"Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom. In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches...

The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson' is the story of Clarence Henderson, a wrongfully accused Black sharecropper who was sentenced to die three different times for a murder he didn't commit, and the prosecution desperate to pin the crime on him despite scant evidence. His first trial lasted only a day and featured a lackluster public defense. The book also tells the story of Homer Chase, a former World War II paratrooper and New England...

Freedom and equality are the watchwords of American democracy. But like justice, freedom and equality are meaningless when there is no corresponding practical application of the ideals they represent. Physical, bodily liberty is fundamental to every American's personal sovereignty. And yet, millions of Americans-including author Deborah Plant's brother, whose life sentence at Angola Prison reveals a shocking current parallel to her academic work on...

Rideau brings to vivid life the world of the infamous Angola penitentiary and his long struggle for justice, giving his readers a searing expose of the failures of our legal system framed within his own dramatic tale of how he found meaning, purpose, and hope in prison.

"The child of an incarcerated father, Antong Lucky grew up in an impoverished, crime-ridden neighborhood in East Dallas, Texas, born at the same time as East Dallas experienced an alarming rise in crack cocaine and heroin use. Despite his high grades and strong love for learning, Antong is introduced to gang life and its consequences when confronted by law enforcement. Antong eventually forms the Dallas Bloods gang, inaugurating a period in the 1990s...

Paul Crump robbed the Chicago stockyards on March 20, 1953 with four other black men and shot one guard to death. He was tried and sentenced to die in the electric chair. William Friedkin met Crump in the Cook County Jail. Friedkin was impressed by the "model prisoner", Crump. Friedkin produced this documentary as an impassionate plea for Crump's return to society.

Challenges one of America's most cherished assumptions, the belief that slavery in the U.S. ended with Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, by telling the harrowing story of how, in the South, a new system of involuntary servitude took its place with shocking force.

A prisoner is granted a furlough in hopes of persuading his estranged son, the country's top high school basketball player, to attend the governor's alma mater.

"In February 1946, when the 21-year-old Malcolm Little was sentenced to eight to ten years in a maximum-security prison, he was a petty criminal and street hustler in Boston. By the time of his parole in August 1952, he had transformed into a voracious reader, joined the Black Muslims, and was poised to become Malcolm X, one of the most prominent and important intellectuals of the civil rights era. While scholars and commentators have exhaustively...