Fields of Blood: My Life As a Prison Laborer
“The days would run together. The heat, the drudgery, the daily unpaid toiling in dirt and fields under the hot Texas sun.”
A person who finds himself freshly recruited by the Texas criminal justice system into the slave labor force of its many state penitentiaries will soon find they have been thrown into a time warp.
As I made my way deeper into this system, in 1981, I found myself bound for a prison called Central Unit, to be my new home for the next 40 years. The bus trip there was a true pain, since we had been handcuffed and essentially herded into a rolling cage. Soon, my senses told me we were getting close to the place where I was born, and it dawned on me fully when I saw the Imperial Sugar refinery.
I was born in Sugar Land, Texas, and now I’d be in its
