Featured Work
See a selection of highlighted written articles, interviews/podcasts, and book publications by Lyle:
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For all of Lyle's published work, see below:
“Prison is designed to break
one’s spirit and destroy one’s resolve. To do this, authorities attempt to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individuality—all with the idea of stamping out that spark that makes each of us human and each of us who we are.”
-Nelson Mandela
“Imprisonment is increasingly used as a strategy of deflection of the underlying social problems--racism, poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and so on.”
-Angela Davis
Article: Is sentencing your neighbors to death ‘the will of the people’?
Lyle writes on how Republican lawmakers in North Carolina are pushing a bill that would end the state’s moratorium on executions by bringing back the electric chair and implementing a firing squad
Published on Prism, July 24, 2025
PC: Sean Rayford/Getty Images​
Podcast discussion: Keeping Democracy Alive with Burt Cohen ft. Lyle May
The appalling criminalization of ordinary people. No charges, no conviction, just sweep up people who, as he said: “look like illegals.” Blatantly circumventing constitutional law. And in the big, ugly bill, passed 7/3, spending for jail space and ICE skyrocketed. Guest on this show is Lyle May who is currently behind bars. He calls this obsession “carceral imperialism,” actively carrying out an obscene belief in the oligarchs right to dominate and control all others. Their secret police grab and hold people just because they can. It’s all part of Project 2025, which may be unthinkable but is in fact happening now. When you listen you’ll also hear a recorded voice from the prison which tells us time is almost up. And if prisons are there to make better citizens, as May says: toughness is not effective.​
