The Autobiography of Billy McCune

by Billy McCune, Danny Lyon (Introduction)

Autobiography of an inmate of the "Fort Worth Death House," detailing the inadequacies and abuses of the 1950s prison system from the inside. An extraordinary jailhouse memoir: an unanswerable indictment of the American-specifically, Texan-system of juvenile institutionalization, punitive incarceration, and execution. The author, a lengthily self-justifying rapist (who protests his conviction without attributing significance to the crime he recounts[low IQ]) was first sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment; as an inmate, McCune was classified as "psychotic" and subjected to an array of physical, psychological, and psychiatric abuses then - and-now - widely practiced in American prisons, and permitted to continue by the indifference of the American public.

154 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1973