(This article has been updated with new details and images from its original September 2024 publication.) My true crime memoir, Chained Birds, chronicles the ten-year journey of federal inmate Kevin Sanders as he fought to survive the blood-soaked Special Management Unit at Lewisburg Prison. While the book serves as an exposé of that now-shuttered experimental program, it also reveals...
Bonus
This is an end-of-year video wrap-up about my book, CHAINED BIRDS, appearing on my new YouTube channel … every video’s theme is about the high cost of truth. For a long time, the only price I thought I’d pay was the ten years I spent writing it. I was wrong. The story—a true-crime memoir centered on my attorney-friend Scott...
Despite my best intentions not to create more work for myself, I just launched a YouTube channel to host videos that are too damn large for this WordPress blog. I didn’t really want to get into making videos (I should be writing 🙄), but I had no choice, because my new videos are just too many megabytes. And you...
This past year, I’ve had the pleasure of being a guest speaker at three local-to-me book clubs that assigned Chained Birds: A Crimemoir to their members. I can’t adequately convey what it meant to me, as a debut author, to be welcomed by these groups and treated as a guest of honor. I have finally compiled a list of...
As part of my “Author’s Cut” re-boot of Chained Birds, I am making available to the public the video surveillance footage of the 2011 recreational cage fight at Lewisburg Prison that essentially launched this book. It’s grainy and brutal, and thankfully the victim survived and walked away on his own … still, viewer discretion is advised. The participants**, from...
This is the second of two prison stabbing videos I’ve made available to the public as part of my re-launch of Chained Birds: A Crimemoir. Like the first one, it’s grainy and brutal, and the victim—federal inmate Kevin Sanders—survives … but just barely. The 2013 footage from USP Florence in Colorado begins with an Aryan Brotherhood (AB) of Texas...
This supplement appears at the end of Chained Birds: A True Crime Memoir in the print and eBook editions, but I am giving it a permanent place on my blog as a point of reference, especially for audiobook listeners. My sound engineer, who guided me through the audiobook narration process in the summer of 2024, said listeners would not want to...