he tells the prison librarian, "I don't care what it's about...
...Nietzsche, Camus, and the like--Umstetter pens a prison drama called "Weeds" and directs it in San Quentin. Weeds, the movie, is the tale of Umstetter's exploits once he's been paroled through a campaign initiated by an impressed San Francisco drama critic. Umstetter and his fellow ex-convict thespians take their show on the road...
Overcrowding in jails has reinforced the trend toward leniency. A convict who escaped from prison last year and was subsequently recaptured was pleased to discover that his cell had been assigned to a newcomer. The former inmate was released in his own custody to await a jail vacancy. Each Friday in Amsterdam, a district attorney tours detention cells to determine who can be released to make room for more serious offenders...
Last year BLM Range Conservationist Walter Jakubowski persuaded authorities at the Colorado State Prison complex in Canon City to let convicts break the horses. Most of the inmates are city bred, and none have had equine experience. In one year the convict-cowboy program has tamed more than 400 mustangs. Another 350 horses are corralled at the prison to be trained at the rate of about ten a day. Most are only halter broken, rather than readied for saddlework...