Was in the seventh year of a ten-year sentence for burglary. i started drawing when i was 6 or 7 years old. my cousin, he drew a picture of batman. and i was like, what is that? you know? it was like a magic trick. and then he started teaching me how to draw and after that i just, i never stopped. unfortunately, goodman s love of art wasn t enough to save him on the outside. i started using drugs. i started being self-destructive. didn t care, you know, about who i am as a human being. was basically homeless. and was struggling with life in general. but in prison goodman rediscovered his passion. a friend of mine told me, since you re in prison, why don t you create work that s pertaining to your life?
Learned how to deal with the consequences of their past. they ve come up with distractions to really take their mind off of their crimes. but sometimes our very presence in a prison can change all of that. lawrence stall has spent the last two decades in prison. most of it at the holman correctional facility in alabama and sometimes it seems to have been just as long since he s heard the sound of his real name. they call me red top. hey, redtop. they call me redtop. they call me ringating red. is there one you prefer? none. i just answer to them all. i ve learned to answer to them all over the years. stall began serving his sentence 28 years earlier, when he was 22 years old. back when i first came here there was a lot of violence. was it scary? were you scared a lot? scared to death. my first impression of
I spent a lot of time feeling sorry for myself. but then i started to think, it s the wrong way to think because why should i feel sorry for myself when actually a lot of people were hurt? and the people whose lives can t be returned and the victims and their relatives as well? and it just made me feel very sorry. these are things that can t be undone. but ever since then, i believe that the soul is immortal. and that helped me to come to terms with the idea that perhaps even the dead will be born again into a new life. but kuna was still making the most of his life. even behind the ancient walls of mirov prison. he had recently remarried. this time to a woman he met through an inmate pen pal program. translator: with this hell i ve gone through, my life values were completely reversed. i realized that some kind of property and money and all that means nothing, compared to a healthy love. a person s health and love of life.
Whoever don t like it, i don t care. i don t [ bleep ]. i m going home. that s it, period. why would i lay in here and let you kill me, over something dumb? or do something to you over something dumb? shepard eventually met with prison officials to discuss his safety and even the possibility of transferring to another prison. how are you doing, mr. shephard? how has everything been since you ve been up here? it s all right. i mean, it s solitary confinement, really, but if that s what i got to deal with until i go home, that s what i m going to do. because i m up on 900 days. and if it takes me staying in that cell until i go home to avoid all the craziness going on out there, do this or do that or get this or end up having this done to you, all that, they can keep all that. i m going home. okay. i will get with internal
Usually meant to discipline inmates, but in this case it s to protect him. it means he ll be locked inside his cell 23 hours a day and allowed out only for a shower or supervised rec time. check the cell out over, make sure there ain t nothing in here. this is like a dungeon in a dungeon. i guess that s the price you pay before you ever kill somebody or get killed. ronnie s story was not an unusual one for us to encounter. we ll start following somebody s situation and then it will completely go in another direction because prison life is pretty unpredictable. and what happens is, these guys basically not only have to face the consequences of their actions outside prison, but they often have to deal with them inside prison as well. while prison officials developed a plan for shephard s