A few weeks ago, I was sitting in on a professional communication workshop led by volunteers from an outside organization. Somewhere during the conversation, the volunteer leading it mentioned that New York City was planning to close the 30th Street Shelter near Bellevue Hospital, the massive intake shelter that has served as one of the main entry points into the city’s homeless system for decades.

Most of the guys in the room barely reacted.

Honestly, I understood why. Many of the men sitting in that class have spent most of their lives bouncing between instability and incarceration. They’ve cycled through shelters, addiction treatment, county jails, prison, temporary housing, release, rearrest, and then another prison sentence. After a while, hearing about another institution shutting down or another system failing just starts sounding like the same old dance.

But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

As somebody who has lived through these failures firsthand and who believes deeply in mental health treatment, addiction recovery, and long-term support, I kept wondering what was going to happen to the people who depended on that shelter. What happens to the people already hanging on by a thread? What kind of effect does something like this have on the city itself?

Then another thought hit me, one I couldn’t shake.

In the next couple of years, how many of the people who could have walked through the doors of that shelter will eventually end up walking past me in the hallways of a New York State prison?

Closing one of New York City’s largest intake shelters affects far more than homelessness alone. It sounds an alarm about what happens when systems that are already fragile begin collapsing into one another. After spending nearly twelve years incarcerated, I’ve come to understand that prison increasingly functions as the institution that absorbs the people every other system failed first, people struggling with untreated mental illness, addiction, homelessness, trauma, and long-term instability.

And at a moment when New York’s prisons are already strained by staffing shortages, deteriorating conditions, and growing mental health crises, it feels dangerously shortsighted to destabilize one of the city’s primary intake shelters without confronting what happens to the people left with nowhere stable to go.

I’ve been incarcerated since I was nineteen years old. During that time, I’ve listened to countless comrades explain how they ended up here. Very few of their stories actually begin with incarceration.

They begin with untreated mental illness. Addiction. Childhood trauma. Homelessness. Family instability. Years spent drifting between shelters, the couches of family and friends, subway stations, psych wards, county jails, and now prison.

By the time a lot of people end up incarcerated, they’re already carrying years of unresolved struggle.

After that workshop, my wife and I started researching the relationship between homelessness, housing instability, and incarceration. Some of the numbers we found through the Osborne Association and other organizations honestly gave me goosebumps.

Formerly incarcerated people are nearly ten times more likely to experience homelessness or unstable housing. People experiencing homelessness are eleven times more likely to be arrested than the general public. Close to half of the people returning from New York State prisons eventually end up in the New York City shelter system.

When people experiencing homelessness are already exponentially more likely to encounter the criminal legal system, it’s hard to imagine how closing one of the city’s largest intake shelters wouldn’t intensify that vulnerability.

And from where I’m sitting, inside a prison system that’s already struggling, that possibility doesn’t feel far-fetched at all.

The history of the 30th Street building says a lot by itself. When it first opened back in the 1930s, it operated as Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric facility. Later, after large psychiatric institutions started disappearing across the country, the building became a homeless shelter and intake center.

Now it’s closing at a time when New York is already contending with rising street homelessness, untreated mental illness, addiction, and public instability.

And underneath all those systems sits another institution absorbing many of the people who continue falling through the cracks above it. Prison.

To be clear, I’m not claiming that homelessness automatically leads to criminal behavior. And I’m definitely not saying people experiencing homelessness should be viewed as threats. Too many conversations already strip people of their humanity instead of recognizing the complexity of what they’re dealing with.

But I do think it’s impossible to completely separate incarceration from the failures happening across surrounding systems.

Prison often becomes the place people end up after every earlier intervention either failed, fell apart, or arrived too late.

What worries me most is that New York’s prison system is already fractured itself.

Over the last few years, everybody from corrections officers to prison administrators to state officials has publicly acknowledged that the system is in trouble. Facilities across New York are dealing with staffing shortages, interrupted programming, violence, burnout, and growing mental health crises behind the walls. Some prisons feel like they’re operating in a constant state of strain.

And despite all that, prison continues functioning as one of the state’s largest fallback systems for people dealing with untreated instability somewhere else.

The reality is uncomfortable and sadly true.

Addiction doesn’t disappear in prison. Mental illness doesn’t disappear in prison. Trauma doesn’t disappear in prison.

A lot of times, those things only get worse.

Every day, I watch men psychologically deteriorate. I watch people who clearly need serious treatment struggling just to survive inside an institution stretched far beyond what it was ever built to handle. I watch men leave prison carrying the same unresolved problems they entered with, except now those problems are compounded by years of incarceration and institutionalization.

That’s why the closure of the 30th Street Shelter feels like much more than one building shutting down.

To me, it reflects a larger pattern in this country, one where we wait until people are already in full-blown crisis before we intervene.

We respond after somebody’s sleeping on the subway. After an overdose. After a psychiatric episode in public. After an arrest. After jail. After prison.

Rarely do we respond before.

At the same time, New York is investing billions into mental health programs, supportive housing initiatives, outreach teams, and crisis-response systems. Some of those investments are important and long overdue. But there’s still a massive difference between a system designed to stabilize people and one designed mostly to manage visible crisis.

Too often, we’ve built the second kind.

New York City now spends roughly $81,000 annually per shelter bed. Supportive housing costs significantly less. Incarceration at Rikers Island costs more than $400,000 per person every year.

We spend enormous amounts of money reacting to instability once it becomes visible enough to disrupt public life. Meanwhile, the systems capable of creating real long-term stability before crisis happens remain fragmented, overwhelmed, or too small to meet the actual demand.

And now one of the largest intake shelters in the biggest city in the country is shutting down while every surrounding institution is already under pressure.

That should concern everybody, regardless of politics, background, or social class.

Because people don’t simply disappear when shelters close. Mental illness doesn’t disappear. Addiction doesn’t disappear. Trauma doesn’t disappear either.

Those problems move elsewhere. Sometimes into emergency rooms. Sometimes into subway systems. And sometimes into county jails or prisons already straining to function as they are.

But if New York is serious about interrupting this cycle, then the conversation cannot end with simply relocating people from one shelter to another or expanding crisis-response systems after somebody has already reached their breaking point. The state has to invest more aggressively in the kinds of systems proven to create long-term stability before people ever reach prison in the first place, giving them a genuine bridge back into society instead of another temporary stop along the way.

Organizations like the Osborne Association have already shown what that can look like through supportive and reentry housing initiatives designed specifically for people returning from incarceration. The problem is not that solutions don’t exist. It’s that the supports capable of producing that stability remain under-resourced and disconnected from one another while prisons continue operating as society’s fallback institutions.

Most people don’t suddenly appear in prison without warning signs long beforehand. By the time somebody reaches incarceration, multiple systems have often already failed them at once. If New York wants to reduce homelessness, improve public safety, lower incarceration rates, and ease pressure on an already strained prison system, then it has to stop treating housing, mental health, addiction, and incarceration as separate conversations.

Because prison was never designed to shoulder the weight of every other institution collapsing around it. And the longer we continue relying on it to do so, the more people we will lose inside systems that were never built to heal them in the first place.

After nearly Twelve years in prison, I thought I understood the limits of humiliation that come with living inside a correctional facility. Then, while preparing to leave for a recent routine medical trip, I experienced the most invasive strip search of my incarceration. 

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Update: Following the email and phone zap campaign, Devin has been safely transferred out of Eastern Correctional Facility and is currently housed at Coxsackie Correctional Facility, away from the retaliatory treatment and hostile environment he had been subjected to prior to his transfer.

While we are still taking things day by day and remaining attentive to any continued forms of retaliation, we want to sincerely thank everyone who called, emailed, shared, amplified, and showed support over these past nearly two weeks.

On behalf of Devin and our entire family, thank you to everyone in this Substack community for your attention, compassion, and solidarity during such a difficult time. Your support truly mattered.

Note: I originally wrote this piece the morning after my 30th birthday in October 2024. It sat unfinished in the drafts folder of my tablet for months before I finally revisited it and decided to share it.

At midnight, the tier located right outside my dorm erupts. The dorm follows suit.

Broomsticks begin to slam against the heavy metal cell doors while my comrades’ voices travel from one end of the dorm to the other, moving through the gallery as everyone screams their birthday wishes across the housing unit in a way that briefly makes the building feel as though it is alive.

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“There’s nothing wrong with him. If there were, it would say so in his file.”

I heard a licensed mental health counselor say those words to a correctional officer as they stood side by side, watching a man through a large plexiglass window that took up most of the wall of an observation cell, a cell used for people deemed a threat to themselves or others. Inside, the man was visibly unraveling, pacing, talking to someone who wasn’t there.

We were in B-4, the mental health unit at Orange County Jail in Goshen, New York, known among incarcerated men and staff as the “bug-out” unit. I was 19 years old, newly incarcerated, and already diagnosed with several mental health disorders. In my naive and inexperienced mind, I thought the man in that cell was going to receive some sort of help. However, on that day, I learned a harsh reality: in New York’s jails and prisons, mental health services do not exist unless it is documented and part of your case file.

When I was arrested in 2014, I came to jail with a psychiatrist’s diagnosis already in hand: oppositional defiant disorder, depression, and severe anxiety. I had been prescribed psychiatric medication, and because that paperwork followed me, I was placed on the mental health caseload. In many ways, I was fortunate. Before my incarceration, I was covered under my family’s health insurance, which allowed me to see a psychiatrist and receive treatment that many others could not access. That single privilege, the ability to afford care and obtain a documented diagnosis, became the reason I qualified for mental health care in jail. Though the services were limited, I was at least provided monthly check-ins, medication, and placement in a housing unit that catered more to our individual needs than a general population unit would have.

None of it felt like treatment though. There were no therapy sessions, no support groups, and no opportunities to understand what I was experiencing or how to manage it, especially in a place like jail. The unit I was housed in felt less like a place for healing, and more like a warehouse: somewhere to lock away people with visible symptoms until they could be filtered back into general population, which eventually is where I ended up.

In 2017, I was sentenced and transferred to a state facility run by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS). I expected some continuity of care. What I found was worse: a system where treatment is reduced to a checklist, and if you are not already “on the books,” you do not qualify. Care inside is determined by paperwork, not people. If you had a psychiatrist before prison, you might be placed on the caseload. If you did not, no matter how much you are struggling, you are likely ignored.

This reality was impossible to miss. I watched men beg for help and get turned away because they lacked a formal diagnosis before incarceration. I listened to stories from people who had been hearing voices since their teenage years, but whose requests for treatment were denied because they had never seen a doctor before prison. Others described panic attacks, chronic insomnia, or overwhelming anxiety, only to be told, “You are not on the caseload.” Their suffering did not count because it was not already written down in a file.

Correctional officers and even some mental health aides treat mental illness like a hustle, assuming people are exaggerating to get medication, avoid punishment, or score a free high. Unless you came in with schizophrenia or psychosis, you are often brushed aside. Depression, anxiety, and PTSD, conditions that disable so many, are dismissed as mood swings or bad behavior. Instead of being seen as medical issues, they are treated as flaws in character, a reflection of willpower rather than well-being.

DOCCS reports that about 29 percent of incarcerated individuals are currently on the mental health caseload, up from 26 percent in 2022. Yet according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, nearly 50 percent of incarcerated people nationwide live with some form of mental illness. That gap exposes the truth: people are coming to prison already suffering, but if they lacked access to doctors and diagnoses before incarceration, their pain remains invisible.

