A life in the balance
Subtitle: the Billy Wayne Sinclair story : a journey from murder to redemption inside America's worst prison system
By: Billy Wayne Sinclair and Jodie Sinclair ; with an introduction by Richard Hand.
Contributors: Sinclair, Jodie, 1938-
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Arcade Pub.
Published: 2000
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 339
Subjects: Sinclair, Billy Wayne, -- 1945-; Prisoners -- Louisiana -- Biography; Prison reformers -- Louisiana -- Biography; Prisons -- Louisiana
Genres: Biography.
Description: "This is his memoir. It begins with an almost unbearable account of his early years, when he was so abused by his father one wonders how he survived, and his "escape" into a crowd of hooligans, which led him to that fateful day in 1965 when he held up the convenience store. His unvarnished story takes you behind the metal doors of the Angola State Penitentiary - and other Louisiana prisons - to reveal the brutal truth of life inside.

Here you will meet Billy Ray, Billy Wayne's blood brother; old Emmitt Henderson, who died of prison neglect; Jamie Parks, a seventeen-year-old kid whose fate was sealed the day he arrived in Angola; Big Mick, who ran drugs in the prison to earn money to put his handicapped sister through college; Wilbert Rideau, Billy Wayne's coeditor on The Angolite; the Dixie Mafia; and Richard Clark Hand, the young lawyer who took on Billy Wayne's case and has been fighting for his release for thirty years."--BOOK JACKET.