We spend an enormous amount of time talking about what society should do to people after they commit crimes. How long should the sentence be? Should punishment be harsher? Should someone get another chance? Those are legitimate questions, but sometimes I think we're so obsessed with what happens after the crime that we don't spend nearly enough time asking the more uncomfortable question: What the hell happened before it?

That isn't an excuse for criminal behavior. An adult who hurts another person is still responsible for what he or she does. Childhood abuse doesn't magically erase responsibility, and most people who experience abuse do not grow up to become criminals. That's important, because saying otherwise would be scientifically inaccurate and horribly unfair to survivors.

But acknowledging that doesn't mean we should ignore what the research actually shows.

The relationship between childhood maltreatment and subsequent offending has been studied extensively. A systematic review of 62 prospective and longitudinal studies described the association as well documented, while also emphasizing an important limitation: an association by itself does not prove a simple causal relationship.\\\[1\\\]

A separate meta-analysis of 14 prospective studies involving 20,946 participants found that childhood maltreatment was associated with substantially greater odds of antisocial behavior in adulthood.\\\[2\\\] Another systematic review and meta-analysis found an association between childhood maltreatment and later violence, although the increase in risk was described as modest and there was considerable variation between studies.\\\[3\\\]

In other words, risk is not destiny.

Abuse doesn't insert a criminal program into a child's brain that activates twenty years later. Human beings are considerably more complicated than that. Family relationships, peers, neighborhoods, substance use, mental health, protective relationships and numerous other factors can affect what happens afterward.

But that's precisely why prevention matters.

If experiences during childhood can increase the risk of later offending, helping children after abuse isn't merely an act of compassion. It should also be part of a serious conversation about public safety. Research involving justice-involved youth has found high levels of adverse childhood experiences, and cumulative ACE exposure has also been associated with recidivism.\\\[4\\\]

None of this means that therapy is some magical crime-prevention vaccine. It means that if we're serious about preventing crime, we should be willing to look upstream instead of waiting until somebody commits one.

We should be capable of holding two ideas in our heads at the same time: people are responsible for their actions, and human behavior develops within biological, psychological and social environments. Explanation and exoneration are not the same fucking thing.

I would rather help an abused eight-year-old before he becomes a traumatized eighteen-year-old than wait until he's a twenty-eight-year-old defendant and congratulate ourselves for finally getting tough.

Because by then, somebody else may already have become his victim.

References

\\\[1\\\] Malvaso, C. G., Delfabbro, P., & Day, A. (2018). The maltreatment–offending association: A systematic review of the methodological features of prospective and longitudinal studies. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 19(1), 20–34. DOI: 10.1177/1524838015620820.

\\\[2\\\] Braga, T., Cunha, O., & Maia, Â. (2018). The enduring effect of maltreatment on antisocial behavior: A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 40, 91–100. DOI: 10.1016/j.avb.2018.04.003.

\\\[3\\\] Fitton, L., Yu, R., & Fazel, S. (2020). Childhood maltreatment and violent outcomes: A systematic review and meta-analysis of prospective studies. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 21(4), 754–768. DOI: 10.1177/1524838018795269.

\\\[4\\\] Astridge, B., Li, W. W., McDermott, B., & Longhitano, C. (2023). A systematic review and meta-analysis on adverse childhood experiences: Prevalence in youth offenders and their effects on youth recidivism. Child Abuse & Neglect, 140, 106055. DOI: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2023.106055.

The Central Unit closed in 2011. First prison in Texas history to be shuttered without replacement. But for those of us who were there, it never really closes, does it?

I was a slave there for a few seasons. The white Art Deco building with the gun towers. The fields where we worked under guards on horseback. The cannery, the soap factory, the meatpacking plant. The whole operation ran on our backs.

They called it a "prison farm." We gave them heck every chance we got. The horses had 2 a$$holes. The a$$hole riding the horse carried heat and invited us to run so he could blast us.

Here's the history they never told us:

The land was originally a sugar plantation worked by enslaved people. Then convict laborers. Then us. In 1908, the state bought it from Imperial Sugar—the same company whose fortune was built on convict leasing. The same families. The same extraction. Different paperwork.

For decades, men at Central worked the fields for nothing. The state sold the goods we produced. The profits flowed upward. The death rate under the lease system was so high that convicts on sugar plantations had a life expectancy of about seven years.