In 2018, while at Clinton Correctional Facility, I stopped taking psychiatric medication. The side effects — weight gain, fatigue, emotional numbness — became unbearable. When I told staff that I felt more depressed and even had thoughts of hurting myself, I was told, “That is just the price you pay to feel better.” But I did not feel better. What I learned was that in prison, medication is often the only tool offered, and even that is reserved for those whose paperwork qualifies them. Real care such as counseling, trauma-informed therapy, and group support is almost nonexistent. The state treats medication as a substitute for healing rather than one part of it, reducing human suffering to a matter of dosage and compliance.

A 2023 study from Harvard’s Kennedy School found that even a single day in jail can cause lasting psychological harm, and prison only multiplies that harm. Constant surveillance, unpredictable violence, long-term separation from family, and the complete loss of control over your own life are not simply stressors; they are traumas that shape every waking moment. Yet the system refuses to acknowledge this. Screenings rarely account for the psychological toll of incarceration itself. When someone begins to break down, their behavior is treated as a disciplinary issue rather than a crisis. Instead of receiving treatment, they are written up. Instead of obtaining care, they are sent to solitary. Their file grows, not with diagnoses or treatment plans, but with misbehavior reports. The result is predictable: people leave prison more fragile than when they came in, carrying untreated wounds back into their communities.

The file system does not merely fail people; it protects the institution. By tying care to prior diagnosis, DOCCS shifts responsibility away from itself. If a man spirals into psychosis but was never diagnosed before prison, the state can claim, “There was nothing in his file.” The suffering becomes invisible by design, hidden behind policy language and bureaucratic logic that prioritize liability over lives. This shield saves money, limits accountability, and allows lawmakers to say they are addressing mental health without making real investments. It is austerity disguised as policy, and its consequences are written on the faces of the people it abandons.

Mental health care must be available to everyone, not just those with paperwork. Everyone should be screened at intake and again at regular intervals, ensuring that these screenings are conducted by independent clinicians rather than correctional staff. Prisons should offer talk therapy, group sessions, and trauma-informed care in every facility. Staff should be trained to recognize signs of distress and respond with care, not punishment. We need systems that acknowledge incarceration itself as trauma and help people survive it rather than break under it.

We know untreated mental illness drives higher recidivism rates, deepens cycles of poverty and violence, and fuels despair that can end in suicide. New York spends more than $3 billion annually on prisons yet continues to ration care as if acknowledging suffering were too expensive. The truth is, neglect is what proves costly. People return home untreated, destabilized, and at higher risk of reoffending. Communities bear the weight. Families pay the price.

Right now, DOCCS treats mental illness as a logistical problem. But what is happening inside these walls is deeper than that. People are hurting. Some are unraveling. And many are leaving prison with scars that no file will ever record. We cannot medicate our way through this crisis. Healing requires more than prescriptions. It requires care, presence, and a system that sees people rather than paperwork, because what is not written down still matters.

I was just twenty-two years old when it happened. The sun wasn’t up yet when a CO’s voice cracked through the heavy metal door like a gunshot. “Giordano! Pack up. Downstate’s here.” His nightstick rattled against the steel bars. I didn’t move at first; I just sat there, numb.

That Thursday morning, in Orange County Jail, I stepped out of boyhood and into something colder and far more permanent. I didn’t know it then, but I would soon receive my new state-issued ID: 17A1451. To the world, that was what I’d become.

For the past two and a half years, I’d seen other men transferred from the county jail in Goshen to Downstate Correctional Facility in Fishkill, New York. I must have watched two dozen men leave to begin their prison sentences. They each left handcuffed and shackled, with their heads down. Some came back with horror stories; others returned bragging, treating the experience like a rite of passage. These were the men who were repeat offenders, already fluent in the system.

I moved slowly, brushing my teeth, washing my face, and packing my few belongings. Half of me hoped that if I stalled long enough, the transfer might not happen, and I might be allowed to stay in the county. But the gate buzzed, the latch snapped, and reality set in.

Honestly, I didn’t know who or what to believe about prison. But I knew one thing for certain: the prison wouldn’t care who I was before I walked through its doors.

It’s been eight years since that morning.

Every day since March 30, 2017—the day I was sentenced to twenty years to life under New York’s felony murder law—I’ve been trying to understand what it means to live inside a system that can so easily diminish your humanity. I’ve been trying to understand what it means to live as a human being inside a place built to trap you in a single story, stuck in time, no matter who you were or who you wanted to become.

I grew up in Orange County, New York. When I was young, I moved around a lot with my mom—Ellenville, Middletown, Goshen—while she tried to find steady work. My dad wasn’t in the picture. I was always smart, but school never held my attention. The material felt distant, and I couldn’t sit still long enough to pretend otherwise. I grew anxious, restless, and frustrated. Teachers often saw me as a problem that had to be dealt with, not a kid struggling to make sense of himself.

At the direction of the school, my parents brought me to a psychiatrist to keep me from being removed from class altogether. They barely asked any questions before handing down a set of diagnoses—attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), anxiety, and depression—along with a handful of prescriptions. Looking back, I don’t believe those diagnoses were accurate; they seemed designed to control my behavior rather than understand it. From then on, I wasn’t Devin anymore. I was a set of labels.

In my teens, I started looking for ways to escape. Pills became my drug of choice. What began as prescriptions to manage me turned into a dependency I carried on my own. That dependence deepened when I met a young woman who became my girlfriend. We spent most of our time using together, feeding each other’s habits. It was an unhealthy bond, but at the time, it was all I had to hold onto.

In the seventy-two hours leading up to the tragedy, I remember attempting suicide by swallowing a handful of prescription pills. I remember being taken to the hospital and released that same night. On the day of the tragedy, my family and I sought help at two different inpatient rehab programs. I remember both turning me away, claiming my addiction wasn’t severe enough. I was nineteen years old, drowning in addiction. I was desperate for a way out, but it felt like every door I pushed against stayed shut.

That desperation, combined with my struggles, led to a tragedy I will never escape. In the early morning hours of August 2, 2014, I accompanied my girlfriend to the home of an elderly woman. My girlfriend had decided to sneak inside to steal pills and money. Court records show that while she searched, the woman woke up. Panicked and high, my girlfriend attacked and killed her. Later, she admitted what she had done in a written and video-recorded confession.

I tried to stop her before she went inside, but she wouldn’t listen. When I eventually stepped through the door and called out, the woman was already lying in bed, unmoving. I froze. That moment would shape the rest of my life.

During intake in the Orange County Jail, men slumped against the walls. Some snored, some mumbled, others looked dead behind the eyes. I watched them like a boy watches grown men, trying to learn how to hide his fear. Some looked hardened; others looked broken. I tried to look like I didn’t care. This was the section that processed men coming in or going out, whether returning home, transferring to another jurisdiction, or, like me, heading out to state prison.

The roughly forty-five-minute bus ride to Downstate, a maximum-security prison that has since closed, felt like a descent into another world. I stared out the window. The road signs blurred past, counting me down to my new life. One name lodged in my mind: Red Schoolhouse Road. The road’s cracked pavement wound toward what looked like a fortress. Towering stone walls came into view, surrounded by rows of coiled razor wire.

“Everybody off. Single file!” an officer barked.

The orders came quickly, without feeling. The guards’ uniforms were crisper here, and their energy colder. This was no longer the county jail; this was the machine.

“Face the wall. . . . Shirts off. Pants off. Right hand, left shoe. Left hand, right shoe. Socks. Move, ladies!”

There was no eye contact from the officers, just scripted, conveyor-belt commands.

“This isn’t the county or Rikers,” one said, his tone calm and chilling. “You mess up here, you will lose your teeth. You come at one of my officers, we’ll assume you’re trying to cause deadly harm.”

In the intake area, they strip-searched us, shaved our heads, and doused us in some sort of foul-smelling lice shampoo. I’ll never forget that smell. Their hair trimmers buzzed like locusts. A young Latino kid gripped his ponytail like it was all he had left.

“You ain’t cutting shi—” he said.

An officer struck him before he finished the sentence. Another tackled him. Pepper spray filled the air. “Stop resisting!” they yelled, drowning out his screams.

“Get on the wall!” our escort barked.

We scrambled back, silent and shaken. That beating wasn’t just for him—it was for all of us, an introduction to Downstate.

The process continued without pause. We took cold showers and were handed our new clothes: stiff green uniforms, cheap socks, and paper-thin underwear. One by one, we were called up and given our prison IDs. We passed through medical and mental health screenings and were served a meal on a plastic tray—bland and unidentifiable.

At 3 Complex, H Block, men stood up against their cell doors, peering through the long rectangular slots. They watched us roll in—some shouting, others quiet, but all intensely alert.

When my cell door slammed shut, I was finally alone, or as alone as I could be. The cell smelled of mildew and sweat. The mattress sagged over rusted springs. Feces—or something like it—was smeared in the corner. I dropped my few things on the steel desk, lay down on the mattress, and cried.

I cried quietly at first, then harder—my shoulders shaking, my breath ragged. Facing the wall, I cried for my mother. For my younger self. For the boy I’d been and the man I’d never be. Above me, the concrete ceiling stared back, blank and indifferent.

The story told online—the one you’ll find if you Google my name—says I showed no regard for life. That I preyed on an elderly woman. That I walked into a stranger’s home and helped take everything from her, including her life. That story is the only one most people see; and that, more than the razor wire or the sentence itself, is what began to eat at me.

People do not see the hospital bracelet I was wearing at the time of my arrest. They do not feel the pain that led me to attempt suicide days earlier, or understand the mental health crisis I was facing. They do not grasp how drugs can dull your senses and slow your mind, allowing something terrible to unfold nearby before you fully comprehend it. What they don’t see is that I never wanted the tragedy to happen, and that I’ll carry it with me for the rest of my life.

That digital version of me bears little resemblance to the man I was, or the man I’ve spent over a decade becoming. Yet it was the version the world accepted. For years, I believed there was no hope of changing it. The Internet felt permanent, immovable, like concrete poured around my name.

I was incarcerated. How could I tell the world my story? I didn’t even have a cell phone, much less a computer. But a friend reminded me that while I couldn’t undo the past, I could still offer context and truth to the story the world saw.

With help from my loved ones on the outside, I began to create a presence across social media: Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. I published reflections about my life and prison experience on Substack, AboutMe, and Change.org. I launched a campaign titled “Who Is Devin Giordano?” and invited people who knew me to share their memories.

In 2024 I cofounded the You Are Not Alone Project (YANA), a nonprofit created from behind prison walls. Its mission was simple but urgent: to shift the culture of how men treat women by confronting violence, teaching respect, and supporting healing—one man at a time.

The project started in the visiting room at Eastern Correctional Facility, where I currently live. Week after week, I watched women carry the emotional weight of incarceration. Mothers, wives, sisters, and grandmothers showed up to support their loved ones despite distance, weather, and humiliation. Their sacrifice raised a question: Would men show up for women in the same way? For me, that question cut deep since it was inseparable from my own accountability. Although I never laid hands on anyone, I’ve spent years reckoning with the fact that my decisions led me into the shadow of a tragedy that took the life of a woman who was a pillar of her community.

Founding YANA was my way of saying: I’m sorry. Founding YANA was my way of saying: I’ll never forget her. Founding YANA was my way of saying: Never again.

We began small: raising money for breast cancer awareness, creating shirts and artwork, and asking men inside to step forward—to take accountability for their actions and inactions that perpetuated harm. Vulnerability is punished in prison, but men joined anyway. Later, we organized a letter-writing campaign supporting mothers of children with autism, and an art show, A Celebration of Women, that raised funds for survivors of domestic violence. Each effort came with risks, since prison policy forbids fundraising or organizing, but we pressed forward. Doing something meaningful mattered to us.

