Straight from the Pen: Writing Wrongs. This item is unavailable.Straight from the Pen: Writing Wrongs

Two dozen lifers sat down on a maximum-security prison yard, ostensibly, to learn to write. But the lessons were much deeper. They learned--many for the first time--to open up, to be honest with themselves and others about their lives, their fears, and their dreams.

With a PhD in criminal justice and a background that took him in and out of prisons literally a thousand time, Paul Sutton is driven by a fervent passion to radically alter the landscape of prisons in America. After years of research into law and criminal justice, focusing particularly on corrections, Sutton became a documentary filmmaker in an effort to expose the harsh realities of prison. His first two feature films--Doing Time and Doing Time: Ten Years Later--garnered five Emmy Awards and continue as classics about the lives and thoughts of men behind bars. His third, Prison Through Tomorrow's Eyes, chronicled the eye-opening experiences of college students on one of the 113 statewide prison excursions Sutton conducted for nearly 3,000 of his students over the course of 33 years. At the end of that lifelong adventure, Sutton and wife Lori created a writing class on a maximum security prison yard in southern California that became the subject of both this volume of writings and an award-winning feature documentary about that experience. Sutton continues to write and produce documentaries that shed light on the humanity of many of those behind bars and the inhumanity of much of what we, as a society, do to them in the name of justice.