Ex Convict Quotes

But all at once I realized that it was not my success God had used to enable me to help those in this prison, or in hundreds of others just like it. My life of success was not what made this morning so glorious -- all my achievements meant nothing in God's economy. "No, the real legacy of my life was my biggest failure -- that I was an ex-convict. My greatest humiliation -- being sent to prison -- was the beginning of God's greatest use of my life; He chose the one thing in which I could not glory for His glory.

At this time of day it should have been open and full of fifty fellow smackheads, crackheads, psychotics, epileptics, schizophrenics, self-harmers, beggars, buskers, car thieves, sherry pushers, ciderheads, just-released-that-morning convicts, ex-army, ex-married-men-with-young-children-who'd-discovered-their-wife-in-bed-with-two-members-of-the-university-rowing-team-at-the-same-time.

Each time he uttered the word ‘Monsieur’ in his mild, compassionable voice, the man’s face lighted up. The courtesy, to the ex-convict, was like fresh water to a shipwrecked man. Ignominy thirsts for respect.

For it must be remembered that at the time I knew quite nothing, naturally, concerning Milo Payne, the mysterious Cockney-talking Englishman with the checkered long-beaked Sherlockholmsian cap; nor of the latter’s ‘Barr-Bag,’ which was as like my own bag as one Milwaukee wienerwurst is like another; nor of Legga, the Human Spider, with her four legs and her six arms; nor of Ichabod Chang, ex-convict, and son of Dong Chang; nor of the elusive poetess, Abigail Sprigge; nor of the Great Simon, with his 2,163 pearl buttons; nor of — in short, I then knew quite nothing about anything or anybody involved in the affair of which I had now become a part, unless perchance it were my Nemesis, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwümpel — or Suing Sophie!

Jean Valjean had undertaken to teach her to read. Sometimes, as he made the child spell, he remembered that it was with the idea of doing evil that he had learned to read in prison. This idea had ended in teaching a child to read. Then the ex-convict smiled with the pensive smile of the angels. He felt in it a premeditation from on high, the will of some one who was not man, and he became absorbed in revery. Good thoughts have their abysses as well as evil ones.

A Philippine-brothel-owning member of the House of Lords was staying at the house of a Spanish Chief Inspector of Police. The Lord was being watched by an American CIA operative who was staying at the house of an English convicted sex offender. The CIA operative was sharing accommodation with an IRA terrorist. The IRA terrorist was discussing a Moroccan hashish deal with a Georgian pilot of Colombia's Medellín Cartel. Organising these scenarios was an ex-MI6 agent, currently supervising the sale of thirty tons of Thai weed in Canada and at whose house could be found Pakistan's major supplier of hashish. Attempting to understand the scenarios was a solitary DEA agent. The stage was set for something.

I was in a car with an ex-convict and an ex-spy, barreling down on an unknown future—if that wasn’t a set of mathematical variables that equaled adventure, I didn’t know what was.

When life could end at any moment in the point of a German bayonet, never allow middle-class morality to get in the way of a good romp with a married ex-convict in tweed.

You know when you watch a movie and there is always that evil girl that never gets a happy ending? That girl, that is me. I am her. I don't deserve a happily ever after.

But there was a catalyst, an event, a moment which changed everything and not just for us. This is good for storytelling but bad for decision making, and it is frightening to look back and realize, were it not for that moment, all of our lives would have been so different. maybe that's revisionist history. Maybe it's me making origin myths. But I can't shake the conviction that Jason's boyfriend's friend's ex-boyfriend's girlfriend changed the world.