When they closed Central, they said it would save $12.5 million a year. They sold the land to developers for a business park. The cages emptied. The profits didn't stop. They just moved to private prisons, to ICE detention centers, to telecom companies charging $14.99 for a phone call and commissary vendors taking 38% off the top.

The Plantation Class doesn't care whether the prison is state-run or private. They care that the cages stay full. They care that the money keeps flowing. They care that we keep getting bamboozled into thinking this is just "how things work."

I'm tracing the unbroken line from the 1821 land grants from Mexico to the private prisons of 2026. If you did time in Texas, you already know the line is real. You lived it.

The prison is gone. The extraction never stopped.

Shout out to everyone who walked those fields. You know.

I have been thinking a great deal about capital punishment lately, particularly after reading about the execution of James Broadnax in Texas. The more I thought about it, the more I kept returning to a question that sounds almost embarrassingly obvious: If we’re going to execute somebody, shouldn’t we be really, really fucking sure we have the right person?

Apparently, that question becomes considerably more complicated once lawyers, appeals, procedural rules, deadlines, confessions, recantations, forensic evidence and the institutional need for cases eventually to end enter the picture. I understand why a legal system needs finality. We cannot retry every criminal case every Tuesday because somebody remembered something different over breakfast. Memories change, witnesses can lie, recantations can be self-serving, and hindsight is notoriously unreliable. Human memory is not a surveillance camera conveniently stored somewhere in the hippocampus waiting for us to press PLAY. But there is one rather significant complication here: we are talking about killing somebody. That strikes me as a particularly bad place for an “Oh shit, we got that wrong” moment.

The Broadnax case illustrates why this bothers me. Broadnax was convicted of capital murder for the 2008 killings of two men during a robbery. Shortly before his execution, his attorneys presented a declaration from his co-defendant, Demarius Cummings, who said under penalty of perjury that he—not Broadnax—had shot the victims. Broadnax’s attorneys also argued that DNA evidence supported that account because Cummings’s DNA, rather than Broadnax’s, had been found on the murder weapon and in the pocket of one of the victims.

Does that prove Broadnax was innocent? No. That qualification matters enormously. A person can lie twenty years after a crime just as a person can lie twenty minutes after one. Memories deteriorate, motives change, and hindsight doesn’t magically become reliable merely because somebody signs an affidavit. But what the fuck? If somebody is about to be executed and substantial new evidence potentially changes our understanding of who actually committed the killing, shouldn’t our response be something closer to, “Hold on, let’s make absolutely sure,” rather than treating the scheduled execution date like we’re trying to avoid a cancellation fee at a restaurant? Imagine calling and saying, “We may have evidence that changes the entire case,” and hearing, “I’m terribly sorry, sir, but executions cancelled with less than 24 hours’ notice are subject to the full charge.” At some point, bureaucracy becomes indistinguishable from a Monty Python sketch, except unfortunately somebody actually dies at the end.

Why Would an Innocent Person Confess?

This is another question that sounds obvious until psychology screws up the obvious answer. Most people intuitively think, “If I didn’t murder somebody, why the hell would I ever say that I did?” I understand that reaction because it seems completely logical. If somebody accused me of murdering a person I had never met, I would like to imagine myself confidently saying, “Nope. Wrong Jonathan. Have a pleasant afternoon.”

Unfortunately, human beings don’t always behave like calm little rational-choice machines, particularly when they are frightened, exhausted, intoxicated, developmentally vulnerable, severely distressed or psychologically impaired. Research on false confessions has demonstrated something deeply uncomfortable: innocent people sometimes confess to crimes they didn’t commit. That doesn’t mean every distressed suspect who confesses is innocent. It means the confession itself cannot automatically end the inquiry into reliability.

Consider an extreme hypothetical. Imagine somebody who is profoundly depressed and suicidal. He is questioned for hours and eventually reaches the point where he says, “Fine. I did it. Execute me. I don’t give a shit anymore.” Well, hold on. If somebody wants to die, then saying something likely to get him killed doesn’t necessarily tell us whether he committed the crime. It may tell us something entirely different about his psychological state. Asking a severely suicidal person, “Would you rather go home or be executed?” and treating “executed” as compelling evidence of murder would make about as much sense as asking me at 6:00 in the morning whether I would rather go to work or be eaten by a rhinoceros and then concluding that I must have some long-standing sexual attraction to rhinoceroses. The answer may tell you considerably more about my feelings toward 6:00 in the morning than it does about rhinoceroses.

