Bøker av Van Hawkins

For nearly 100 years, from after the Civil War to the 1960s when two federal judges took charge, Arkansas prisons were torture chambers. Brutal prisoners doing time for murder and other extraordinarily violent crimes regularly held positions of authority. Their supervisors included convict trustees and sadistic prison authorities. They starved and beat men and women prisoners, sometimes to death, and often for amusement. Politicians and their cronies did nothing because corruption and graft benefited them. This book graphically describes the horror and those who endured it. It pulls together previously published firsthand accounts from two prisoners, an Arkansas State Police Criminal Investigation Division Report, and two major legal opinions related to complaints of unconstitutionality in Arkansas prisons.

The entertaining story of a boy who apprentices with a legendary Mississippi River gambler - but later finds himself seduced by the power and wealth of a corrupt Delta planter family. When his nefarious gambling skills are applied to the persecution of oppressed tenant farmers and other vulnerable people, his life becomes a tragedy.