We have both been talking about you. Cosette loves you so dearly! You must not forget that you have a chamber here, we want nothing more to do with the Rue de l'Homme Armé. We will have no more of it at all. How could you go to live in a street like that, which is sickly, which is disagreeable, which is ugly, which has a barrier at one end, where one is cold, and into one cannot enter? You are to come and install yourself here. And this very day. Or you will have to deal with Cosette. She means to lead us all by the nose, I warn you. You have your own chamber here, it is close to ours, it opens on the garden; the trouble with the clock has been attended to, the bed is made, it is all ready, you have only to take possession of it. Near your bed Cosette has placed a huge, old, easy-chair covered with Utrecht velvet and she has said to it: 'Stretch out your arms to him.' A nightingale comes to the clump of acacias opposite your windows every spring. In two months more you will have it. You will have its nest on your left and ours on your right. By night it will sing, and by day Cosette will prattle. Your chamber faces due South. Cosette will arrange your books for you, your Voyages of Captain Cook and the other,— Vancouver's and all your affairs. I believe that there is a little valise to which you are attached, I have fixed upon a corner of honor for that. You have conquered my grandfather, you suit him. We will live together. Do you play whist? you will overwhelm my grandfather with delight if you play whist. It is you who shall take Cosette to talk on the days when I am at the courts, you shall give her your arm, you know, as you used to, in the Luxembourg. We are absolutely resolved to be happy. And you shall be included in it, in our happiness, do you hear, father? Come, will you breakfast with us to-day?" "Sir," said Jean Valjean, "I have something to say to you. I am an ex-convict.

Why this book is disliked by gay readers: Captain Ernst Roehm, was a stocky, bull-necked, piggish-eyed, scar-faced professional soldier—the upper part of his nose had been shot away in 1914—with a flair for politics and a natural ability as an organizer. Like Hitler he was possessed of a burning hatred for the democratic Republic. His aim was to re-create a strong nationalist Germany and he believed with Hitler that this could be done only by a party based on the lower classes, from which he himself, unlike most Regular Army officers, had come. A tough, ruthless, driving man—albeit, like so many of the early Nazis, a homosexual—he helped to organize the first Nazi strong-arm squads which grew into the S.A.... (...) Murderers, pimps, homosexual perverts, drug addicts or just plain rowdies were all the same to him if they served his purposes. (...) The brown-shirted S.A. never became much more than a motley mob of brawlers. Many of its top leaders, beginning with its chief, Roehm, were notorious homosexual perverts. Lieutenant Edmund Heines, who led the Munich S.A., was not only a homosexual but a convicted murderer. These two and dozens of others quarreled and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations, with their peculiar jealousies, can. (...) [Hitler] who was so monumentally intolerant by his very nature, was strangely tolerant of one human condition—a man’s morals. No other party in Germany came near to attracting so many shady characters. As we have seen, a conglomeration of pimps, murderers, homosexuals, alcoholics and blackmailers flocked to the party as if to a natural haven. (...) Karl Ernst, a former hotel bellhop and ex-bouncer in a café frequented by homosexuals, whom Roehm had made leader of the Berlin S.A., had alerted the storm troopers...

What are Christians?” “The people in the churches.” “Yes, I know. But why do Christians give money to strangers?” He was getting a little peeved. “It’s just what Christians do. They give things away. They’re not like normal people.” I sighed. “That makes no sense.” The ex-convict tried to explain, but I could see even he didn’t understand what he was saying. In North Korea, there was no concept of doing things for other people out of kindness. Unconditional love was not something I was familiar with. You did things because of family obligation, or because of hunger or greed, or because there was no other choice. But what he was describing—people freely giving their hard-earned cash to complete strangers—was plain crazy. We changed the subject. But the ex-convict’s stories stayed in my mind. I thought of Christians as bizarre people, almost another species. I wanted to meet them, touch them, to confirm that such creatures existed.

Let us go a step farther. From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge- a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in pros- perity. As the number of her adherents dimin- ishes, so will she lose many of her social privi- leges. In contrast to an earlier age, she will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, she will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members. Undoubtedly she will discover new forms of ministry and will ordain to the priesthood approved Christians who pursue some profession. In many smaller congregations or in self-contained social groups, pastoral care will normally be provided in this fashion. Along- side this, the full-time ministry of the priesthood will be indispensable as formerly. But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world. In faith and prayer she will again recognize her true center and ex- perience the sacraments again as the worship of God and not as a subject for liturgical scholar- ship.

In May, Stanton graduated with five other formerly incarcerated adults from Project ReMADE, a 12-week program created by Stanford law students that aims to turn ex-convicts into entrepreneurs. The program matches former prisoners with Silicon Valley venture capitalists and business executives, and with students from Stanford's law and graduate business schools, who mentor the ex-inmates to become small-business owners. "Stanford brings social capital to people who don't have ... the networks that you and I and everyone else leans on and takes for granted," said Debbie Mukamal, executive director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, who oversees Project ReMADE. "We're here to open doors for them.