What YANA showed me is that even under the worst of circumstances, men can change. I watched men who had lived in silence begin to honor their mothers, write about their daughters, and confront the harms they had caused. I heard it in their testimonies, in the way their language began to shift. I saw tenderness emerge in a place liable to crush it. For me, the project was about accountability—about proving through action that, although I cannot undo the past, I can spend every day showing up differently, and helping others do the same.

Telling your own story is messy, emotional work. It requires you to gather every shattered piece of who you were and who you hope to become, then hold those pieces to the light so others can witness the transformation. It’s work that demands honesty, even when the truth hurts.

My journey, although marked by tragedy, birthed a new me. On that day, I did not strike the blow, but I should have acted sooner to try to prevent what happened. Accepting that reality has been painful, but it’s also been freeing. Growth, for me, has meant moving from grief to accountability; from avoidance to understanding. That is the hardest and most important work I’ve done.

I’m not asking anyone to forget what happened on that fateful day. I’m asking them, if they can, to look at my whole story. Maybe then, they’ll see me as I am—not as a monster, or a number, but as a man trying to move forward with integrity. A man who is still here, still becoming. And a man who, through the You Are Not Alone Project, is determined to make sure that men learn to show up for women, so no one else repeats my failure.

And even if the world never changes the way it sees me, that doesn’t diminish the work I do or the man I am becoming. My accountability is still a powerful force—for me, for those affected by my actions, and for the younger men who might otherwise follow the same path I did. And at the center of that accountability is the woman whose life was lost, Mrs. Mills. My remorse for her and her family is something I live with every day; it fuels my commitment to change and to never again turn away from what’s right.

The past is fixed, but how I live now—how I respond, how I teach, how I take responsibility—that’s still mine to shape.

A few of the guys were watching the Knicks beat up on the Atlanta Hawks when a new officer came through the front gate. I’ll call him D. He locked the gate behind him and took his post in the far corner of the room. My friend Butta leaned over. “I don’t care what nobody says,” he whispered, “he’s CIA.” We laughed. D didn’t move. He just sat there, staring at the wall.

After a while, he got up and came over to watch the game with us. I decided to break the ice by telling him there was a rumor going around that he used to work for the CIA. He laughed, genuinely. It wasn’t the kind of laugh an officer gives when he’s managing a situation or weighing whether he’s dealing with someone who has an ulterior motive. Then, oddly, he started speaking freely.

He went on to tell me how, for fifteen years, he taught in a BOCES program for children with severe autism. He has a master’s in special education and had recently been overlooked for a promotion in favor of someone twenty years younger with half his experience. Upset, he complained to the school, causing things to spiral, and eventually resigned from a job he loved. Then he took a job with DOCCS.

He talked to me like I was a person.

After almost twelve years inside, I had to remind myself to respond casually — the way you respond to another human being simply having a conversation with you. Honestly, the fact that I had to remind myself at all should tell you something about what this place does to you.

I kept my voice loud enough for everyone around me to hear. This is something you can only understand if you’ve done time.

When I first came to prison, I quickly learned that conversation is not always just conversation. It is a risk. The first facility I entered was Clinton Correctional in Dannemora, a maximum-security prison with a reputation for extreme violence. An old-timer named Chico pulled me aside not long after I arrived. He explained the rules in a way that left no room for confusion.

If I wanted to survive, I was not to speak to an officer alone. Not casually. Not in passing. Not about anything. If I had to exchange words with a CO, I made sure someone was close enough to hear. If paperwork moved between me and an officer, I showed someone else first.

He explained that keeping my distance wasn’t disrespect. It was part of my survival.

In prison, perception travels faster than truth. Once a story is attached to your name, it doesn’t matter whether that story is accurate. What matters is that people believe it. I understood those rules immediately. Most men I came up with did. Not because someone forced us to, but because we witnessed firsthand what happened to the ones who didn’t.

Over time, those rules became something deeper than instruction. They became ingrained in our minds and part of how we lived. What Chico gave me wasn’t just advice. It was a form of orientation — a set of principles that have been passed down through decades of incarcerated men navigating an institution designed, at its core, to be navigated against them. He didn’t invent those principles, but like me, he inherited them. Then he passed them along.

For a long time, that transference held.

The younger men coming in today are not receiving what Chico gave me. Part of that is structural. The old-timers are tired. After years of watching their guidance go ignored, after years of younger men arriving too angry or too distracted to be reached, a lot of them now lay dormant. They do their time and wait to see if they live to make it home. The informal curriculum that once moved through these facilities — the one that told you where the lines were and why they existed — began to fade.

In its absence, the population became harder to read. Not because these young men are worse, but because nobody is sitting them down and having the uncomfortable conversations they need to hear.

None of this is happening in isolation. The deaths of Robert Brooks and Messiah Nantwi put New York’s prison system under scrutiny it hasn’t faced in quite the same way before. From the inside, those deaths were not a revelation, as mainstream media often depicts them. They were confirmation — documentation of what incarcerated people have been saying for years without being taken seriously.

A report released by Julia Salazar described the violence inside the state’s correctional facilities as endemic, not the product of individual misconduct but embedded in the structure of the system itself.

For those of us living here, that word didn’t feel like news. It felt like a necessary recognition.

Then, last year, came the officer strike.

What followed was difficult in ways that are worth being honest about. Programs were suspended. Movement was essentially locked down. Visits were cut back. The already constrained life inside these walls became even more constrained. But something else happened at the same time. A significant portion of the existing officer corps left — retired, transferred, fired, or simply did not come back. Into that absence, new officers began to arrive.

Some were younger. Some came from backgrounds that had nothing to do with law enforcement. Teachers. Counselors. People trained in de-escalation. People trained in how to be present with someone who is struggling without making it worse.

Officer D is one of those people.

The shift was not announced. There was no policy, no memo, no formal acknowledgment that something was changing. But you can feel it if you’ve been inside long enough to know what the old culture felt like. Some facilities — Upstate, Marcy, Coxsackie — still feel largely unchanged. The same rigidity. A similar distance. The same unspoken rules enforced the way they’ve always been enforced.

But in other places, the edges are beginning to soften.

The old culture inside these walls was brutal. But it was predictable. You knew where the lines were. You knew which interactions were safe and which ones would cost you. There is a kind of stability in that knowledge, even when it costs you everything else.

What’s emerging now doesn’t offer that same clarity. The environment is less consistent — which sounds like progress, and maybe in some ways it is. But inconsistency carries its own risks in a place like this. You can’t always tell which officer will meet your openness with openness and which one will mistake it for something else entirely.

By the time D went back to his post, the game was still playing. The room felt largely the same. Butta made another joke, and the moment passed the way most moments do in here — without announcement and without significance.

But I kept the witnesses.

Even while we were laughing, even while the conversation felt easy, I made sure people were close enough to hear every word. Not because I thought D was a threat, but because I am still the person Chico made me. The rules live in my body now. They shape the way I move, the distance I keep, the calculations I run before I speak to anyone in a uniform.

Something is shifting inside these walls. I believe that. I’m watching it happen in real time, from a vantage point most people writing about it don’t have. Whether what’s shifting will become something durable — a genuine change in the culture of this institution — or whether the system will return to what it has always been, I cannot say.

But I can tell the difference.

And I’m still figuring out what it means.

Every so often, this sort of morbid question comes to my mind: will I ever again experience life outside of prison walls, or will my lifetime end within a thirty-something-foot cement wall, in an institution that, come next week, won't even remember my name?

I sit with that question more than I let on. There are people I love on the other side of these walls, and the last thing I want is to place the weight of this uncertainty on them, so I carry it quietly, in the hours between lights out and sleep, in the space between one head count and the next. What I can tell you is this: after almost twelve years of incarceration, I have not lost hope. Yearning for the day I walk out the front gate and greet my family as a free man is one of the only things that keeps me going. But living inside this kind of uncertainty — the chaos, the neglect, the dysfunction — forces a man to inventory every variable that stands between him and that gate. And there are so many variables.

My parole board is set for 2034. In a just world, twelve years of work, growth, and transformation would speak for themselves. But my freedom will not be decided by what I know myself to be. It will be decided in a room by a panel of people who have never met me, reviewing a file assembled by other people who have never met me, concluded by a one-hour interview. I have no quarrel with those individuals; they are doing what is asked of them inside a system I simply believe to be imperfect. But there is something quite devastating about the fact that the most consequential decision of my life will be made by strangers reading documents written by more strangers. My name probably appears in that file hundreds of times, and not one page of it can tell them who I actually am.

And while I wait for 2034, I have to survive the institution as it exists today. There is a widespread belief on the outside that if you come to prison, keep your head down, and do your time, everything will be fine. It is not true. The culture that lives inside these walls — one that rewards dominance and normalizes abuse — means that navigating this place safely requires a kind of constant vigilance that never fully lets up. There are officers I have come to genuinely respect, men and women who treat incarcerated people with both fairness and dignity, who see us as human beings who made a serious mistake and are now paying the price. But they exist alongside a culture that does not always make room for that kind of decency, and the ones who don't share that decency are the ones you can never afford to forget.

Outside of familial hypertension, I am, at this moment, in good health. I hold onto that fact the way you hold onto something you know is fragile. Because health is one of those things that can change without warning, and if it changes in here, I am in serious trouble. I have watched men die inside these walls, men whose deaths, as far as I can tell without any medical training, did not have to happen. Deaths that appear to trace back to delayed emergency responses, to medications that are cheap or experimental or simply inadequate, to a medical culture that greets a man's pain with suspicion rather than care. The working assumption, it seems, is that most men who seek medical attention are seeking something else: an escape from their housing unit, a coveted medication, a brief reprieve. And so real suffering goes unmet. If I become seriously ill before I go home, the institution I am held in is neither equipped nor willing to take care of me the way I deserve to be taken care of.

Feeding incarcerated people has become, like most things in this country, a profitable enterprise. One market analysis puts the industry at nearly $3.2 billion in 2022, and it is still growing. I think about that number sometimes when I think about what I've seen inside prison kitchens. About five years ago, at Green Haven Correctional, I was volunteering for an inmate organization and helping to prepare a meal. I was moving boxes from a freezer onto a hand truck when one of my comrades stopped me. He was holding a large plastic bag — the kind that looks almost like an IV bag — full of what appeared to be sauce or gravy. He didn't say anything at first. He just turned the bag so I could read the packaging. In bold letters: NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION. My stomach turned. I had heard this story before — from men in every prison I've been in — and I always thought it was an exaggeration, the kind of thing that gets embellished in the retelling. Standing in that kitchen, holding that box, I understood that it was not. From that day forward, I can count on one hand the number of times I have eaten a meal provided by the state. The alternative is the commissary: sugary cakes, chips, cookies, candy bars, fish and meat products so loaded with preservatives that many of them carry no expiration date. That is the choice — food marked unfit for human consumption, or food that never expires. Inside these walls, that is what nutrition looks like.

Then there is the water. The central water supply at a number of New York prisons is widely known to carry Helicobacter pylori — H. pylori — a bacterial infection that, left untreated, can cause ulcers and increase the risk of stomach cancer. For those of us who are financially fortunate enough, the workaround is buying bottled water from the commissary. But the facility places limits on how much we can purchase, framed as a supply issue, so in my prison I am allowed 48 bottles every 14 days, if they are in stock. If I ration perfectly, that comes to 3.5 bottles a day. I am a 300-pound man with high blood pressure. My medical provider has told me to drink adequate water, especially in the heat. 3.5 bottles. The gap between what this institution is supposed to provide and what it actually provides is not abstract to me. It is 3.5 bottles. It is a file full of strangers' observations. It is a meal bag stamped with words I cannot stop seeing. It is the weight of 2034 sitting on my chest every single night, and still getting up the next morning, because the alternative is to stop getting up, and I refuse to give this place that.

