land of the unfree: all articles

Inside the prison walls, books can set the mind free. In his eighteenth year of confinement, Michael Santos reflects on a life redeemed by imagination.

The American high–security prison is a primitive and violent world that encourages a retreat to racial bonding as one of the few guarantees of security. At the borders of white, Hispanic and black gang affiliation, between a criminal past and the hope of a future on the outside, long–term inmate Michael Santos takes us inside a multicultural battleground.

Tattooed, tough, and looking to make his name inside, the future seems to hold only more jail time for Jessie. Michael Santos, a veteran of seventeen years, and numerous maximum security prisons, watches, and helps, Jessie grow up inside.

The Unites States prison population is 2.1 million – over twice the number in 1988, when the first President Bush was elected. Most of them are non-violent drug offenders. Sixteen years after his incarceration for cocaine distribution, Michael Santos reflects on the political cycle he has witnessed from the wrong side of the prison walls.