Nothing comes to a sleeper but a dream - sometimes it's a nightmare" Translation: get your shit together! Colden Hanks - Cerebral Ex-Convict

The ex-convict tried to explain, but I could see even he didn’t understand what he was saying. In North Korea, there was no concept of doing things for other people out of kindness. Unconditional love was not something I was familiar with. You did things because of family obligation, or because of hunger or greed, or because there was no other choice. But what he was describing—people freely giving their hard-earned cash to complete strangers—was plain crazy. We

At first I didn’t think I’d even be able to play—I had way too much going on in my mind—but to my profound surprise, my fingers didn’t seem to care. Apparently if you wanted to rock, it didn’t matter if you had explosives in the basement, or a father with a chronic problem with keeping his dick in his pants, or a crazed ex-Blackwater employee with some religious conviction for ripping your head off. Hell, it might have helped.

The names of your informers, what backstabbing campaigns you’re embarking on, where you store your guns, your drugs, your money, the location of your hideout, the interchangeable lists of your friends and enemies, your contacts, the fences, your escape plans—all things you need to keep to yourself, and you will reveal every one if you are in love. Love is the Ultimate Informer because of the conviction it inspires that your love is eternal and immutable—you can no more imagine the end of your love than you can imagine the end of your own head. And because love is nothing without intimacy, and intimacy is nothing without sharing, and sharing is nothing without honesty, you must inevitably spill the beans, every last bean, because dishonesty in intimacy is unworkable and will slowly poison your precious love. When it ends—and it will end (even the most risk-embracing gambler wouldn’t touch those odds)—he or she, the love object, has your secrets. And can use them. And if the relationship ends acrimoniously, he or she will use them, viciously and maliciously—will use them against you. Furthermore, it is highly probable that the secrets you reveal when your soul has all its clothes off will be the cause of the end of love. Your intimate revelations will be the flame that lights the fuse that ignites the dynamite that blows your love to kingdom come. No, you say. She understands my violent ways. She understands that the end justifies the means. Think about this. Being in love is a process of idealization. Now ask yourself, how long can a woman be expected to idealize a man who held his foot on the head of a drowning man? Not too long, believe me. And cold nights in front of the fire, when you get up and slice off another piece of cheese, you don’t think she’s dwelling on that moment of unflinching honesty when you revealed sawing off the feet of your enemy? Well, she is. If a man could be counted on to dispose of his partner the moment the relationship is over, this chapter wouldn’t be necessary. But he can’t be counted on for that. Hope of reconciliation keeps many an ex alive who should be at the bottom of a deep gorge. So, lawbreakers, whoever you are, you need to keep your secrets for your survival, to keep your enemies at bay and your body out of the justice system. Sadly—and this is the lonely responsibility we all have to accept—the only way to do this is to stay single. If you need sexual relief, go to a hooker. If you need an intimate embrace, go to your mother. If you need a bed warmer during cold winter months, get a dog that is not a Chihuahua or a Pekingese. But know this: to give up your secrets is to give up your security, your freedom, your life. The truth will kill your love, then it will kill you. It’s rotten, I know. But so is the sound of the judge’s gavel pounding a mahogany desk.

Ask anybody, would you want an ex-madman living next door? It’s difficult enough being an ex-convict. It’s double hard for us ‘madmen’. Please believe it.

Of her portrayal in the 1967 movie, Bonnie and Clyde, Blanche said, 'That movie made me out like a screaming horse's ass!' ... 'I was too busy moving bodies [to act hysterical],' Blanche herself said. ... Her image in this memoir, as well as in Fugitives and in Cumie Barrow's manuscript, was fashioned at a time when Blanche could have easily been charged with the Joplin murders. That may account for the great difference in tone Between Blanche, the young convict in Missouri State Penitentiary, and Blanche, the elder ex-fugitive. Indeed, at least one of Blanche Barrows' champions, Wilbur Winkler, the Deni— son man who co-owned (along with Artie Barrow Winkler) the Cinderella Beauty Shoppe, used Fugitives to try to obtain a parole for Blanche from the Missouri Board of Probation and Parole. In letters to the Platte County prosecutor and the judge involved in Blanche's case, Winkler alluded to the book's description of Blanche in Joplin in an effort to win their support for her release: 'Blanch [sic] ran hysterical [tic] thru [sit] the gunfire down the street carrying [her] dog in her arms,' Winkler wrote. He even sent copies of the book to them—and to others.

