How I Got Locked Up #3: Stories of Youth, Opportunity, Crime, and Punishment

Most people do not wake up one day in otherwise happy situations to begin a life of crime. That shouldn’t be surprising, but this series nonetheless provides a needed jolt of reality with these collected oral histories. How I Got Locked Up returns the human face to the prison population in America. Striking, honestly observed, and written with the force of lived experience, these zines provide insight and emotional context to what incarceration really means. Includes a foreword by poet-activist Jimmy Santiago Baca. This volume contains three essays: Angelo Rodriguez's "Dialect of the Hustle" is about the consequences of growing up without ever getting enough of anything—love or money. Douglas Attard's "Party on, Dougie" is about growing up in a nice suburb with plenty of everything, but the allure of partying and drugs was stronger. And Jeremy Peterson's "Hood Life" describes growing up in a broken world, leading to spending most of his adult life in prison.