It was the eve of Easter Sunday, and I couldn’t sleep.

My family was coming in the morning. I’d been lying in my bed running through everything I needed to do before the visit — wake up early, get to the shower before the line got long, and get myself together. It was late. I knew I needed to stop thinking and just sleep. But that’s the thing about a visit. The anticipation doesn’t care what time it is. You lie there in the dark waiting for morning the way you used to wait for Christmas as a kid, except now the ceiling is concrete and the light never fully goes off.

That’s when I heard it.

A slight shift on one of the plastic mattresses. In here, the mattresses announce everything. It doesn’t matter how carefully you move or how slowly you turn. The plastic gives you away. I lay still for a second and listened. In a place like this, that sound at that hour means something. Your mind goes to medical first.

I got up.

I crossed the dark dorm to the cubicle directly across from mine, one to the left. Ty was lying on his side, tablet held roughly a foot from his face, his earbuds in. The screen was the only light in the room. He was watching a video. I could see from where I stood that he was smiling — but it was the kind of smile that you could tell comes with a cost. Before I could fully take in what I was seeing, he tapped the screen and the video started over.

He was watching it on a loop.

I stood there for maybe ten seconds. Long enough to understand what I was looking at, and to know I had no business standing there any longer. I went back to my bed and sat on the edge of it in the dark. I waited, in case he needed me.

He never knew I was there.

Today is one year since Ty’s sister died. He calls her Sis. That’s what she was to him, and that’s what she’ll be here.

I was there the day he found out.

Our facility was on full lockdown. A few of us were in the day room watching Creed 3 when Ty stepped away to call his mother on his tablet. I wasn’t paying close attention. Then his voice changed, and I was.

Stop playing with me. Tell me you’re joking. Stop. Ma, stop crying. What happened? What happened?

We all looked up. Nobody moved. You could tell something had broken, you just didn’t know what yet. In a place like this you learn to wait for information to reach you rather than reach for it. When he hung up, he threw the tablet into his cubicle, knocked everything off the ledge of a nearby divider with one swipe of his arm, and said it out loud.

My sister. She’s dead.

Then he walked into the bathroom and kicked a row of plastic buckets that lined the wall.

I stood there not knowing what to do. What could you?

Full transparency. I am not good at being there for people who are grieving. Part of it is inexperience. Before I came to prison, I hadn’t lost many people close to me. Most of the people I know who’ve died, I’ve lost while I’ve been in here. Elderly relatives. Friends I grew up with, gone in car accidents, suicides, or overdoses. I was never really there for any of it.

But the other part is harder to explain.

I’ve watched enough men experience loss in here to know that grief doesn’t come in one shape. Some men need you right beside them. Some need you close but quiet. Some need you to stay away, and they’ll make that clear if you don’t pick up on it. And some turn it outward — the grief becomes anger, and it lands on whoever is nearest. Those are the ones you have to read carefully. You want to be present for them, but you also have to protect yourself. Not knowing which kind of grief you’re about to walk into can stop you in the doorway before you ever step through.

So I did what I could. I didn’t try to say the right thing, because I didn’t know what the right thing was. What I did was what some people say I do best — write. Letters to the facility administration, the commissioner, anybody with an ounce of power. Grievances. Anything that might convince someone with authority to let Ty attend his sister’s funeral. I used whatever I have with words and put it to work for him.

It didn’t matter.

They said they didn’t have the manpower. The facility was in a state of crisis. The illegal wildcat strike by corrections officers had the prison locked down and stripped of staff — that was the stated reason. But the indifference was already there before the strike. The strike just made it harder to look away from.

What Ty was offered instead was a virtual visit. An hour on a screen. Except the officers assigned to manage the video equipment couldn’t get it working. The setup process took over thirty minutes, and by the time a connection was made, Ty had fifteen minutes before he was walked back to his housing unit.

Fifteen minutes. To say goodbye to his sister. To sit with his grieving mother. And then prison life resumed, as it always does in here.

He told me later that he was grateful for those fifteen minutes. At least he could see his mother’s face. At least he could say something. But he also said this:

The fact that I was never able to hold my baby’s hand and say goodbye — that’s something I’ll carry for the rest of my life. Something that will hurt my heart forever.

His baby. That’s what he called her.

There’s something people on the outside don’t always know about grief in here. It goes beyond the absence of support. The thing is — showing grief visibly can get you punished.

A woman incarcerated in Georgia wrote about the day she found out her grandmother had died. She was crying when an officer saw her. He didn’t call the chaplain. He called mental health. She was handcuffed, escorted to the infirmary, told to remove all of her clothing. The room was fifty-two degrees. They handed her a paper gown and told her to stop crying. They kept her there for four days.

Years later, she received another call. Her sister had died by suicide. This time she knew better than to let anyone see it. She gave herself three minutes alone on the floor of her cell — three minutes to feel everything she had — and then she got up, wiped her face, and went to watch a Valentine’s Day dance-off in the common area. It happened to be going on in the unit that day. She couldn’t lie down. She couldn’t show anything. So she went. Four people knew about her loss for weeks.

She wasn’t being cold. She had learned what the institution did when grief made itself visible.

That’s the environment Ty has been navigating for 365 days. Eight-by-six feet, four-foot dividers. If you sit up in your bed you can see your neighbors on both sides, and the officer at his elevated desk can see all of you. When you lose someone in here, the therapeutic response is a checklist. Do you have thoughts of harming yourself or others? Mark the box. Move on.

That’s it. That’s the support.

The grief doesn’t go anywhere. It just gets smaller. It finds whatever container is left to it — a bunk, a dark room, a tablet screen on a loop at midnight.

He talks about her every day. Not always by name or even directly. But she’s there, in the way he talks about wanting to get home, wanting to be there for his mother who is getting older. Sis lives in the edges of almost every conversation he has.

He didn’t know I was there that night. We haven’t talked about it. I don’t know that we will.

If you love someone who is incarcerated and you’ve read this far, I want to talk to you for a second.

You probably already know things are hard in here. What you may not know is what it actually looks like when someone loses a person they love and the institution’s response is a checklist, a fifteen-minute video call, and an expectation that they return to the yard and the mess hall and the work assignments like nothing happened. No counselor assigned. No grief group. No memorial. The system acknowledges the loss, covers its liability, and moves on.

What you can do is not move on.

Write a letter that has nothing to do with the case or commissary or court dates. Write one that just says: I know what today is. I’m thinking about you. Tell me about her. Ask to hear a story about the person who died. Ask what made them laugh. Ask what your person misses most. Give the grief somewhere to go that isn’t the floor of a cell at three in the morning.

Send a card on the anniversary. The dates the outside world forgets are the ones that hit hardest in here — because every day looks the same, and the ones that should feel different never do, unless someone from the outside makes them different.

You can’t fix what the institution refuses to do. But you can refuse to replicate its indifference. That matters more than you know.

Today, Ty made a celebration out of it.

He’s been playing reggaeton all day, loud enough that the whole dorm can hear it. He cooked a big meal with some of the men. He moved through the day like someone who decided — on his own, without anyone telling him to — that today was going to be a celebration of life. Not a vigil. Not a breakdown. A celebration, built entirely out of what the institution left him with after it took everything else.

I watched him move through the dorm today and thought about what that takes. To get up on the one-year anniversary of your sister’s death, in a place that gave you fifteen minutes and a checklist and called it support, and turn the day into something that honors her anyway.

He built the only memorial he was allowed to have.

Sis died one year ago today on a road in the Hudson Valley, in the early hours of a Saturday morning in April. She was thirty-four years old.

Her brother has been grieving her alone — inside one of the hardest environments a human being can occupy — without a single program-taught tool for any of it. No coping strategies offered. No framework given. No sanctioned space to feel what he feels. Every morning he gets up and moves through his day because this place requires it, and because he simply doesn’t have a choice.

Endurance is not the same thing as healing. I need people to understand that. A man smiling at a screen in the dark at midnight, watching the same video of his sister on a loop, is not a man who has found peace. He is a man who has found the only container the system left him.

His name is Ty. Her name was Sis.

I want them both to be remembered.

Legal arguments often hide inside sentences that appear simple at first glance, their reasoning unfolding only for readers who have learned how to follow the structure of the language itself. I was thinking about that one evening while sitting on the edge of my bunk at Green Haven Correctional Facility, holding a legal motion in my hand and trying, once again, to understand the sentence that seemed to hold my future inside it. Leaning forward beneath the small lamp mounted to the wall above my bed, I reread the same paragraph again and again while the light cast a narrow circle across the page, leaving the rest of the cell dim beyond its reach as the housing unit settled into its nighttime rhythm, the distant sounds of movement along the gallery gradually fading as men prepared for sleep.

The words themselves were not unfamiliar. I could pronounce each of them without hesitation, the way someone might read aloud a language whose vocabulary has become recognizable through repetition even when the deeper structure remains elusive. Yet the sentence refused to open for me, stretching across the page in layers—clauses folding back into earlier clauses, conditions attaching themselves to claims that seemed to shift slightly each time I read them—until the meaning appeared to disappear somewhere inside the architecture of the sentence itself.

For a long time I believed the difficulty belonged to me.

I had left high school only months before graduation and later earned my GED, which made it easy to assume that legal language simply belonged to a world of education I had only partially entered. Motions, rulings, appellate briefs—each arrived written in a style that was technically English yet strangely distant, as though the reasoning shaping my future had been expressed in a dialect whose grammar everyone else appeared to understand but that no one had ever paused to explain. The law, I assumed, was a thing that happened to you in a language you were not meant to fully possess.

Because I could not reliably decipher those documents on my own, I relied heavily on my attorney to interpret them. My family and I had hired one of the most respected defense lawyers in our area, and when he walked me through the filings connected to my case I listened carefully, grateful for the clarity he could provide. Even so, a lingering uneasiness followed that dependence. There is a particular kind of vulnerability in having the decisions of your life explained to you rather than read by you—a passivity that is not chosen but structurally produced. When the documents governing your future arrive in a form you cannot fully enter, trust becomes less a matter of choice than necessity. You accept another person's interpretation not because you prefer it, but because the language itself seems determined to remain just beyond your reach. And what you cannot read, you cannot question. What you cannot question, you cannot contest.

It would take several years before I began to understand that this was not a personal failure. The law operates not only through rules and statutes but through sentences—sentences whose structure carries the reasoning that ultimately determines how those rules are applied, and that are written in a style dense enough to make that reasoning invisible to most people who encounter it. The difficulty I experienced was not a symptom of inadequate education. It was a feature of a system that has never been especially interested in being understood by the people it most directly governs.

At the time, however, I had not yet found a way into that understanding.

That began to change the semester I encountered Shakespeare.

I was enrolled in the Bard Prison Initiative at Green Haven Correctional Facility when Macbeth appeared on the syllabus for our First-Year Seminar, a course required for every incoming Bard student whether they study on the main campus or inside a prison classroom. The room where we met carried the unmistakable features of the institution surrounding it—painted cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights buzzing faintly overhead, and a wide plexiglass window that allowed the officer stationed in the hallway to see directly inside.

There was no air conditioner. On warmer days the air in the classroom settled heavily against our skin, leaving the small plastic fan near the professor's desk as the only source of relief. The fan rotated slowly from side to side, producing a faint scraping sound each time it turned. Every few seconds it would briefly face our direction, sending a thin ribbon of air across the room before drifting away again, leaving us once more in the still heat of late morning.

