About the book
“CRIMINAL MINDED VOL. I: How the Criminal Justice System is Incorporating Inmates, Not Rehabilitating” is the first comprehensive eyewitness account documenting every level of America’s mass incarceration system from the inside.Erwin “Dallas Cake” Pilgrim spent 15 years navigating federal conspiracy charges and state prisons across New York and Indiana. Unlike academic analyses or journalistic investigations, this book offers unfiltered testimony from someone who lived it: the federal conspiracy laws that ensnare young men, the 100:1 crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity that destroyed a generation, the plea bargain system forcing false confessions, the violence tolerated by guards, the psychological warfare of solitary confinement, and the parole system designed to send people back.Pilgrim documents how the prison industrial complex profits from human warehousing while rehabilitation programs are systematically underfunded and undermined. Through vivid storytelling and meticulous documentation, he exposes a system working exactly as designed—not to reduce crime, but to sustain itself through recidivism.This is not a redemption story. This is a resistance story. A testimony from the frontlines of America’s largest human rights crisis. Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how mass incarceration actually works—and why it’s designed to fail.