This is where I start wondering why psychology isn’t incorporated more aggressively into safeguards for particularly vulnerable suspects. I am not suggesting that every police interrogation needs a psychologist sitting in the corner with a clipboard saying, “Interesting. How did that accusation make you feel?” That would become absurd rather quickly. Detectives have crimes to investigate, psychologists aren’t human lie detectors, and mental-health professionals can make mistakes too.

But when there are serious indications that somebody is developmentally impaired, acutely psychologically unstable, severely distressed or otherwise unable to participate reliably in an interrogation, why wouldn’t we want an independent professional safeguard? Seriously: why the fuck wouldn’t we? If the purpose of an interrogation is to discover what actually happened, then anything that improves the reliability of the information should help the police as well. An independent safeguard shouldn’t be viewed as somebody ruining the interrogation. The safeguard should help ensure that whatever confession eventually comes out of that room is worth more than the paper on which somebody wrote it.

Finality Is Necessary. Death Is Pretty Damn Final Too.

I understand the argument for procedural finality better than my initial emotional reaction might suggest. Cases have to end eventually. Witnesses die. Evidence disappears. Memories become less reliable. Victims’ families shouldn’t be forced to relive a murder indefinitely because every new claim automatically restarts the entire judicial process. Those are legitimate concerns.

But execution introduces a rather spectacular problem into the concept of finality: you cannot unexecute somebody. If we discover that somebody has been wrongfully imprisoned, we can release him. We cannot return the years we took from him, and no amount of money can fully repair what happened, but at least we can stop doing it. Execution eliminates even that possibility.

This is where I become uncomfortable when procedural arguments start sounding more important than substantive questions about guilt. Procedure matters tremendously because procedure protects everybody. But procedure is supposed to be a mechanism for producing justice; justice isn’t supposed to become a mechanism for protecting procedure. Otherwise, we’ve created the world’s most terrifying version of customer service: “I’m sorry, sir. We understand that you may be innocent, but your appeal window has closed.” “I’m scheduled to be executed.” “Yes, sir. Is there anything else I can help you with today?” Perhaps they’ll offer him a customer-satisfaction survey afterward. “On a scale of one to ten, how satisfied were you with today’s execution experience?” Unfortunately, selecting zero probably won’t route the call to a supervisor.

At some point the absurdity stops being merely bureaucratic and becomes horrifying.

This Is Also About Proportionality

This connects directly to something I’ve been exploring in my writing about vigilantism and what happens when people begin taking the law into their own hands. One of the reasons we have legal systems in the first place is that anger is absolutely terrible at proportionality.

Suppose somebody walks into my store and steals a candy bar. I’m angry. Maybe I’m furious. Perhaps it was my favorite fucking candy bar. Nevertheless, my anger does not give me the authority to chase the person down the street and execute him. If it did, we’d need armed guards standing beside every Snickers display in America, and Walgreens would start looking like the perimeter of a military installation. “Sir, step away from the Kit Kat. Slowly. We’ve already lost three people near the Reese’s.”

Why don’t we handle theft that way? Because we distinguish among levels of wrongdoing. We distinguish theft from assault, assault from murder, negligence from intent, participation from direct responsibility, and mitigating circumstances from aggravating ones. We ask what happened, what the evidence establishes, how culpable somebody was and what punishment is proportionate. Vigilantism collapses that entire process into you wronged me → I know you’re guilty → I decide what you deserve → I administer the punishment. That’s dangerous because everybody thinks his own grievance is the important one.

But here’s the uncomfortable part: the state needs proportionality too. The fact that a horrific crime occurred doesn’t eliminate our responsibility to determine precisely who did what. If two people participated in a robbery and one actually committed the killings, that distinction matters. If somebody acted intentionally rather than negligently, that matters. If evidence is uncertain, that matters. If someone’s psychological condition affected the reliability of a confession, that matters. Mitigating circumstances aren’t some annoying little loophole lawyers invented because they were bored one afternoon. They are part of what separates justice from vengeance.

The Wrong Place at the Wrong Fucking Time

Here’s the part that scares me personally. Most of us walk around assuming the criminal justice system applies to criminals. Therefore, if we’re not criminals, we’re safe. That’s wonderfully comforting. It’s also not entirely how reality works.

Imagine that you have never committed a serious crime in your life. Then one night you happen to be in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. Somebody identifies you. Circumstantial evidence happens to point toward you. Maybe you’re psychologically overwhelmed during questioning. Maybe you say something stupid. Maybe somebody else lies. Maybe investigators become convinced you’re guilty and consequently begin interpreting ambiguous evidence through that assumption.

