Page 216 - Demo
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                                    3045 Redefining Americaagainst C.D.C.R. rules, but every prison has guys who fill their cells with radios, TVs, and speakers to repair and resell. I looked out for one guy, G.L., when he first hit the yard, and he became one of the best electronic fix-it guys I%u2019ve ever met. He loved reconfiguring different speakers to get the best sound. He rewired the boom box for auxiliary cables and gave it to me. At C.M.C., I had a cell to myself, so I%u2019d turn up the music enough to drown out obnoxious sounds outside my cell. Of course, some people always think that Swift is the obnoxious sound. %u201cWhat%u2019s up with the damn Taylor Swift?%u201d a neighbor yells out. Another voice chimes in with requests: %u201cPlay %u2018Style.%u2019 That song%u2019s tight right there.%u201d By the time the song ends, someone new will admit, %u201cThat girl%u2019s got jams.%u201dWhen you transfer between prisons, you can%u2019t take any undocumented property with you. At the end of 2015, I gave that boom box back to G.L. and left C.M.C. for Folsom prison. After a year, I landed at San Quentin. I started working at the San Quentin News, the in-house newspaper, for a quarter an hour. Around that time, C.D.C.R. started allowing a vender to sell us MP3 players for a hundred dollars. They charged $1.75 per song and ten dollars for a memory card. Eventually, I asked my family to order one and would call my cousin Roxan with requests. %u201cWhat%u2019s up with all the damn Taylor Swift?%u201d she%u2019d say during phone calls. By the time Swift released her album %u201cLover,%u201d in 2019, I had almost every song she%u2019d ever released. And, when the MP3 players were restricted because crafty folks were using the 10San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers/Getty ImagesThis photograph is of San Quentin Prison, one of the places where Garcia was incarcerated. During the COVID-19 pandemic, an emergency care facility was erected on the baseball field (pictured) to treat inmates suffering from one of the largest outbreaks in the nation.How does viewing this photograph help you better understand Garcia%u2019s account of his life in prison?Copyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.
                                
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