Thomas E. Gaddis

A detailed memoir and self-analysis by a mass murderer. Panzram was born in 1891 on a Minnesota farm and died in 1930 on the gallows at the U.S.Penitentiary, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Imprisoned for most of his life from the age of twelve and brutally punished, Panzram's keen insight into the arbitrary cruelty of his fellow human being is graphically illustrated with a litany of prison abuses, as well as the details of his own sordid, tragic life. Panzram arrives as a gripping warning from America's past to new prison-industrial complex era. The authors add an historical and sociological framework for Panzram's words.

It was "The Rock." Thirteen acres in the middle of San Francisco Bay, home to the most dangerous men of their time. There was no gas chamber, no gallows, no quick way out. Sealed off and separate, it brooded over its inmates.Robert Stroud, grandson of a judge, was one. Sentenced to life in solitary confinement, he found solace in the birds that landed outside his cell window. For years he studied them, trained them and eventually wrote several books on their behavior. Remarkably, Stroud spent nearly 40 years in solitary before he died -- he never knew "alcatraz" means "pelican," or that early settlers called it "Bird Island."