Nurturing My Marriage Through Prison

Nurturing relationships while struggling through the complications of a prison term requires a daily commitment. Carole and I understood the challenges we would have to overcome long before we agreed to marry in a prison visiting room. I wrote about our courtship and marriage in several previous articles. I meet many prisoners, however, whose wives […]

Sex in Prison Visiting Rooms

Cindy Bedolla wrote to ask whether my wife and I ever violated the visiting rules of a federal prison. She also wanted to know whether we ever saw other prisoners violating the rules with their visitors. I’m grateful for this opportunity to share my experiences and to help Cindy understand more about prison life. As […]

Limited Intimacy in Prison

Joe Gonzalez asked me how prisoners coped with prison visiting rules. He thought that rules prohibiting prisoners from expressing more intimacy than a single kiss and embrace at the start and conclusion of each visit could lead to emotional struggle. He was right. As a prison family, Carole and I have had to cope with […]

Prison Reforms We Can Believe In

Ultimately, society relies upon these prisons as tools to encourage law-abiding behavior. Yet flaws within the design of the prison system render it less effective than its potential. Statistics show that more than six of every ten people in America’s prison system return to confinement after their initial release. Reforms can lower those recidivism rates […]

We need President Obama to appoint a new Director in the Bureau of Prisons

The President appoints Director of the Bureau of Prisons. The  Director presides over an agency that employs more than 25,000 people and incarcerates more than 200,000 people. The Director sets the policy for the Bureau of Prisons. All employees of the BOP carry out the Director’s mission, and the prisoners must live within the rules […]

A New Earth – Chapter One: The Flowering of Human Consciousness

As part of Oprah’s online class, my wife and I are working through Eckhart Tolle’s book, A New Earth, together by reading and answering the weekly workbook questions. Following are my answers to the questions posed in the Chapter One workbook: Why did you decide to read this book? My wife, Carole, sent me Eckhart […]

A Message of Gratitude to my Wife

More than three months have passed since administrators transferred me from the camp at Lompoc to the camp at Taft. As I’ve written in various other articles, this move has been a good one for me. The living conditions are better than anywhere I’ve been since my confinement began, back in 1987. The one difficulty […]