Dead Weight

Randall Horton was a drug smuggler who received an eight-year state prison sentence. After his release he earned a PhD in creative writing and became the only tenured professor in the United States with seven felony convictions. Dead Weight is his memoir of that unlikely turnaround, told through visceral essays about how hard it is to change one's life and how the burden of felony convictions never lifts. The book opens with an imagined conversation between Horton and the Invisible Man statue honoring Ralph Ellison in New York City. Their dialogue explores the psychological toll of racism on Black men and boys, including Horton's separation from his mother right after his birth in a segregated Alabama hospital. Writing now as a professor and prison reformer, Horton looks back on his years as a drug smuggler and trafficker in the 1980s and 1990s and on the many obstacles that followed his release. He considers how his drug activity affected the people around him, and reflects on the pull of economic freedom and the mental escape cocaine offered, a pull strong enough that sellers and users alike risked prison. He also supplies historical context and vivid detail about people caught up in the war on drugs, who became unwitting characters in someone else's melodrama. Lyrical and gripping, the book shows how one man's incarceration continues to shape his mind, his memories and his daily experience of American society.