In half a century, 1717–67, 10,000 serious criminals were dumped on Maryland alone. They arrived chained in groups of ninety or more, looking and smelling like nothing on earth. Marginal planters regarded them as a good buy, especially if they had skills. They went into heavy labor—farming, digging, shipbuilding, the main Baltimore ironworks, for instance. In 1755 in Baltimore, one adult male worker in ten was a convict from Britain.165 They were much more troublesome than non-criminal indentured labor, always complaining of abuses and demanding ‘rights.’ People hated and feared them. Many were alcoholics or suicidal. Others had missing ears and fingers or gruesome scars. Some did well—one ex-thief qualified as a doctor and practiced successfully in Baltimore, attracting what he called ‘bisness a nuf for 2.’ But there were much talked-about horror-stories—one convict went mad in 1751 and attacked his master’s children with an axe; another cut off his hand rather than work. From Virginia, William Byrd II wrote loftily to an English friend: ‘I wish you would be so kind as to hang all your felons at home.’166 There were public demands that a head-tax be imposed on each convict landed or that purchasers be forced to post bonds for their good behavior. But the British authorities would never have allowed this. As a result of the convict influx we hear for the first time in America widespread complaints that crime was increasing and that standards of behavior had deteriorated. All this was blamed on Britain.

REGINALD BURNABY THE GREAT (variously identified as a defrocked Roman Catholic priest from Galway, an ex-convict from Liverpool, if not an escaped convict from that seaport city)

While Bigge was trying to turn back the clock, ex-convicts and their sons and daughters were demanding greater rights. Most important, they realized, again just as in the United States, that to consolidate their economic and political rights fully they needed political institutions that would include them in the process of decision making. They demanded elections in which they could participate as equals and representative institutions and assemblies in which they could hold office. The

Benoit began life in the year 1889, with the coming of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad. There was never any plan to run track through the plantations south of Rosedale, but James Richardson, the largest individual cotton grower in the world at that time, offered the railroad free use of his land if, in turn, the company built him a station. James was the eldest son of Edmund Richardson, a planter whose holdings at one time included banks, steamboats, and railroads. He owned three-dozen cotton plantations and had a controlling interest in Mississippi Mills, the largest textile plant in the Lower South. His New Orleans-based brokerage house, Richardson and May, handled more than 250,000 bales of cotton every year. Edmund Richardson was not always so prosperous. By the end of the Civil War, he had lost almost his entire net worth, close to $1 million. So in 1868, Richardson struck a deal with the federal authorities in Mississippi to contract labor from the state penitentiary, which was overflowing with ex-slaves, and work the men outside prison walls. He promised to feed and clothe the prisoners, and in return, the government agreed to pay him $18,000 a year for their maintenance. The contract struck between Richardson and the State of Mississippi began an era of convict leasing that would spread throughout the South. Before it was over, a generation of black prisoners would suffer and die under conditions that were in many cases worse than anything they had ever experienced as slaves. Confining his laborers to primitive camps, Richardson forced the convicts to clear hundreds of acres of dense woodland throughout the Yazoo Delta. When the land was cleared, he put prisoners to work raising and picking cotton on the plowed gound. Through this new system, Richardson regained his fortune. By 1880 he had built a mansion in New Orleans, another in Jackson, and a sprawling plantation house known as Refuge in the Yazoo Delta. When he died in 1886, he left his holdings to his eldest son, James. As an inveterate gambler and drunk, James decided to spend his inheritance building a new town, developed solely as a center for sport. He bought racehorses and designed a racetrack. He built five brick stores and four homes. In 1889, when the station stop was finally completed for his new city, James told the railroad to call the town Benoit, after the family auditor. James’s sudden death in 1898 put an end to his ambitions for the town. But decades later, a Richardson Street still ran through Benoit, westward toward the river, in crumbling tribute to the man.

