I am Clark: My Life as a Prison Newspaper Reporter

By Ruben Constante Jr.

No one ever told me going to prison could be such a constructive experience. You see, we are all guilty of wanting to escape the consequences of our bad decisions, but the truth is those consequences are oftentimes the best teachers we can have! The way I survived the brutal elements of prison life was to focus on the right things, on the things that would serve me well. I didn't focus so much on the 20 years I had to serve as an obstacle to overcome but as an opportunity to embrace. Consider your focus as a magnifying glass. Whatever you place the magnifying glass over will become enlarged, right? Well, our mental focus works exactly like that. If you focus on the negative, then it will become very big for you. However, if you focus on the positive, it, too, will become enlarged. What you are about to read is a collection of articles I wrote while I served as the Torres unit reporter for The Echo, the Texas prison newspaper. Writing for the Texas prison newspaper didn't require any type of formal education, only a desire to write constructive and positive things that would edify the inmate population. Each time I submitted an article for publication, it went through a rigorous editing process to ensure my material was in good taste and offered a positive message. Most of my writings are observational in nature and very analytical. In fact, some of my pieces were a bit too much for some people to process, but I wrote them anyway because I was always trying to challenge people to think. In a sense, I was like Socrates had been in ancient Greek: a gadfly. I always enjoyed provoking people to think about why they do what they do because thinking about our motives allows us to discover real solutions to our problems.This was the driving force behind my writings for The Echo. There is no real order to how you can read this book because the articles were written randomly. I think the titles themselves will offer you an idea of what topics I address, so feel free to jump around. Hopefully, though, you will read them all. Trust me: each article offers a profound look at what goes on within the mind and world of an inmate.Welcome to my life as Clark.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1093763337
• ISBN13: 9781093763331
• Release Date: April 2019
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 149 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.4" x 5.5"