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This chapter examines the death of prisoners from illness in prison. It brings together first-person accounts and other research on the experiences of aging, being ill, and dying in prison, with and without formal hospice care, and the experiences of those working in hospice, caring for other prisoners at end of life. It considers these accounts, emphasizing Butler's analysis of livability and asking the question: what makes life, death, and grief in prison livable? It argues that adequately considering the complexity of prison hospice programs means attending not just to how, where, and with whom prisoners are dying but also to who is most likely to be imprisoned, how their relationships are likely to be constrained, and how their lives and deaths are most likely to be perceived (both inside and outside prisons). Formal and informal hospice programs are important not only for the way prisoners provide basic care to each other within them but for the way they also allow for recognizing and mourning those who die in prison, as significant, remembered, and grievable.

This chapter discusses sports in Texas and California prisons. Athletic programs in Texas and California state prison systems grew from small programs to large-scale organized events and celebrations from the Progressive Era through the New Deal years. They originated as part of the progressive impulse in the Northeast, where sports filled gaps in the disciplinary program opened by organized workers' protests over competition with inmate labor. Penologists quickly realized the utility in these athletic programs, whose intended pedagogy including teaching keen competition, fair play, sportsmanship, respect for authority, and rule compliance. Prisoners also found new value, meaning, and pleasure for themselves in athletics. Prison sports were structured by the social imperatives and class relations of the day. Baseball was segregated by race, especially in Texas, delineating anew the privileges of whiteness and denigrations of blackness.

This chapter focuses on the time when prison rehabilitative efforts seemed too narrow to the point where trying to scare people straight was the most visible prison program in the country. At the same time, alternative visions of prison life found numerous venues for expression and distribution. The work of prison writers appeared in small distribution publications such as the Fortune Society's Fortune News and Joseph Bruchac's Greenfield Review. Some found their work picked up by specialty houses such as Dudley Randall's Broadside Press, major university presses, and even some trade publishers. Perhaps the greatest incubators and benefactors of prison culture during the 1970s, however, were the movements for cultural nationalism among African Americans and Latinos.

This book explores the relationship between William Shakespeare and race in American popular culture by focusing on specific moments in contemporary film, novels, theater, prison programs, programs for at-risk youth, Internet postings, and scholarship. It examines the unstable nature of this relationship as well as the greyer areas between American constructions of Shakespeare and American constructions of race. More precisely, it considers Shakespeare's universalism in relation to explicit discussions and debates about racial identity, or how performances involving actors of color affect contemporary notions of Shakespeare's racial politics. The book also discusses the possibilities for employing Shakespeare as a theoretical and practical tool for negotiating contemporary race relations. It argues that passing beyond the strangeness of American constructions of Shakespeare and race requires destabilizing both race and Shakespeare.