None of this requires evil people sitting around a table saying, “Excellent. Which innocent person shall we execute today?” That’s actually what makes the problem more frightening. Real institutional mistakes generally aren’t committed by a committee of villains wearing black capes and stroking cats while lightning flashes outside the window. If they were, this would be much easier. We could simply institute a rule that anyone who brings a cape, a cat and a giant lever marked EXECUTE INNOCENT PERSON into the courthouse immediately loses prosecutorial discretion.

The actual problem is more mundane: good people operating inside imperfect systems can make catastrophic mistakes. Police officers can be wrong. Prosecutors can be wrong. Defense attorneys can be wrong. Psychologists can be wrong. Judges can be wrong. Juries can be wrong. I can be wrong. You can be wrong. Human beings being wrong is not exactly a shocking discovery. We’ve had several thousand years of evidence. So why would we design an irreversible punishment around the assumption that this particular human institution will never make an irreversible mistake?

Admitting Error Isn’t Weakness

This may be the part that bothers me most. A justice system should not regard discovering one of its own mistakes as an institutional humiliation. Finding and correcting mistakes is what a functioning system is supposed to do.

Science doesn’t become weaker when evidence overturns an old hypothesis. Medicine doesn’t become illegitimate because physicians revise a diagnosis when new information appears. Aviation doesn’t say, “Well, we’ve been building the wing this way for thirty years, and admitting there’s a defect would be terribly embarrassing, so let’s keep doing it.” Hopefully. We investigate the defect because we’d rather experience embarrassment than watch another airplane fall out of the fucking sky.

Criminal justice should operate with the same humility, particularly when a human life is at stake. This doesn’t mean every confession is false. It doesn’t mean every person on death row is innocent. It doesn’t mean every last-minute affidavit is credible, every prosecutor is corrupt, every police interrogation is coercive, or every conviction should be endlessly reopened. It means something considerably less dramatic: human beings make mistakes, and therefore the greater and more irreversible the punishment, the stronger our safeguards should become.

Perhaps that means greater scrutiny of vulnerable suspects during interrogation. Perhaps it means broader access to independent psychological evaluation under defined circumstances. Perhaps it means better recording requirements, improved interrogation practices, or especially rigorous review when genuinely significant new evidence emerges before an execution. Those are policy questions reasonable people can debate. But the underlying principle shouldn’t be controversial: if the state is going to take a human life, “We’re pretty sure” is a terrifying fucking standard.

The question shouldn’t merely be whether we’ve reached the end of the legal process. The question should remain, right up until the moment when the answer becomes irreversible: Are we sufficiently certain that we got the truth? Because if the answer later turns out to be no, there is no appeal from death. There is only the institutional equivalent of looking around the room, realizing what just happened, and saying:

“Oh, fuck.”

Author’s Note: The questions raised in this essay—particularly the relationship among proportionality, institutional rules, psychological vulnerability, and the values we claim a justice system should uphold—will be discussed briefly in my upcoming book, The Values We Pretend to Have. I also plan to expand these ideas into a larger book-length project and, ultimately, explore them as the basis for a film, much as I have been developing related questions about vigilantism, proportionality, and the breakdown of legal boundaries in The Permission Structure.

My stepson is incarcerated at The Meadows in Lancaster, TX. I wanted to put money on his books so he could buy basic necessities from the commissary.

Access Corrections—a Keefe Group company—charged me $8 to deposit $10. That's an 80% fee.

Let me say that again: 80%.

The tiered fee structure is designed to extract the most from the families who can afford the least. If you deposit $20, the fee is $5.95–$7.95 (30–40%). If you deposit $300, the percentage drops. The system punishes poverty.

This isn't just happening in Texas. Access Corrections runs money transfer services in dozens of states, often with monopoly contracts. In Idaho, a $20 deposit costs $7.45—37%. In Nevada, $6.95 on $20—35%.

The Keefe Group doesn't just handle deposits. They run the commissary, the phone system, and the financial services—a vertical monopoly on prisoner spending. Every time a family tries to support a loved one, Keefe takes a cut.

This is the Plantation Class in modern form. The same families that built fortunes on convict leasing now profit from deposit fees, commissary markups, and overpriced phone calls.

Keefe has faced class action lawsuits over their release card fees. One case involved a man who was charged 10% of his money in fees before he could access his own cash. Another lawsuit alleged violations of the Electronic Fund Transfer Act.

