[The file linked here is the first chapter of the autobiographical reflections I intend to publish on the criminal justice system. At the time I met him, Harley Valentine had been in San Quentin for 28 years, the third longest tenure at that time in the California prison system. The extended confinement had literally driven him mad, in the Nineteenth Century sense of that word. The nature of his madness is implied in the title of the piece. After all that time had passed, he was returned to Santa Clara County for resentencing on the original offense. How that happened and what happened next is the subject of the story.]
My family settled in Santa Clara County, in the town of Los Altos (about two miles south of Palo Alto and Stanford University) in 1953, when I was six years old. In California terms, that makes me an old timer. Back then . . . Download the rest of 'Replacement Atoms'