This journey has led me to Pause and Think about my new role as a mom, an ex-wife, and a co-parent with a convicted felon and registered sex offender. To think about who I want to be as a survivor. I was powerless over what happened to me, but I had a choice to be thoughtful in what I did next. I didn’t want to live as a victim. I didn’t want to be angry or bitter or vengeful. So I continuously work to Act in a way that supports my life, by practicing being Thoughtfully Fit and by picking up the pieces when I falter. And I falter often. I still have lots of ups and downs, but I’m better today than I was yesterday.

The average man does not wish to employ an ex-convict, because the average man has no confidence in the reforming powers of the penitentiary. He believes that the convict who comes out is worse than the convict who went in.

Instead of hiding bodies in mass graves, corpses were triumphantly displayed, as when the Jalisco New Generation (while still part of El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel) dumped the thirty-five bodies on an avenue in Veracruz in September 2011. In reply, the Zetas scattered twenty-six corpses in Jalisco and a dozen in Sinaloa. On closer inspection, the bodies were those of ordinary citizens, not criminals: they were workers and students who had been abducted and murdered and displayed in order to strike fear in the heart of anyone who doubted the murderous resolve of the Zetas... In To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War, John Gibler writes about a related series of bizarre and violent episodes that took place in Torreón, in Coahuila state, bordering Texas: “Who would believe, for example, that the warden of a state prison would let convicted killers out at night and loan them official vehicles, automatic assault rifles, and bulletproof vests, so that they could gun down scores of innocent people in a neighboring state and then quickly hop back over the state line and into prison, behind bars, a perfect alibi. Who would believe that a paramilitary drug-trafficking organization formed by ex−Special Forces of the Mexican Army would kidnap a local cop and torture him into confessing all of the above details about the prisoners’ death squad, videotape the confession, execute the cop on camera with a shot to the heart, and then post the video on YouTube? Who could fathom that the federal attorney general would, within hours of the video-taped confession and execution being posted online, arrest the warden, and then a few days later hold a press conference fully acknowledging that the prisoners’ death squad had operated for months, killing ten people in a bar in January 2010, eight people in a bar in May 2010, and seventeen people at a birthday party in July?” Yet all of this actually happened. During April 2012, when El Chapo was at war with the Zetas, fourteen torsos — armless and legless bodies — were found in a car by the side of the road in Nuevo Laredo. Dead Zetas. Some of the torsos were in the trunk, for which there is a specific narco term: encajuelado (“trunked”; therefore, trunks trunked). Soon after, in Michoacán state, the Zetas met their match in the person of Nazario Moreno (called El Más Loco, the Craziest One), leader of the ruthless Templarios, the Knights Templar cartel, whose recruits were required to eat human flesh—their victims’— as part of their initiation rites. When Moreno was gunned down by the Mexican army in 2014, the Zetas flourished, and remain dominant. But there was a posthumous bonus for the Craziest One: he was promoted to sainthood. In and around his birthplace in Apatzingán, shrines and altars were erected to Saint Nazario, the dead capo represented as a holy figure in robes, venerated by credulous Michoacanos.

In any event, if upon recounting your eerie encounter you get caught up in the spirit of the story and say you saw an ethereal being, then you may convince not just your audience, but yourself. One notable finding of modern psychology is how systematically misleading memory is. People often remember events wrongly from the get-go, and even when they don’t, their memory can later be steered toward falsehood. In particular, the act of reporting false details can cement them firmly in mind. You don’t just recount what you remember; you remember what you recount. (Football star O. J. Simpson’s former agent was sure Simpson had killed his ex-wife and also sure that Simpson believed he didn’t.) This built-in fallibility makes sense from a Darwinian standpoint, allowing people to bend the truth self-servingly with an air of great and growing conviction. And, clearly, bent truths of a religious sort could be self-serving. If you were a close friend or relative of the deceased, then the idea that his powerful spirit is afoot may incline people to treat you nicely, lest they invite his wrath. Another gem from social psychology: publicly espousing something not only helps convince you of its truth; it shapes your future perception, inclining you to see evidence supporting it but not evidence against it. So if you speculate that the strange, shadowy creature was the disgruntled spirit of the deceased, you’ll likely find corroboration. You may notice that one of his enemies fell ill only a week after your sighting, while forgetting that one of his friends fell ill a few days earlier. If you’re a person of high status, all of this will carry particular weight, as such people are accorded unusual (and often undue) credibility. If, in a hunter-gatherer band of thirty people, someone widely esteemed claims to have seen something strange—and has a theory about what it was—twenty people may be convinced right off the bat. Then the aforementioned tendency of people to conform to peer opinion could quickly yield unanimity.

