MEET THE WRITER
E.C. Theus-Roberts is a Cuban-American essayist, historian, prison writer, and advocate whose work explores justice, history, rehabilitation, and the enduring capacity for personal transformation.
Currently incarcerated in California, Theus-Roberts has become a nationally recognized voice among incarcerated writers. He is a ranking member of the Prison Writers Support Organization, a jailhouse lawyer, a member of the National Lawyers Guild, and serves as Advisory Chair for Prison Programs at Destination Freedom.
His writing has appeared in respected academic journals, including the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal, and in poetry anthologies such as Prison Express Poetry. His essays invite readers to confront difficult truths about incarceration while imagining more just and humane futures.
Justice • Prison Reform • History • Poetry • Social Commentary
Writings
SOCIAL CANCERS: Incarceration and Recidivism
This article deals with the remedial treatment or response to crime and criminality, i.e. incarceration, which has become as socially detrimental as the social ill it was intended to address in the first place. This fact is evinced by the results of incarceration as seen in recidivism. Originally published in the BERKELEY LATINE JOURNAL OF LAW AND POLICY 35 (2025)
Perspectives on Prisoners' Potential
An innate human quality is the capacity to change, mature, evolve. So how does imprisonment change this fact into an untruth?
Humanity's Shadow
"[M]y focus is not on humanity but all that lurks behind it in its shadow. Therefore, the poems, poetics, and reflections consequence of experiencing the human condition: life..."
Ens Legis
This revenge/tragedy follows the true, historic events of Cuba immediately after the Spanish Conquest in 1511 of the island. A Latino flavored, Neo Shakespearean play patterned on e Inimitable Bard's "Titus Andronicus."
A Most Vengful Institution
A concise, 1400-word, historical gloss and critique of modern criminal justice as it is represented in our penal institution. A certain extent, post modern incarceration has done little more than to institutionalize the bloody vendetta law was intended to address; if only in another form.
It Costs Less to Educate Than Incarcerate
An approximate average expenditure of $36,000 a year per prisoner translates to around $80 billion on corrections annually
At Gavel's End
At gavel's end, I am not a person. A person is capable of being-- At gavel's end, I simply once existed. People live and have relations. People can grow and be crushed. At gavel's end, I no longer matter. A person just is; I, on the other hand, was. At gavel's end, No living. No fulfilling. Joys are illusory, but pain... People feel pain--of all sorts --I exist in a single kind People live, love, grow old then senile At gavel's end, I will only disintegrate in this vacuum-- An irreality of the delusion I become People are loved, cherished. People are celebrated, even in memoriam. People--are--even after they are not. At gavel's end, I am become naught-- A zero sum--Nihil. Not capable to love nor be loved; Not able to be seen, heard-- Yet, at all events, admonished. At gavel's end, I was but am what remains When people annihilate what once I contained.
