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CourtTVnews.com reporter Emanuella Grinberg interviewed death row inmate Kenneth Foster on Aug. 22, 2007, at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, a week before his scheduled execution. The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity. The video was produced by Andrew Brooks and Jake Edelstein.

COURTTVNEWS.COM: How are you doing today?

KENNETH FOSTER: Hanging in there. It's getting a little difficult, but I'm trying to stay positive.

CTV: Can you describe a typical day for you on death row?

FOSTER: Well, it might be a little more intricate for me, I usually start the day off with a prayer, but most of my time is spent writing, reading, studying, working on my case, trying to reach out to potential activists and supporters, and things like this.

CTV: What do you like to read?

FOSTER: I guess it would depend what subject you were talking about. If you're talking about history, I might be reading some Howard Zinn, some Noam Chomsky. If I'm reading poetry I might be going to some Sonia Sanchez, some Saul Williams, Nikki Giovanni, things like this here. If I'm doing philosophy, I might be reading Machiavelli. It has to be something constructive. I don't read a lot of fiction because I feel like anything that I read, anything that I study, I need it to apply to now. Reading something like Harry Potter, it's not going to help me right now.

CTV: I understand music has been a big part of your life. Can you tell me more about that?

FOSTER: I actually used to do music in the world back around '94, '95. I started getting really involved in music. I was going to school with friends that were involved in music and they were building a studio out in San Antonio and it was always kind of something that I was involved in, and then it just so happened that when I got incarcerated, I think it was about 2005, that's when I met the woman who is now my wife and she happened to be an artist from overseas.

Around 2004, we reached out to some artists from New York called the Welfare Poets. They started getting involved in the death penalty, and they put out a CD against the death penalty called "Cruel and Unusual Punishment."

We're trying to put a voice out there through this music. When you think about the death penalty, there's not a lot of young people involved in [the movement against it]. Maybe college students, university students. But most of the everyday young folks are not involved, so you have to think, what's going to pull them in? And you know they're out going to the clubs, hanging out, so you have to find things that reach them, have to find a way to tap into them. We know if we can put a positive message in music, we know it's going to soak into them.

CTV: Can you talk a little more about who we are?

FOSTER: I work with a lot of anti-death penalty groups. Groups like Alive in Germany. My main core group right now is the CEDP, the Campaign to End the Death Penalty, and they're stationed out of Chicago but they have different branches throughout the U.S. The CEDP out of Austin has been the strongest group to step up thus far. They're pretty much helping lead my campaign. So we make these bridges. We build these bonds with all these people from all over. When I say "we," I'm talking about the whole death penalty movement, not just myself.

CTV: Can you tell me a little bit about DRIVE?

FOSTER: Drive is Death Row Inner-communalist Vanguard Engagement. That was a coalition that we put together back around 2005.

This death row has been through a whole lot because we used to be on another unit. We were on Ellis One. There was an escape over there, and kind of for punishment they moved us to this unit. When they moved us to this unit, we lost a lot. We lost our group rec, we lost our arts and crafts, we lost TVs. We're the only death row on America that doesn't have TV. We're the only death row out of I think it's 38 states with the death penalty, and Texas is the only state that says you can't have TVs, you can't have arts and crafts. You can't have this, you can't have that.