truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

The West Tennessee Detention Facility (Mason, Tenn.) made a video pitch for California inmates, hoping some would volunteer to be outsourced under that state's program to relieve overcrowding. The hard-timers should come East, the video urged, because of West Tennessee's "larger and cleaner jail cells, 79 TV channels, including ESPN, views of peaceful cow pastures, and . . . the 'Dorm of the Week,'

The West Tennessee Detention Facility (Mason, Tenn.) made a video pitch for California inmates, hoping some would volunteer to be outsourced under that state's program to relieve overcrowding. The hard-timers should come east, the video urged, because of West Tennessee's "larger and cleaner jail cells, 79 TV channels, including ESPN, views of peaceful cow pastures, and ... the 'Dorm of the Week,' (with its inmates) staying up all night, watching a movie and eating cheeseburgers or pizza," according to a March description in Nashville's Tennessean. "You're not a number here," said one inmate. "You come here, it's personalized." (California's outsourcing program is facing a lawsuit from the prison guards' union, anxious about job loss.)

Arrested recently and awaiting trial for murder: Gary Wayne Ray Jr. (Oklahoma City, February); Larry Wayne Brigman (St. Paul, Minn., charged in February for a 1989 murder, but already in prison for a different murder); Lewis Wayne Fielder Jr. (Laurens, S.C., February); Robert Wayne Wyant (Charlottesville, Va., February). Confessed to murder: Timothy Wayne Shepherd (Houston, March). Sentenced for murder: Jimmy Wayne Bass (Mobile, Ala., February, life in prison for DUI homicide). Re-captured after a brief escape: convicted murderer Michael Wayne Brunner (La Grange, Ky., March). Ray:

Tennessee's death-row-execution procedures came under attack in February when critics realized they were a hodgepodge of combined rules for lethal injection stuck in the midst of old electric-chair protocol. (Lethal injection thus required shaving an inmate's head and having a fire extinguisher on hand.) Also in February, at a commission hearing investigating Florida's botched December execution of Angel Diaz, a New York anesthesiologist said that the executioners apparently "did exactly 100 percent the wrong thing." The commission concluded that the execution team failed to re-check whether the IV line was in the vein before the executioner began pushing the chemicals into the arm. (The only formal qualification to be appointed a Florida executioner is to be at least 18 years old.)

U.S. Justice Department statistics released in January showed that nationally, inmates in state prisons (between ages 15 and 64) die at a rate of about 20 percent less than people of that age in the general population. Black inmates, especially, appear to suffer lower mortality behind prison walls, where the death rate is less than half what it is on the outside.

U.S. Justice Department statistics released in January showed that nationally, inmates in state prisons (between ages 15-64) die at a rate of about 20 percent less than people of that age in the general population. Black inmates, especially, appear to suffer lower mortality behind prison walls, where the death rate is less than half what it is on the outside.