What have you been doing since 1989? Did you graduate school? Get married? Your kids grow up and begin lives of their own? Maybe you weren’t even born in 1989…maybe your entire life has transpired in those three intervening decades between then and now.
Barry Duane Woods has been inside California State Prisons since 1989. A founding father of the Crips in Sacramento, Barry has spent those years on a deeply personal journey, along the way experiencing all that prison has to offer. Violence. Racism. Privation. The SHU.
This episode is Barry’s story, from an interview we did in the A Yard gym one sunny morning back before COVID. In it, Barry takes us from the halcyon days on the streets in the ’80s, days that had once promised a different future, to various Ag-Segs and SHUs in the ’90s, where his life was transformed into little more than a struggle to simply survive.
This is the story of Barry’s survival. And with it, we begin the tale this podcast was created to tell: The Awakening – how inmates at Pelican Bay sparked a movement that has changed the culture in California’s prisons. To understand what is happening today inside institutions like Pelican Bay, we must understand what it was like inside before…
And for that, we need to hear from someone who was there. Someone with the scars to prove it.
