Author: Tammy Thorne

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Writing

Love Behind Bars Is Possible. It’s Just Absurdly Hard.

I’ve been incarcerated in New York State for 20 years straight, serving a 28-years-to-life sentence for murder and selling drugs. I’ve also been married twice, meeting both wives from ads I placed on prison pen-pal websites.

Categories
Writing

Who Deserves Mercy?

When I was on trial for murder almost twenty years ago, I remember moments of civility between my lawyer, the prosecutor, and the judge. I could tell that the prosecutor and the judge resented me for the same reasons my mother did.

Categories
Writing

A Canon for the American Prisoner

January 19, 2018 - New York, NY : John J. Lennon, a journalist and inmate at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, poses for a portrait in a room at the facility on Friday morning, January 19. Lennon, who is serving a sentence of twenty-eight years to life, has been published in a number of major media outlets including The Atlantic, The New York Times, the Pacific Standard, and The Chronicle for Higher Education.

In 2001, Reginald Dwayne Betts was about five years into a nine-year sentence in a Virginia prison for a carjacking he’d committed at age sixteen. That was the year that I shot and killed a man on a Brooklyn street, when I was twenty-four years old.