Most of us arrived that day having struggled through the previous night's reading, which was honest enough—Shakespeare has a reputation for difficulty that is not entirely unearned. But the difficulty rarely lies in the individual vocabulary. The words themselves are often familiar enough. What complicates the reading is the way those words move together, bending through images and subordinate clauses that require the reader to follow the thought carefully before the meaning becomes visible. The architecture of Shakespeare's sentences does not yield itself immediately. It has to be traced.

Our professor did not translate the passages for us or summarize their meaning in advance. Instead, he asked us to slow down and begin asking a different set of questions: Who is speaking? What does the character believe? Where does the reasoning begin? At first those questions felt almost too elementary, the kind of instruction that belongs to middle school rather than a college seminar. Yet something about the method began to shift the way I listened to the language on the page—because Shakespeare's sentences move the way thought itself moves. A suspicion appears, attaches itself to an observation, draws in a memory or a fear, and then follows its own logic forward until the conclusion begins to feel almost inevitable. The reasoning is not stated. It is performed. And the performance is in the grammar.

One morning we were working through a passage spoken by Banquo when that movement suddenly became legible to me in a new way.

As a classmate read the speech aloud, I found myself following the character's reasoning almost without effort. Banquo is reflecting on what has already come to pass: Macbeth has obtained the title of Cawdor exactly as the witches predicted, and soon afterward he has become king. The first part of the prophecy has proven true. If the witches were right about Macbeth, Banquo begins to wonder, then perhaps the prophecy about his own descendants also carries weight—which means the same witches who have elevated Macbeth may have spoken honestly to him as well. But if that is true, then Macbeth has every reason to fear him. The logic arrives clause by clause, each subordinate thought adding pressure to the one before it, until the argument assembles itself in full. Banquo does not announce his conclusion. He reasons his way into it through the structure of his speech, and the reader arrives there alongside him.

What surprised me in that moment was not simply that I understood the passage. It was that I could hear the reasoning moving through the sentence—the way a thought gathers weight as it accumulates conditionals, qualifications, and dependent clauses, until the structure itself has made the argument. The meaning had not been hiding. It had been there all along, distributed through the grammar, waiting for someone willing to follow it at its own pace.

Around that same time my direct appeal was underway, and legal documents continued arriving through the mailroom with the kind of regularity that begins to feel, after a while, like a second clock measuring a different kind of time. One evening, not long after that class, I pulled one of those motions from the plastic bin where I kept my papers and attempted to read it again, sitting in the same spot on the edge of my bunk while the housing unit settled into its familiar nighttime rhythm.

This time I approached the paragraph differently.

Instead of trying to absorb the entire sentence at once—instead of treating comprehension as something that should arrive suddenly or not at all—I followed the argument the way we had followed Shakespeare's. I found the main claim first. Then I located the condition attached to it. Then I traced the citation explaining why the condition changed the meaning of the claim. The sentence did not open immediately, but it did open, revealing a structure that had always been there: a legal argument built through exactly the same logic of accumulating subordination I had been practicing in the classroom.

The motion was not simply describing the law. It was making an argument. And like Banquo's speech, it was making that argument through the architecture of its sentences rather than through any explicit declaration.

The realization was quieter than I expected, without the drama that moments of recognition often carry in retrospect. But it stayed with me—because it disclosed something I had not fully understood before: that the difficulty of legal language is not random. It is structural, and structure can be learned. The distance between legal prose and ordinary comprehension is not the distance between expertise and ignorance. It is the distance between trained reading and untrained reading, and the training, it turns out, has been available all along in places no one would think to look for it.

Since that semester, men in the housing unit occasionally bring me their legal paperwork. The interaction usually begins the same way—a manila envelope placed on the table between us, inside it motions, court decisions, or letters from attorneys that someone has been trying to decipher alone in his cell. Often the person across from me is not undereducated. He simply has never been taught how to read this particular kind of sentence, which is a different problem entirely.

“I can read the words,” they often say.

“I just don’t know what they’re saying.”

What they mean, I have come to understand, is that they can decode the surface of the language but cannot yet find the reasoning running beneath it. So we sit together and begin the slow process of tracing the argument. We look for the main claim. We follow the subordinate clauses. We identify the conditions. We listen for the logic moving through the sentence rather than waiting for a summary that may never arrive.

Gradually the structure comes into view. The argument has been there from the beginning—not hidden, exactly, but requiring a kind of patience and method that most people are never taught and that institutions have little interest in teaching. The documents that most directly shape people's lives are written in the style least likely to be understood by the people whose lives they are shaping. That is not an accident of style. It is a condition of power.

Perhaps that is why education in prison carries a kind of gravity that is difficult to describe to someone who has not experienced it from the inside. Each class opens a small space in which language shifts from barrier to instrument—not because the language itself changes, but because the reader does. What felt impenetrable begins to yield. What seemed to belong to another world begins to seem, at least in part, negotiable.

The discovery that began in a hot classroom—with a slowly turning plastic fan, a play written more than four hundred years ago, and a professor who refused to translate the difficulty away—continues to follow me back into the housing unit. The sentence appears again, dense and layered in the way legal language invariably is, but now I know where to begin. The argument is there, distributed through the grammar the way Banquo's suspicion is distributed through the conditionals of his speech, waiting for a reader willing to slow down and follow the reasoning all the way through to the end.

Two sentences. One a grammatical unit. The other a measure of time. What I did not understand, until Shakespeare taught me otherwise, is that both of them reward the same kind of reading: patient, structural, and willing to follow the logic wherever the language leads.

Four men died in my facility in sixty days. I'm not going to release their names, as their families deserve to grieve without a prison writer turning their loss into a news peg. On top of that, in a place where drug debts outlast the people who owe them, attaching names to overdose deaths still carries risk for the living, myself included. What I can tell you is that each death was confirmed as K2-related. And I can tell you what happened after.

The yard opened the next day. The school building opened a few minutes late. And the package room was closed because officers were needed somewhere else throughout the facility. That was the full institutional response. Four men dead from the same drug, in the same facility, in sixty days. The days that followed felt like just another day in prison.

I want you to sit with that for a second, not with outrage, but with curiosity.

The numbness that settles over a prison after an overdose death isn't callousness. It's adaptation. When you've watched enough medical emergencies, when the response teams rushing through the housing units have become background noise, when K2 deaths stop being shocking because they keep happening and keep happening, what you develop isn't indifference. It's grief that has nowhere to go. So it goes quiet.

I'm not immune to it. I came to prison more than twelve years ago with a drug problem that had hollowed out everything around me. I got sober here. So when I hear that another man has died from an overdose in this facility, I can't stop myself from wondering what he was carrying. What sent him to that drug on that particular day. Whether, if someone had opened a different door, he would have walked through it.

I also think about Andrew.

Andrew came to prison roughly eight years ago for breaking into various electronics stores and stealing televisions to support a heroin habit. He came from a decent family. He had people who loved him. He did his time. He went home. Six months later he was dead. Found in his apartment with a needle in his arm. I've thought about him many times since. Not because his story is unusual, but because it isn't.

Andrew didn't leave prison recovered. He left the way he arrived — dependent, without tools, and pushed back into the same environment that had produced the addiction in the first place. The system processed him and released him and called that rehabilitation. He was dead before the year was out.

The easy response is to blame DOCCS. Or the superintendent of a particular facility. Or the officers walking the tiers. I want to resist that, not because these institutions are beyond criticism, but because it lets the larger problem escape. The people running New York's prisons are largely managing a disaster they inherited. The state funds these facilities at levels that make real treatment structurally impossible. The federal government is cutting rather than expanding what's available for correctional mental health and addiction intervention. And unfortunately, nobody with real budget authority has decided that what happens inside a prison cell is worth what it costs to do right.

What gets lost in that conversation is worth saying plainly. The three largest mental health facilities in the United States are not hospitals. They're prisons. We spent forty years defunding psychiatric institutions, eliminating community mental health infrastructure, and routing the consequences into the criminal justice system. Then we expressed surprise that prisons are overwhelmed with people whose primary diagnosis isn't criminality but untreated mental illness and addiction. According to SAMHSA, 58 percent of people in state prisons meet criteria for a substance use disorder. Most of them didn't develop that disorder here. They arrived with it. Carrying everything that produced it. Trauma, poverty, grief, years of unaddressed need. They entered a system that was never designed to treat any of it.

So when coverage of criminal justice reform suggests that progressive policies are remaking the inside of New York's prisons, I want to ask one question. Remaking what, exactly?

There are men in this facility right now who are dependent on K2 and want to stop. The substance treatment program available to them, ASAT, a structured therapeutic model, can't serve someone in active withdrawal. It requires a stability they haven't reached yet. AA and NA are fellowship programs, not detox. There is no medically supervised withdrawal unit. There is no door that opens when someone hits rock bottom and decides today is the day. There is just the drug, still accessible, and another day to get through.

Joe Robinson spent twenty-five years in New York State prisons, sentenced for a murder rooted in the crack trade that consumed East New York in the 1980s. He was released in 2016. He now directs reentry services at Appellate Advocates and sits on the advisory board of the Parole Preparation Project. His story gets told as evidence of what prison can produce. However, I read it differently. Joe Robinson succeeded the way almost everyone who succeeds in this environment succeeds. Through individual will, exercised against the grain of everything the institution was structured to do. He isn't evidence that the system works. He's evidence that some people are strong enough to survive it.

The four men who died here weren't anomalies. They were the expected outcome. They were what happens when a system receives broken people, offers them inadequate treatment, and releases them, or buries them, in roughly the same condition it received them.

I keep returning to a question I don't want to answer too quickly. Is this a system that is failing to rehabilitate people, or a system that was never genuinely designed to? There are problems in this country that seem solvable, that have clear solutions, that somehow never get solved. At some point that pattern stops looking like failure and starts looking like a choice. I'm not certain enough to say that's true here. But I'm not certain enough to say it isn't.

What I am certain of is this. Four men died. The yard opened the next day. And somewhere in this facility right now, someone is using K2 because there is nothing else available that hurts less than being here.

Something has shifted in ow this country talks about men and boys, and it happened fast. In the past year alone, New York Times columnists have debated it. Governors from both parties have made it a policy priority. Podcasters with millions of listeners have built entire platforms around it. Researchers are publishing findings. Parents are asking questions they didn’t know how to ask before. The conversation goes by different names depending on who’s having it — a crisis of masculinity, a war on boys, a generation of young men adrift — but the urgency underneath it is the same. Something is wrong. Boys are falling behind in school. Young men are pulling away from the people closest to them. The male suicide rate sits at nearly four times the rate of women. Everyone seems to agree that the problem is real. Nobody seems to agree on where it starts.

I know where it starts. I’ve been watching it up close for eleven years.

The morning the chair became a crisis, the housing unit was quiet.

Of the twenty-one men assigned to our dorm, maybe six of us were around. The rest were at college classes, vocational programs, religious services. Light music was playing. Good vibes. Everybody doing their own thing.

One man had placed a chair in front of the television and left his headphones on the seat. It’s something people do inside — a way of holding slot time, the period each person gets to control the screen. He stepped away to rinse out some clothes in the bathroom sink. While he was gone, another man walked over and sat down. Headphones in his ears. Settled in like the seat had always been his.

When the first man came back and found someone in his chair, what followed began with a word. One word, in a tone that landed harder than intended — or maybe exactly as intended. Within thirty seconds, two men were standing face to face in a room that had been peaceful moments before.

