A structured public-speaking and leadership program — culminating in a TEDx event inside the prison — that builds leaders, lowers risk, and costs the state nothing. Georgia can be the first Southern state to host one.
After a year without seeing the sunset from my cell window, I finally witness it again—a brilliant fireball of orange, red, and purple. This daily blessing reminds me of God’s beauty even after decades inside.
Without belief and faith in God, my prison life would be a living hell. Faith brings stability, freedom, and the confidence that God governs for my good.
In the mid-1990s at Georgia State Prison, a prisoner’s daily routine with alcohol-based window cleaner ‘Blue Duck’ leads to an unexpected and humorous struggle. This story captures a moment of prison life before gangs and modern security measures.
Elbert Walker Jr. describes the burden of believing he is held in violation of the law, with evidence of incorrect legal advice and a psychologist’s finding of incompetence, yet receiving no relief. He appeals for justice and reform.
Bitten twice by brown recluse spiders while incarcerated in Georgia prisons, the author describes the painful reality of venomous spider encounters, medical responses, and the resourcefulness required to survive.
Every harm this series documented flows from one choice: Georgia warehouses people instead of preparing them to return. There is a proven alternative — normalization — that is humane, far cheaper, and may be legally required. The finale of End the Warehouse, and the blueprint out.
Georgia treats family contact — the strongest predictor of going straight — as a privilege to ration and revoke: phone lists capped at twenty, visitation lists changeable only in May and November. An investigation into the connection the state severs by design, and the cheap fix it refuses.
Georgia stripped its prisons of work, hope, and a future — and some people answer that emptiness not with drugs or the gang, but by going silent and disappearing while still alive. An investigation into the despair the state manufactures by policy, refuses to treat, and declines to count.
In 1994, I was locked down 24-7 at Georgia State Prison in Reidsville, where men flung feces and boiling baby oil. The federal court fined offenders, but nothing stopped the seriously mentally ill like ‘Cuba,’ released from a Cuban psychiatric institution into a concrete isolation cell.