The Factory: A Journey Through the Prison Industrial Complex

In the 1950s, Bobby Dellelo was sentenced to the notorious Lyman School for Boys reform school, a place where children were forced into gladiator-like combat on the weekends to amuse the guards. The winner got a candy bar. Child prisoners preyed on other child prisoners and the guards abused them all. He was only 13 years old. Unbeknownst to him, he had secured a place on an assembly line that all but pre-determined his future. By age 18 he was in maximum security at Walpole State Prison, and by age 22 he was serving life without the possibility of parole.Over the course of 40 years in prison, Dellelo escaped three different times, rose to the top of the prison hierarchy, became the prisoner’s union president, and was one of the architects behind the prison uprising in the 1970’s. He won his freedom in 2003 by writing his own appeal.Dellelo’s story is not just the story of one prisoner, but rather, the story of an industry whose success is dependent upon the continued failure of more than two million Americans. It is the story of an industry that built an assembly line that takes 13-year-old boys and transforms them into violent, habitual offenders, leaving both them and society as a whole to deal with the consequences of their dangerous product. Bobby Dellelo’s life experience is the story of that process. It is the story of The Factory.