It was broken up quickly. No serious violence. But I watched that pause — the moment between the first word and everything that followed — with the attention of someone who has seen it many times. I knew what was being negotiated. It wasn’t about the chair. It wasn’t even about respect, though that’s the word both men would have used. It was about the impossibility of being seen to back down. About a rule that said you cannot let something like that pass. A rule neither of them wrote. A rule neither of them could name. But both of them knew it by heart.

They’d known it since they were boys.

I’ve been incarcerated for eleven years, serving a twenty-to-life sentence for a burglary that resulted in the death of a woman. In that time I’ve watched versions of this scene play out more times than I can count. The objects change. The men change. The rule doesn’t.

The national conversation about boys tends to locate the problem somewhere in the present — in social media algorithms, in fatherlessness, in schools that don’t serve boys well, in a culture that sends contradictory messages about what a man is supposed to be. These are real forces. But they are not where the problem starts. What eleven years inside has shown me is that the emotional conditions that produce those standoffs — the hair-trigger pride, the inability to back down, the total absence of any language for what a man is actually feeling — don’t develop in prison. They arrive here. Fully formed. Built years before any of these men walked through a set of gates.

Prison didn’t create this. Prison revealed it.

The damage arrives with the men. The institution just makes it impossible to look away.

I learned the rules the same way most men do. Not as rules. As wisdom.

My stepfather raised me with genuine care. He was deliberate about it. After one too many situations where my temper had gotten the better of me — anger outbursts, trouble at school, small things turning into something bigger than they needed to be — he picked me up one afternoon and sat me down. He told me to look him in the eyes. He said: anytime you’re speaking to a man, look him in the eyes. Give him that respect. Then he told me that emotions are temporary. That most of the things we get angry about aren’t worth the size of the reaction they get. That a split-second decision should never dictate something larger.

He was right about all of it.

He was also passing something along he didn’t know he was passing. The lesson beneath the lesson was this: manage what you feel before you understand it. Reduce it before it becomes visible. Control your emotions before they control you.

I heard that in different forms all through my childhood. From coaches. Teachers. Older boys who had already learned it themselves. By the time I was a teenager it wasn’t instruction anymore. It was just who I was. The management had become automatic. I didn’t notice the walls until I was already inside them.

Research on how boys are raised confirms what I lived. Fathers are significantly more likely than mothers to discourage emotional expression in their sons. Parental attention to boys tends to focus on anger while setting aside sadness and fear — the emotions that signal vulnerability rather than force. What children are taught to express shapes what they eventually allow themselves to feel. My stepfather wasn’t unusual. He was a man doing what men are taught to do, passing along what had been passed to him.

That’s what makes this conversation so hard to have honestly. The harm isn’t in bad actors. It lives inside ordinary love, inside cultural limits that most people can’t see and never chose.

Prison strips those limits down to almost nothing.

I’ve watched men calibrate themselves in real time — adjusting posture when someone new walks in, catching something on their face and pulling it back before it becomes readable, shifting tone mid-sentence when they sense eyes on them. It happens fast. Below the level of thought. It’s not performance exactly. It’s reflex. The same reflex I built as a boy, running faster and tighter now in a place where the consequences of getting it wrong are immediate and physical.

Men don’t arrive here and learn a new set of rules. They arrive already fluent. The man who sat in that chair, and the man who came back to find him there — they weren’t responding to prison. They were responding to something installed in them years before they ever got here. Prison just removed every buffer that might, somewhere else, have given those rules room to bend.

Studies on incarcerated men confirm what you can see with your own eyes inside: the men most committed to appearing untouchable are often the ones suffering most quietly. Emotional suppression is linked to elevated rates of depression among incarcerated men. The same conditioning that helps a man navigate prison extracts a serious psychological cost. That’s not a contradiction. It’s the endpoint of something that started long before any prison sentence, arriving here fully formed.

What I didn’t expect, over eleven years, was to also watch it move the other direction.

There’s a group of us here — incarcerated men, most of us serving long sentences — who’ve been meeting informally for several years. No program. No institutional backing. No dedicated space. We meet in the yard before college classes, in hallways, in the housing unit when the timing allows. We came together to look honestly at the behaviors that cause harm to women. The language. The entitlement. The ways men relate to each other that make diminishment feel normal. The administration didn’t build this. We did.

At one of these gatherings we were discussing language — specifically a word used casually among men that degrades women. A man in his mid-twenties, engaged and sharp, was making a point when the word slipped out. He caught it almost immediately. I watched him register what he’d said, register the room, and make a decision.

He stopped. He apologized. He said he needed to do better. Then he kept going.

What stayed with me wasn’t the slip. It was the correction. In a place that has historically punished exactly this kind of public accountability, this man chose to stop and name his error instead of pushing past it. He did it because the room had become — slowly, without any help from the institution — a place where that choice was survivable.

The architecture can be rebuilt. I’ve seen it happen.

The politicians and pundits driving the national conversation about men and boys are asking the right question. They’re just asking it from the wrong end. They want to know what’s wrong with men. The better question is what was taken from boys — and when, and by whom, and with what intentions.

The capacity for honesty. For connection. For the kind of vulnerability that researchers identify not as weakness but as boys’ developmental starting point — where they begin, before the years of conditioning take over. That capacity doesn’t disappear. It goes underground. What I’ve seen, over eleven years of watching men arrive at this place carrying everything they were taught, is that it stays there. Waiting for conditions that make it safe to come back up.

Those conditions aren’t complicated. They ask for environments where a man can say what he feels without being punished for it. That’s not a radical demand. It’s the minimum. And we’re not meeting it — not in schools, not in families, not in the institutions that receive boys and shape them into the men they become.

The chair was never the point. It never is. By the time you can see the confrontation, the damage has been running for years.

That’s where this conversation needs to go.

Note: This essay was originally published in HuffPost Personal on February 24, 2026.

I was 19 when my then-girlfriend came out of a stranger’s house with blood on her shirt. Inside, an elderly woman lay dead. I hadn’t touched her, but the law said I was a murderer.

In a state of panic, my co-defendant poured rubbing alcohol and lit a fire — an impulsive attempt to cover what had already happened, a reflex of fear rather than reason. I stood outside, high on Xanax and weed, frozen in shock. I didn’t call for help. I didn’t run. I didn’t act.

After she was arrested, she gave both a signed statement and a recorded confession admitting what she had done, and admitting that I was outside when the homicide occurred. Still, the law treated us the same.

The crime happened in 2014, but I wasn’t convicted until 2017. I have been incarcerated in New York for a little over 11 years now. In that time, I have worked as an essayist and journalist, exposing the injustices that run through our legal system and our prisons.

When the sentence came down — 20 years to life — I was stunned. My co-defendant received 19 years to life, even though she had confessed. Felony murder laws ignore both intent and individual action; they’re built on the belief that punishment should reach as far and as harshly as possible after a death. That isn’t justice — it’s desperation.

I’ve since learned that I’m far from the only one in this situation. In New York, at least 226 people have been sentenced under the felony murder rule, according to the Felony Murder Reporting Project. Across the country, more than 10,000 people have been punished under similar laws — people who, like me, may not have killed or intended to kill anyone. Each case is different, yet the same story is repeated: fear mistaken for intent, presence mistaken for murder.

Felony murder isn’t intentional murder. Intentional murder means you choose to kill. Felony murder means that if someone dies during a crime, everyone involved can be charged with murder, even if they never touched the victim or wanted anyone to die. It doesn’t matter whether you pulled a trigger or froze in fear; the law doesn’t care about why — it only cares that someone died.

That’s how I ended up with a life sentence. My fear and hesitation weren’t seen as weakness or panic. The law twisted them into malice. And New York continues to twist fear into murder today.

The summer of 2014 was the lowest point of my life. I was struggling with addiction and had no access to the support I needed. When my childhood sweetheart and I broke up, I clung to the first person who made me feel wanted. We mistook chaos for love and pulled each other further down. At first it was weed and liquor; then it was Xanax and painkillers. Drugs blurred the edges of my pain until the blur itself became unbearable.

On July 30, I swallowed a handful of pills, hoping to end what I couldn’t face. Two days later, I tried to check myself into two rehab facilities. Both turned me away — “not bad enough,” they said. Less than 24 hours later, I was standing outside a stranger’s door, high and scared, moments from a decision that would define my life.

Spending time at either of our houses wasn’t an option. Both of our mothers opposed our relationship because they were convinced that we only enabled each other’s addictions. With nowhere else to go, we stood at a friend’s door. When he didn’t answer, she decided to break into his grandmother’s home to steal money and drugs. I thought she was joking. She wasn’t. When she came out with blood on her shirt, I froze. Fear rooted me in place when I should have acted.

We all know intent matters. If two kids walk into a store and one of them steals, we don’t punish the other as if they stole too. But felony murder punishes presence as if it were action. That’s why teenagers across New York are still being sentenced to life for deaths they never caused.

At least 36 people convicted of felony murder in New York were younger than 18 at the time of their offense, and the median age for those sentenced is nearly six years younger than for all other crimes. Felony murder hits young people hardest because it removes the burden of proving intent. It allows courts to ignore what we already know about brain development — knowledge that should be a mitigating factor, not something erased. Teenagers act on impulse; their brains are still forming. Science confirms what every parent knows.

Some states have already recognized how wrong this law is. In 2018, California reformed its felony murder rule and freed people like Adnan Khan, who was 18 when he joined a robbery but never killed anyone. Now, only those who actually killed or intended to kill can be charged with murder.

New York hasn’t caught up. Despite everything we know about how felony murder punishes youth and disregards intent, the law here remains unchanged. Assembly Bill A8929 could finally fix that. It would limit murder convictions to people who directly caused a death or meant for someone to die — and it would give those already serving time under the old law a chance to return to court for a fairer sentence.

There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think about the woman who lost her life that night. She was a mother, a neighbor and someone who deserved to grow old in peace. I will always carry the weight of her death with me — and the knowledge that fear and addiction led to choices I can never undo.

Being young means making mistakes. I did. But freezing in fear is not murder. Until New York changes its law, kids like me will keep losing their lives to a system that refuses to see us for who we really are.

In fifth grade at Goshen Intermediate School in Goshen, N.Y., I sat in a metal chair outside the principal’s office and began to sense, in a way I could not yet articulate, that the way adults see you can begin to settle into something more durable than the moment that produced it. I had been accused of stealing my teacher’s cell phone. No one had seen me take it. I had never taken anything like that before. Yet as I shifted in the chair to keep my legs from going numb, I felt the presumption in the room solidifying — not that I had necessarily committed the act, but that I was the kind of child who might.

The office carried the faint smell of old books and perfume. The secretaries did not shout or glare; they watched me, calmly and attentively, as though the matter under consideration had subtly shifted from evidence to identity. I understood that I was in trouble. What I did not yet understand was how quickly “trouble” can become a category, and how easily a category can begin to define a child long before he has the language to define himself.

That memory has followed me into adulthood, particularly as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder has become one of the most commonly discussed diagnoses in American schools. Nearly one in ten children in the United States has received an ADHD diagnosis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and adult diagnoses have increased sharply over the past decade, with a study published in JAMA Network Open documenting significant growth across racial and ethnic groups. The language of attention, regulation and executive function now circulates freely in classrooms and living rooms alike, reshaping how we understand distraction, impulsivity and frustration.

For many families, that shift represents genuine progress. Children who once would have been dismissed as lazy or morally deficient are now evaluated for neurodevelopmental differences and provided with accommodations, behavioral supports or medication. Longitudinal research suggests that consistent treatment can improve academic performance and mitigate certain long-term risks, and a large meta-analysis published in Clinical Psychology Review found untreated ADHD associated with elevated risk for substance misuse, underscoring that identification and treatment can be protective.