Look at me, Meg,” he said in that deep voice. “Who do you see?” “What?” She frowned, unsure of what he was doing and wondering at the sorrow reflected in his eyes. “Who do you see standing here?” What did he want from her? she wondered in confusion. “I see you,” she said at last. “Ace Allen.” “Exactly. You see the mixed-breed ex-convict who killed two men. I’ll always be sorry for that, but if you never believe anything else about me, you can believe that I would never deliberately harm a hair on your head.

Madison!” Bob’s head jerks up and he steps back three paces from me, and all the warmth that was him is suddenly gone. “Dad!” I cry. My father steps between me and Bob. “What are you doing here?” “Skip called me.” Skip and I grew up together. The traitor. “Skip said some ex-convict was carrying you out of the bar over his shoulder.” He looks from Bob to me and back again. “Is that true?” “I can explain, sir,” Bob begins, but my dad shoots him a look. “Why do you look so familiar to me?” Dad asks him. “We met in the courtroom, sir.” “What’s your name?” “Bob Caster, sir.” Dad’s eyes narrow. “One of Phil’s boys?” “Yes, sir.” Bob scratches his nose like he’s suddenly uncomfortable. “Why are you with my daughter?” “We’re on a date, sir.” “One that ends with you throwing her over you shoulder?” “That’s actually how it starts, sir.” A chuckle bursts from my lips and I cover my mouth to keep it in. “Sorry,” I mutter. “Madison, get in the car.” Dad points to his fancy car, which is parked right behind the one I’m sitting on. “With all due respect, sir, I’d like to take her home.” “If you had any respect for my daughter, you wouldn’t have been all over her on the hood of a car in the middle of the street.” “It was just a kiss, Dad—” “It looked like more than that.” “It was,” Bob interjects. His eyes meet mine. “It was more than that.” “What was it?” I whisper, past the lump that’s suddenly clogging my throat. “More,” Bob says. “I don’t know how to explain it. But it was more.” “More than you deserve,” Dad snaps. “My daughter will not have a relationship with an ex-convict.” Bob takes a step back and stuffs his hands in his pockets. “I understand, sir,” he says. “Good night, Madison.” “Don’t go!” I cry. He rounds the front of his car and gets inside. He cranks it and waits for me to get my butt off it. “You deserve better than him, Madison,” Dad says. I get off the hood of the car and glare at him. “Dad!” “Get in the car, Madison!” he shouts. He points his finger in the direction he wants me to go. I stomp over to the car and get in, and my heart breaks when I see that Bob is already driving away. His eyes meet mine briefly in his mirror and I see a world of hurt inside him. “I’m not going to my apartment, Dad,” I tell him. “Yes, you are.” “No, I’m not.” Dad heaves a sigh. “What do you want, Madison?” “I want to get to know him, Dad. That’s all. I like him a lot.” “I could tell,” he grunts. “He’s not the one for you.