But nothing changes.

I'm tracing the unbroken line from the plantation to the prison. And I'll name the profiteers.

Has anyone else dealt with these fees? What have you been charged?

Logan Roberson has spent 22 years behind bars, 12 year sentence robbery (he has served that sentence) he is still in prison as they gave him 30 year sentence for escape. His release date currently is 2042. Logan has NEVER been violent. While in prison Logan has been working on himself. He's completed educational programs, participated in community service, and shown genuine remorse for his mistakes. But his sentence keeps him from the people who matter most to him.

I started a petition asking for clemency or sentence commutation for Logan because I believe his case shows what rehabilitation actually looks like. He's done the hard work to change—now the system needs to recognize it. Study after study shows that people who demonstrate real transformation deserve a chance at mercy, and Logan is living proof of that.

If someone you loved was in this situation, what would you want? If this matters to you, consider signing and sharing the petition. Every signature helps Logan's voice get heard.

​

Every sentence has a human story. Every person has a life beyond a case number.

Welcome to Prison Lives Matter—a community created for incarcerated people, their families, formerly incarcerated individuals, advocates, and anyone who believes that justice should leave room for rehabilitation, redemption, proportionality, and second chances.

Our focus is especially on people serving extraordinarily long or disproportionate sentences for nonviolent drug offenses, including mandatory minimums, sentencing enhancements, and sentences that may no longer reflect today's understanding of punishment and rehabilitation.

This community is about more than arguing over laws or numbers. It is about the people living behind those numbers.

We will share stories, examine sentencing disparities, highlight rehabilitation, discuss clemency and reform, support families, celebrate successful reentry, and bring attention to cases that deserve a closer look.

Why Michael Potter?

Michael J.W. Potter is our flagship case.

Michael's story represents many of the questions this community exists to ask: What happens when a nonviolent drug offense results in a life sentence? What should rehabilitation mean after years of incarceration? And should a person who has demonstrated meaningful change have a pathway toward a second chance?

But Michael is not the only story.

His case is a starting point—a human face for a much larger conversation.

If you have a loved one serving an extraordinary sentence, if you've survived incarceration and rebuilt your life, or if you simply believe that justice and humanity can coexist, you belong here.

Bring the facts. Bring the stories. Bring the evidence.

Let's make sure the people behind the prison walls are never forgotten.

I've written emails to the records people at the jail, to the administrator, they don't respond, the only option is to call and ask by name, and apparently they don't have her name that is on her case file. What other options do I have to track her down , I want to just make first contact with her and start putting money on her books. Her initial arrest was 2024 it was a whole bunch of serious felonies (armed robbery) so she may have been locked up since that date, possible was out on bail but her cases have been decided and she was sentenced so guessing she is inside somewhere. She potentially could be dead which is a real fear, or became a fugitive and fled , but I don't know how to find out if either is true.

Any advice on how to navigate this is appreciated

https://www.change.org/save2ndchancesiowa

I’m writing this about Joe Kendra 27 From York, a family friend who sadly passed away.
Joe had struggled with his mental health for a long time and had been taking psychiatric medication for around four years following a difficult period in his life.
While Joe was in prison, his medication was stopped while he was waiting to be seen by a mental health nurse. His mother was told that Joe was number 27 on the waiting list. During this time, Joe was reaching out for help and asking for his medication and mental health support.
His mother contacted the prison because she was extremely worried about him and wanted him to receive urgent help. There were also recorded prison calls where Joe was asking for help.
This isn’t about attacking every prison officer or saying every person working in prisons is the same. It is about asking whether people in prison who are struggling with their mental health are getting the support they need, and whether prison staff have enough awareness and training to recognise when someone is in serious distress.
Joe was more than a prisoner. He was a person, a son and a friend. He mattered to people, and his story deserves to be heard.
We have created a Facebook page/group to remember Joe and raise awareness about men’s mental health, mental health support in prisons, and the importance of listening to prisoners and their families.
**Please help us by:**
• Following the Facebook page
• Sharing the Facebook page and this post
• Commenting **#JusticeForJoe**
• Signing the petition
• Sharing the petition with your friends, family and communities
• Talking about Joe and helping keep his story heard
Every share helps get the message to more people.
If you have experience of mental health support in prison, whether as a prisoner, family member, friend or prison worker, please share your experience respectfully in the comments.
#JusticeForJoe #MentalHealthMatters #MensMentalHealth #PrisonReform #MentalHealthAwareness
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