Yet the question that has lingered for me is not whether ADHD is real; it is how institutions respond once a child has been marked, formally or informally, as different. Because diagnosis does not unfold in a vacuum. It unfolds in classrooms governed by discipline codes, in schools strained by limited resources, and in systems that must balance care with order.

According to the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection, students receiving services under federal disability categories make up roughly 14 percent of public school enrollment but account for about a quarter of out-of-school suspensions. Black students are disciplined at disproportionately higher rates than white students, and when disability status intersects with race, disparities widen further. These numbers do not prove that diagnosis causes punishment. They do reveal that behavioral difference is filtered through systems already shaped by racial and institutional hierarchies.

Experts who study school discipline note that tolerance shifts as children age. In elementary school, difficulty regulating emotion may result in an evaluation or an individualized education plan. By middle school, similar behaviors may be interpreted as defiance. By high school, they may be codified as insubordination. The behaviors themselves do not necessarily intensify; what changes is the institutional patience extended toward them.

A 2015 meta-analysis published in Psychological Medicine found ADHD significantly overrepresented in incarcerated populations compared with the general public. Researchers are careful to emphasize that this does not establish a direct pathway from diagnosis to incarceration; most children with ADHD will never encounter the criminal justice system. But when neurodevelopmental differences intersect with punitive environments, under-resourced schools and disproportionate discipline, vulnerability accumulates in ways that are measurable at the population level.

As I moved from elementary school into adolescence, the language used to describe me evolved even when the underlying struggles did not. What had once been characterized as impulsivity became resistance. Frustration was reframed as attitude. Emotional reactivity narrowed into disciplinary notation. Over time, I began to internalize those translations, learning to anticipate how my behavior would be interpreted rather than understanding it on my own terms. I learned compliance before I learned self-understanding.

Clinicians often emphasize that diagnosis can be empowering when it provides explanation rather than stigma. Many adults report relief upon receiving an ADHD diagnosis after years of self-blame, and researchers have documented how recognition can reduce shame and facilitate access to treatment. But diagnosis also participates in identity formation, especially when it emerges during childhood, when a young person is still assembling a sense of who he is allowed to be.

When nearly one in ten American children carries a neurodevelopmental label, we are not simply expanding clinical awareness; we are shaping the vocabulary through which an entire generation interprets effort, discipline and failure. The question is whether institutions can distinguish between neurological difference and moral deviance, between developmental variation and defiance, or whether the presence of a label quietly lowers the threshold for removal from a classroom.

For me, this is not an abstract policy debate. It is a reflection on how quickly a room of adults can become convinced of a narrative about a child, and how long that narrative can linger. I still remember that metal chair and the sensation that something about me had already been decided. The accusation passed, though the memory continued to live inside me.

If recognition of ADHD is to represent progress rather than merely expansion, then it must be paired with reform in how schools discipline, supervise and support students whose brains do not align neatly with systems built for compliance. Diagnosis alone cannot guarantee protection. It can clarify, but it can also calcify.

What ultimately matters is not how many children are evaluated, nor whether diagnostic rates continue to rise, but whether classrooms remain places where difference is accommodated rather than criminalized, where a child can be more complex than the category assigned to him, and where being seen does not mean being fixed in place.

(I recently wrote a piece for the Death Row Soul Collective.)

I was lying on my bed watching a movie when my comrade tapped my foot. He was smiling. That alone told me something was up. He said, “Hochul granted 13 people clemency.”

He has been waiting for more than three years. The only thing he has ever been told is that his case is “under review.” So when he smiled, I understood why. For a moment, I believed it too.

We did not learn the details right away. That came later. Thirteen people, yes, but only two of them were incarcerated. The rest were pardons, granted to people who had already completed their sentences. Only two were commutations, meaning only two people inside prison saw their sentences shortened.

When that settled in, it felt like a blow to the stomach. I remember thinking, She waited all this time to grant two commutations?

My mind went immediately to the men who have been waiting far longer than I have. Men whose clemency applications date back to the Cuomo era. Men who talk about relief in physical terms, not political ones. Better knees. Fewer stairs. Less pain. A chance to live with whatever time their bodies still allow.

I watched my comrade’s smile fade as the meaning caught up with the headline. In prison, hope rarely disappears all at once. It thins. It adjusts. And sometimes, it hurts just to watch it happen.

Watching that happen forced me to confront a question I had long been avoiding: whether I should even try to enter the clemency process myself.

I am not in the clemency process myself. Not yet. I am still trying to find representation. That is not a strategic preference so much as a conclusion drawn from watching this system up close. In more than eleven years of incarceration, I cannot recall a single person who received clemency without a lawyer or an advocacy organization filing on their behalf.

That reality shapes how I think about whether to step forward at all. Clemency may be described as accessible, but in practice it is navigated through legal counsel, institutional relationships, and resources most incarcerated people simply do not have. Change and remorse alone are not enough. Someone still has to translate that change into a form the system is willing to recognize.

This is where hesitation enters. Not doubt about whether I have earned reconsideration, but uncertainty about whether entering the process without representation would amount to little more than waiting in place. I have seen what that kind of waiting does. I have watched hope become something men learn to ration. I have watched expectations turn into liabilities when there is no timeline and no explanation.

This moment did not land only on the people whose applications are pending. It landed on those of us watching from the edge, trying to decide whether to follow. It raises questions I do not say out loud. Should I invest the time and emotional energy required to apply? Should I ask my family to write letters, to reopen the most painful parts of my past, knowing that without representation those letters may never move the needle?

There is a particular weight in asking other people to hope on your behalf. Not because they would refuse, but because they would give everything they have. I am not sure what it would mean to watch them do that while my application sits, marked “under review,” with no sense of when or whether anyone will decide my fate.

What troubles me most is not that clemency is rare. It is that it is unpredictable in a way that subtly wears people down. Promises are made in broad language: “rolling reviews,” “cases under consideration.” But from the inside, what that looks like is stasis. Files that do not move. Timelines that do not exist. People left to interpret silence as part of the process.

Clemency is often described as mercy, but mercy that cannot be anticipated or understood becomes something else. It becomes a test of endurance. We are told to show growth, accountability, and rehabilitation, and many do. We complete programs. We mentor others. We stay infraction-free for years. And still, there is no clear sense of what, if anything, that work leads to.

The result is not outrage. It is attrition. Hope does not disappear all at once. It fades with time. It becomes conditional. Over time, the message becomes internalized: change may be real, but it may never be recognized.

I do not write this to demand an outcome. I write it to name what this system does to people, including those of us still deciding whether to enter it. Uncertainty of this magnitude is not incidental. It shapes lives.

For now, I remain here, watching, weighing, and carrying the uncertainty alongside the men around me, trying to decide whether faith in this process is a risk worth taking, or a

hope best handled with caution.

In the early morning hours of March 10, 2003, after a party that stretched late into the night at his apartment in Escambia County, Florida, a groggy and hungover 20-year-old named Ryan Holle lent his Chevrolet Metro to a friend. Holle had done it before, without incident. He went to bed expecting the night to end like any other.

While he slept, his car was used to drive several men to a home in Pensacola where a burglary occurred. During the break-in, an 18-year-old girl, Jessica Snyder, was beaten to death with a shotgun.

Holle was not there when the crime occurred.

When prosecutors charged him the following year, in 2004, that small but decisive fact barely entered the equation, as is often the case under felony murder laws.

Under Florida’s felony murder rule, Holle was accused not of lending a friend his car, but of first-degree murder. The prosecution’s theory was blunt: without the car, the crime would not have happened; without the crime, no one would have died. “No car, no crime,” the prosecutor told the jury. “No car, no murder.”

After a trial that lasted just one day, Holle was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He had no prior criminal record. He was 20 years old.

In December 2007, The New York Times published a front-page story describing Holle as a man “serving life for providing a car to killers.” By then, he had already spent nearly four years behind bars. His case began circulating in legal scholarship and court opinions as a stark illustration of a doctrine most Americans had never heard of: felony murder.

Felony murder allows prosecutors to charge someone with murder if a death occurs during the commission of certain felonies, even if that person did not kill anyone, did not intend for anyone to die, or—as in Holle’s case—was not even present at the scene of the crime.

Holle remained incarcerated for more than a decade. In January 2018, after serving over 15 years, his sentence was commuted by Florida Governor Rick Scott, and he was released.

His conviction was never overturned. The law that put him in prison remained unchanged.

Holle’s case is often described as extreme, even aberrational. It is neither.

In New York, felony murder remains firmly embedded in the penal code, carrying sentences of 25 years to life. The doctrine has been upheld repeatedly by the state’s highest courts for decades, including in cases where the connection between a defendant’s conduct and a death is indirect, delayed, or unforeseeable.

In 1986, New York’s appellate courts affirmed the felony murder conviction of William Ingram, who broke into a home and was confronted by the armed homeowner. The homeowner restrained Ingram and called police. Only after police arrived did the homeowner suffer a fatal heart attack. The intruder did not kill him. The crime had effectively ended. Still, the court ruled that the death was legally attributable to the burglary.

In 1994, New York’s highest court upheld the conviction of Eddie Matos, who committed a robbery and fled across rooftops to escape police. During the chase, an officer fell 25 feet down an air shaft and died. Matos never touched the officer. The fall was fatal anyway. The court held that the death occurred “in furtherance” of the felony.

These cases rarely register in public consciousness. They do not resemble the popular image of murder trials, with clear villains and deliberate violence. But they are not anomalies.

Across the country, similar cases appear again and again. In Missouri, courts upheld a felony murder conviction in 1989 after a driver in a stolen car accidentally struck and killed a toddler who ran into the street. In Georgia, a 15-year-old was convicted of felony murder in 2002 after a schoolyard punch resulted in a fatal brain hemorrhage. In California, courts affirmed felony murder convictions as early as 1969 when victims suffered fatal heart attacks following robberies, even when no physical violence was used.

Taken together, these cases reveal the doctrine’s reach. Lending a car. Running from police. Being present during a crime. Acting as a lookout. Sharing drugs. Under felony murder, these actions can carry the same legal weight as committing the killing itself.

Supporters of the doctrine argue that it promotes accountability and deters dangerous behavior. Prosecutors and victims’ rights advocates contend that anyone who participates in a felony assumes the risk that someone might die.

But the evidence that felony murder deters violence is thin. A University of Chicago Law School study analyzing FBI crime data from 1970 to 1998 found no consistent reduction in deaths associated with the presence of felony murder laws. In some categories, deaths increased. More broadly, decades of criminological research have shown that sentence severity has little deterrent effect, particularly when the law itself is obscure.

A rule cannot deter behavior people do not know exists.

What felony murder does reliably produce is leverage. Because the sentencing exposure is so extreme, prosecutors gain enormous power in plea negotiations. Defendants are often forced to choose between accepting decades in prison or risking life sentences at trial, even when their role in the crime was limited. For people with no criminal history and faith that the system will distinguish between levels of responsibility, that choice can be devastating.

The doctrine also falls disproportionately on marginalized communities. Data from multiple states show that felony murder convictions affect young people and people of color at especially high rates. Many were teenagers or in their early twenties at the time of the offense. Many age out of crime long before they are ever eligible for release.

Other countries confronted these realities decades ago. England abolished felony murder in 1957. Canada eliminated accomplice felony murder liability in 1990, ruling that punishment must be proportionate to individual moral blameworthiness. Most modern democracies reject the idea that one person should be imprisoned for life based on another’s actions.

