Word: lockups
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...lawmakers have tried to outdo each other in legislating harsher mandatory penalties and in reducing avenues of release. The only thing to do with criminals, they say, is get tougher. They have. In the process, the ! purpose of prison began to change. The state boasts one of the highest lockup rates in the country, imposes the most severe penalties in the nation and vies to execute more criminals per capita than anywhere else. This state is so tough that last year, when prison authorities here wanted to punish an inmate in solitary confinement for an infraction, the most they could...
...telling yet if Randy Blackburn, 31, will become such a person, but he is worried he might. Blackburn has been in Cook County Jail for the past 13 months, awaiting trial on sexual assault. "I almost felt like a baby," he says of his first days in lockup. "I really didn't know what cocaine was until I got here." Now, Blackburn says, the temptation to become "hard" is constant. "Every night in the dorm, you hear the guys talk about how many people they have shot and how much drugs they've sold and women they...
Conditions were not always so relaxed and congenial at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. Just three years ago, the main prison and five outcamps at the 18,000-acre maximum-security prison farm -- physically the largest lockup in the country -- were rocking with murders, suicides and escape attempts. The mood was so tense that a federal judge declared a state of emergency, which included a state investigation and tightened federal oversight. Discontent among the 5,186 inmates could be summed up in a word: hopelessness. Prisoners, the vast majority of them lifers in a state where a life term...
...strong belief in committed theater, theater which acts as a catalyst for social change. Rasminsky recalls, "I had seen this group called New Landscapes, that works with kids in lockup, they do monologues of Shakespeare interspersed with their own lives--Hamlet, here's this kid who comes home and his father's dead and his mother remarries, and he's really pissed. They did it in ways these kids could really relate to, be inspired by. And then I thought, what if we could do it with this, and I got really excited...
There is more than a slight whiff of jailhouse self-pity: Joe loves Kitty, goes to the lockup, survives the schemes of bad villains with the help of good villains, and gets out to find true-blue Kitty and the child he has never seen waiting for him. The best of the book is Morgan's wildly reinvented con lingo. His ear fails him occasionally, when he uses lace-curtain language -- "caparisoned," "implacable mien" -- that some editor should have yanked from the manuscript with tongs. But at other times he's cooking: "Saturday night movies in the Gym were...