Haley Cohen in The Economist:
Patience and tenderness are new traits for Tierce, who is 50 years old and serving the final months of a seven-year sentence at Arizona’s state prison complex in Florence for assaulting his ex-girlfriend while high on methamphetamine. “I’ve been in the system my whole life, you know. I was probably given up for incorrigible when I was about five.” At that age Tierce would sneak out of the window of his home in Phoenix to roam the streets with older friends, returning late at night. His father had walked out when he was young; his mom had polio and two other kids. “She was scared to death. She had to do something – she couldn’t control me,” he says flatly. He was placed in a group home for troubled youngsters, where he suffered physical and sexual abuse throughout his childhood. At 18, finally independent, he found meth, and spent 21 of the next 32 years in a jail cell, mostly on drug-related charges.
Tierce’s current sentence – his fifth – has been the most agreeable. In many states, including Arizona, all prisoners who are physically able to must work by law. While other inmates at the Florence complex toil in the prison slop hall, harvest tilapia on the prison fish farm or tinker with broken prison vehicles, Tierce is one of about 20 who spend their weekdays outside, training mustangs as part of the prison’s Wild Horse Inmate Programme (WHIP).
More here.