In truth, the U.S.-sponsored international “War on Drugs” is a war on poor people, most of them subsistence farmers caught in a dangerous no-win situation. If the goal of the War on Drugs is to discourage or prevent drug use, it has failed. Among young people in North America drug use has reached unprecedented levels and enjoys unprecedented tolerance. According to figures quoted by Norm Stamper, the number of Americans who have used illegal drugs stands at 77 million. The U.S. Department of Justice reports that the number of prisoners has tripled, from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 476 per 100,000 in 2002, the vast majority being incarcerated after drug convictions. From 1980 to 1999 the annual number of Americans arrested for drug offences nearly tripled, from 580,900 to 1,532,200. “That’s a lot of enemies,” comments the ex–police chief. If the War’s purpose is to protect people and communities or to improve their quality of life, it fails disastrously. As the personal histories of Downtown Eastside addicts illustrate and as statistics show, the human costs are devastating. “One [result] which is especially cruel and will have a terrible impact on American life for many generations is the large increase in the number of women incarcerated for drug violations,” U.S. District Court Judge John T. Curtin has pointed out. From 1980 to 1996, there has been a 400 percent increase in the number of women prisoners. Many of those jailed for drug violations were mules or assistants. I venture that none was a principal organizer. Many are the mothers of small children who will be left without maternal care, and most probably without any parental care at all…The engine of punitive punishment of mothers will haunt this nation for many years to come. If the War’s aim is to end or even curtail the international drug trade, it has failed there, too. If it is to suppress the cultivation of plants from which the major substances of abuse are derived: once again, abject failure. Truth, once again, is among the inevitable casualties of war.

Manson attracted the attention of another woman, Patricia Krenwinkel, on Manhattan Beach in 1967. Krenwinkel later said that Manson was the first person who had ever told her she was beautiful and that she had sex with him on the first night they met. Thoroughly transfixed by Manson and desperate to become one of his girls, Krenwinkel left her job, car, apartment, and last paycheck behind and returned with the budding family to San Francisco. Krenwinkel gave Manson her father’s credit card and the foursome survived for a while by stealing and writing bad checks. Susan “Sadie” Atkins was the next woman to join the Manson Family. Atkins was an ex-convict who was supporting herself by topless dancing. Manson was drawn to Atkins when he learned that she had danced in a cabaret led by the self-styled leader of the Satanic Church, Anton LaVey. Atkins was a heavy drug-user when she met Manson and was easily convinced to join his family and to set about recruiting more members, preferably male. Atkins was able to lure Bruce Davis to join the family in the fall of 1967, the first male member and a man who was later described as Manson’s right-hand man. Davis met the family when they were in Oregon. Manson had traded his minibus for a full-size yellow school bus and had taken his family on a tour of the American West; he had decided the family should move to Los Angeles. The Haight had become too dangerous, Manson said, life would be better for the family in L.A. What he didn’t tell his family was that the real reason he wanted to move to Los Angeles was to pursue his dreams of stardom. Charles Manson was looking for a record deal.

Australia is not, as is commonly believed, a vast, wealthy, and extremely happy country in the southeastern corner of the globe settled by ex-British convicts who mellowed out considerably and built a fancy opera house once they’d gotten a bit of sun. First of all, globes do not have corners. Second, Australia is in reality a crazed anarchic hellscape where machine-gun toting grizzled Australian troopers are deployed alongside eyepatch-wearing koala infantry to battle ferocious emu warlords and their kangaroo allies. Control of the continent regularly shifts between dictatorial factions as they battle for control of the continent’s precious metal and Vegemite reserves.

The show made national news in June by yanking off the air at the last minute a story detailing the 1937 escape from Alcatraz of convicts Ralph Roe and Theodore Cole. The FBI had always maintained that Roe and Cole drowned, a point hotly disputed by ex-inmate Pat Reed, the story’s main source. NBC pulled the show at the FBI’s request, leaving Reed crying coverup.

One and A Half Ex (Sonnets 1429, 1430) Once upon a time by the Bay of Bengal, a naive tiger fell for a vain sheep. The sheep had him eating out of her hand, only to discard him for another sheep. The tiger's world was turned upside down, abandoning home-n-uni he set out as monk. Then one afternoon underneath the tree, the monk awakened to prophetic dimension. The saintly tiger then returned home, Lo, commenced his sleepless self-education! He had already mastered all divine sight, Now he needed to muster a scientific arsenal. During his making he met a Balkan xena, she was everything he could ever dream of. But the tiger still had plenty struggle ahead, even for the perfect partner it was too much. She had a beautiful heart which grew weary, waiting for a giant with the world on shoulder. The first whole love of the tiger came to halt, after four magical years of timeless forever. Though devastated, unable to think-n-work, this time this was no longer a naive tiger. Gloom galvanizes conviction invincible, Shattered heart makes shade for the world.