A New Voice in Vice -- Max Robbins Writes Crime (instead of doing it, anymore)

I’m pissed.   If you’re one of the 80-some people so far who’ve read my ‘novellita’ Blood in the Water (on Amazon - https://amzn.to/3liwiEv - or on this blog) , you know how I feel about Big Pharma. Particularly Purdue & the Sacklers, and their role in the opioid crisis that’s destroyed so many lives. Lives of friends and family. (Even my own setbacks, which I can’t directly attribute to the reckless and heartless marketing of OxyContin, were certainly at least exacerbated by the devastating dope culture Oxy helped create.)   Then, for a brief moment last week—vindication! “Purdue Pharma Pleads Guilty!” read the headlines. “$8.3 Billion in Fines!” Newspapers trumpeted prosecutors’ claims that the settlement would afford vast new resources to fight addiction, and that “past wrongs” are now redressed.   Sounds great, right? Maybe a little lopsided, given the $15 billion in Oxy profits the Sacklers made, and the 400,000(!) Americans who lost their lives since 2000, b...

      “I’m a POW, you know—a prisoner of war.” It was a joke I often made, while I was doing my little 5-year bid, probably disrespectful to the real POWs who went thru unimaginable stuff in ‘Nam and elsewhere, but that wasn’t my intent. Fact of the matter is, I  felt  like a casualty of war—America’s War on Drugs. I didn’t die, but I’ve often argued that caging people for some number of years is tantamount to murdering those years of their lives. After all, I lost those years, in every meaningful sense of the word. My business, too, was a casualty. (I was, at the time of my indictment, running a pretty successful small contracting company.) My home, my bank balance, my reputation—all lost to the War on Drugs. All casualties. My relationship with my daughter—a casualty of war. (Oh, we’re still close now, since I got home—thank God. But where I was once her primary caregiver, now I have to fight to get an occasional weekend with her. It’s not the same, not ...

 'nuff said.  https://amzn.to/3liwiEv

I promised a blog on the First Step Act... And, truth is, I've been wanting to write on this subject since my fellow inmates & I excitedly watched the FSA's announcement (with great fanfare)--only to see its implementation become just another lip-service broken promise by the BoP, DoJ & the rest of the usual suspects. Thousands upon thousands of inmates were released after the FSA was signed, according to the (shallow) reporting of most mainstream news outlets. (Please bear in mind that the FSA only affected *federal* prisoners, a small fraction of the 2.3 million Americans behind bars.) Fact is, the vast majority of those 'early releases' resulted from the FSA's restoration of *one week per year* of 'good conduct time'--which inmates were already  supposed to be getting, *by law.* It's the first topic I want to address, because it provides a pretty good insight into the institutional culture within the BoP and DoJ, one that works diligently to ...

 CON V FLICTED... I don't want to be political. (Even tho I am, at heart; I was raised by two gov't employees in DC.) This blog is *not* about politics. I write crime fiction--'literary hood novels,' a friend once said--and there's no percentage in me alienating anybody .  I don't want to be political. But it's hard not to, right now, isn't it? All anyone talks about right now, is politics. It's become a constant buzzing in my ears, my email inbox, my social media feeds... Political tinnitus. And, like the vast majority of Americans, I *do* have strong feelings, this season especially. Problem is, my feelings--my insights & observations--are prolly gonna just piss everyone off.  First off, I *hate* Trump. This may be a popular position to occupy, with the literary folks I'm currently trying to suck up to, but it was an exceptionally un popular attitude where I just came from. In prison, white guys are pretty much unanimous in their support fo...