Peace and blessings, everybody, and welcome.
My name is Devin A. Giordano, and I want to welcome you to Words of a Prisoner, a publication written from inside a maximum-security prison within the New York State Department of Corrections.
Prison has long been a source of public curiosity, yet it remains a place most people will never see or understand in real time, and this work exists to close the distance between that curiosity and the lived experience of incarceration. Here, policy is not abstract and daily life is shaped by mental, physical, emotional, and social pressures that rarely make it into public conversation, and the writing moves between reporting and reflection, grounded in ordinary moments shaped by the systems that govern confinement.
Much of what is written about prison comes from outside its walls and is filtered through headlines, statistics, or brief moments of attention that fade quickly, leaving little sense of what life inside actually feels like. This publication begins from lived experience and allows policy and institutional decisions to be understood through their effects, keeping the focus on people rather than spectacle.
