Career
A convicted murderer, he is serving life in prison in California. When he was 19 years old, he murdered a homeless man after an alcohol and drug binge. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
He was one of the proponents of the "Honor Yard" in California State Prison in Lancaster.
The program involves "600 inmates who have promised to avoid drugs, gang activity and violence against each other or prison staff and who live in a section of the prison separated from the general inmates" where they may take training and classes. In a 2009 New York Times editorial, he described the effects of the recession on the prison system.
He has also written against the penalty of life imprisonment without parole, calling it "the other death penalty". In a December 2014 feature for Harper"s magazine, he described three decades of prison Christmases to illustrate the progressive attempts to dehumanize prisoners in the United States.