The United States has not followed suit.

Ryan Holle eventually walked free. Thousands of others may never get that opportunity. In New York alone, people convicted under the felony murder doctrine continue to serve life sentences for deaths they did not cause, under a law that remains largely unchanged since the height of the tough-on-crime era.

Holle’s release does not demonstrate that the system works. It demonstrates how much damage can be done before discretion intervenes—and how arbitrary relief can be once it does.

For those raised to believe that justice must be harsh to be effective, felony murder poses an uncomfortable question: if punishment is supposed to reflect individual responsibility, what does it mean when the law no longer cares what you actually did?

In New York, and across much of the country, the answer remains written in decades-long sentences imposed on people whose proximity to tragedy was enough to make them murderers in the eyes of the law.

Whether that reflects justice—or merely endurance—is a question the system continues to avoid.

(This is not one of my usual essays. It felt like something that needed to be written plainly, without structure, because anything more formal would have missed what the moment was asking of me.)

When I got on the phone earlier, my wife read me an email that had come through my account. One of my subscribers had pledged eighty dollars to support my newsletter. I did not say anything at first. I felt the moment settle in my chest before words could reach my mouth. My first thought was disbelief. Someone was willing to pay to read my words. Not out of obligation. Not out of pity. But because something I wrote mattered enough that they wanted to keep reading.

That realization stayed with me longer than I expected. Writing has always been my way of marking time, of leaving proof that I still exist, still thinking, still reaching outward from a place designed to shrink people like me. But this was different. This was not simply my words being read and passed along. This was someone saying, I want more of this, and I am willing to invest in it. And in that choice, they reflected something back to me that I have not always allowed myself to see.

If I am honest, it stirred something in me that has been absent for a long time. Pride, yes, but deeper than that, a sense of purpose I thought I had trained myself to live without. It reminded me that my voice still travels beyond these walls, that my words do not dissolve the moment they leave my hands.

For many people on the outside, a gesture like this might seem small, maybe even ordinary. For me, it felt enormous. It felt like a breach in the quiet, like a hand reaching back through the distance to say, I hear you.

It also left me sitting with a question I have not yet answered. What does it mean to make this work paid? Would it change the relationship I have with the people who read my work? Would it change the way I approach the page, the risks I take, the truths I allow myself to tell? Writing has been one of the few spaces where I do not feel reduced to metrics or outcomes. I do not want to lose that. I do not want my honesty to feel negotiated, or contingent on anything other than what comes from my heart.

So I am still sitting with it. I am letting the question breathe. What I do know is this: moments like this matter to me more than I can easily explain. They remind me that I am not writing into an abyss. They remind me that what I offer lands somewhere real, with someone who is paying attention, someone who sees me not as a number or a circumstance, but as a voice worth listening to.

To my subscriber, you know who you are. I just want you to know how much I appreciate your support and the reassurance that I am seen. That is all I want in my writing.

(Note: This essay contains discussion of suicide and suicidal ideation. Reader discretion is advised. Support resources are available through the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (988) in the U.S. and through local services internationally.)

I was nineteen years old when I first reached a point where I could no longer imagine a future that did not feel intolerable. At the time, I did not think of what I was experiencing as a crisis so much as a narrowing, a gradual closing of options that left me unable to picture relief in any form that did not involve disappearance. I did not want to die, though I would not have known how to make that distinction then. What I wanted was for the pain to stop, and by that point it had begun to feel permanent.

In the months leading up to that moment, several parts of my life were coming undone at once. I had recently ended a long relationship with my high school sweetheart, a relationship that had carried me through adolescence and into early adulthood and had shaped my sense of who I was allowed to be. When it ended, it did not simply leave a space; it destabilized the structure of my days. Around the same time, I stopped taking psychiatric medication, not out of clarity or rebellion, but because I no longer trusted my ability to tell whether it was helping or merely keeping me functional. I told myself I was managing. I was not. I was slipping deeper into addiction and growing increasingly estranged from my own interior life.

I was unhappy in ways that resisted language. Unhappy with where I was living, with the instability of my days, with the relationships I was moving through without conviction or care. More than that, I was unhappy with myself, with the sense that I was becoming someone I did not recognize and did not know how to stop becoming. One night, sitting outside a friend’s house, aware that something in me was failing, I thought—without urgency or drama—that I could not continue like this. I did not imagine death as an ending. I imagined it as quiet.

I attempted suicide that night.

Three days later, I was arrested.

There was no space between those events in which the attempt could be understood as something that required care or interpretation. Whatever I had been living through was almost immediately overtaken by something larger and more consuming. I was processed. I was incarcerated. I was absorbed into a system that had no use for distinctions between despair, exhaustion, and intent. The question was no longer how I had arrived at that moment, but whether I could endure what came next.

Incarceration does not make room for fragility. It translates vulnerability into liability and teaches you, quickly, that whatever cannot be concealed will eventually be used against you. From the earliest days of confinement, I learned how to hold myself together in ways that were legible to the environment I had entered. I learned how to function, how to appear unaffected, how to move through days without asking questions that could not be answered safely. Silence became a form of competence. Composure passed for strength.

For years, this was something I did not speak about, not with my family and not, in any sustained way, with myself. With them, I behaved as though that night belonged to another life, telling myself that silence was a form of protection rather than avoidance, and that there was no appropriate moment—especially given the circumstances of my incarceration—to raise something so unresolved without causing harm. Over time, that silence became less a decision than a shared arrangement, unspoken and mutually maintained, until it settled into the background of our relationship and remained there for more than a decade.

Silence, however, does not erase experience. It postpones it. What I mistook for resolution was, in fact, containment. In prison, this strategy was not only common but necessary. Vulnerability carried risk, and introspection could make you visible in the wrong ways. Endurance acquired authority. Over time, the ability to function was mistaken for health, and the absence of crisis was taken as proof that nothing remained unresolved.

What changed was not a revelation, but a gradual shift in how I related to my own interior life. With time and distance, the silence that had once felt protective began to feel heavy. I found myself returning to that night not with despair or urgency, but with questions I had never allowed myself to ask—about the state of mind I was in, the feelings I could not articulate, and the decision I made when relief no longer seemed possible in any other form.

This return was not driven by a desire for attention or absolution. It arrived quietly, as the recognition that carrying something unexamined for so long had begun to require more effort than naming it. I was not interested in reliving the pain, nor in extracting meaning from it after the fact. What I wanted was understanding—not as redemption, but as release. Not the kind that promises closure, but the kind that loosens what has remained tightly bound.

One of the more difficult realizations has been accepting that the silence was not imposed on me alone. I participated in it. I learned how to protect the people I loved by not bringing my unresolved interior life into our conversations, and how to protect myself by not asking questions I could not answer. That strategy served me. It helped me survive. But survival strategies are not the same as understanding, and eventually they demand their own accounting.

I am wary of romanticizing this process. There is nothing noble about enduring pain without language, and nothing admirable about postponing reckoning simply because circumstances make it unsafe or inconvenient. What I am describing is not resilience in the celebratory sense. It is an acknowledgment that certain forms of survival come with deferred costs.

Writing about this now does not feel like reopening a wound. It feels like acknowledging that the wound was never properly tended in the first place. I no longer believe that silence is neutral, or that composure is synonymous with health. I no longer believe that surviving without understanding is the same as having moved on.

I am still here. That fact alone does not redeem anything, and I do not ask it to. What it does do is obligate me to be honest about how survival works when it unfolds under conditions that discourage reflection and reward restraint. For a long time, I believed that not speaking about that night meant it had lost its power over me. I see now that silence was not absence, but storage.

Trying to understand what led me there, and what followed, is not an attempt to rewrite the past or justify the present. It is a way of setting down a weight I have carried quietly for most of my adult life. The pain did not stop that night. But neither did I. Learning to hold both of those truths at once, without turning either into spectacle, is the most honest work I can do now.

Early one morning in November, my friend Jack was taken out of the facility in restraints after collapsing with abdominal pain so severe he could barely stand. Jack is sixty-three years old, an old timer by prison standards, and someone whose body has started to slow in ways this place doesn’t make room for. By the time he arrived at a hospital in Ellenville, he was rushed into surgery before anyone explained what was happening to him.

When he woke up, part of his liver was gone. It was only then that he was told he had stage four cancer. The doctor didn’t stay long. There wasn’t much explanation of what had been done or what the diagnosis meant for whatever time Jack might have left. If he wanted to know more, he was told, he should ask the doctor back at his facility. Before Jack was transported back to prison, an officer guarding his hospital room mentioned something else, almost offhand. Jack might want to look into compassionate release.

When he got back, Jack told the story the way men in here usually do, plainly and without drama. But the worry was there. I’ve known Jack since 2017, when we were both housed at Clinton Correctional Facility, and I had never seen him like that. He’s spent most of his adult life moving in and out of New York prisons, caught in an addiction that followed him for decades and led him to burglaries and attempted robberies to support it. He’s never been charged with physically hurting anyone, but under New York law, his record is considered violent.

Jack is serving a sentence of sixteen years to life as a persistent violent felony offender. He’s also living with advanced cancer in a system where the thing meant to account for moments like this exists mostly on paper.

New York allows for compassionate release for people who are terminally ill, permanently incapacitated, or elderly, when continuing to incarcerate them no longer makes sense. In theory, it’s supposed to be a recognition that punishment has limits. In practice, it’s something most people in here talk about quietly, if at all, because so few have seen it work.

Applying for compassionate release means navigating medical evaluations, administrative reviews, and parole determinations that can take months. You have to prove you’re sick enough, but not just that. You also have to show you have somewhere to go and care waiting for you. And unlike other parts of the legal process, no lawyer is appointed to help you do any of this.

Jack doesn’t have family on the outside. He doesn’t have money. He doesn’t have an attorney. His diagnosis didn’t change any of that. It just made those absences matter more.

Jack lives in my dorm, three cubicles to the left of me. I see him every day. Sometimes I walk over and check on him, nothing formal, just to make sure he’s okay. That’s normal in here. We keep an eye on each other because no one else really can. Some days he says he’s fine. Some days he doesn’t say much at all. Either way, the routine doesn’t change. Count still comes. Meals still get served. The place keeps moving.

I’ve been lucky. I haven’t had any major health problems while I’ve been incarcerated. My body has held up. But watching Jack move more slowly now, watching him come back from medical trips with more questions than answers, I can’t help but think about how thin that line is. None of us plan on getting sick in here. And once you do, there’s no way to speed the system up to match what your body is doing.

People inside talk about compassionate release with a kind of cautious disbelief. You hear about men who were told their prognosis wasn’t certain enough, or that something they did decades ago still mattered more than the condition they’re in now. You hear about people who died waiting. You also hear about people who never applied because they didn’t think it would matter.

Nothing about prison has changed since Jack got sick. The rules don’t bend. Pain doesn’t interrupt policy. Jack adjusts himself to the institution, not the other way around.

New York’s prison population is getting older. Older people are more expensive to incarcerate, mostly because of medical care, and many will spend their final years here. Still, release decisions stay tied to static versions of the past, even as bodies break down and risk fades. For people labeled violent, that label tends to follow them right up to the end.

Jack’s crimes are decades old. His last serious disciplinary issue is even further behind him. What’s in front of him now is cancer, and a process that moves slowly enough to make time itself the deciding factor.

In here, friendship often stands in for family. We notice when someone stops coming to chow, when their hands shake, when they start needing help they didn’t need before. We also learn how little power we have to do anything beyond noticing. Compassionate release, like appeals, parole packets, and clemency applications, almost always depends on legal help. Without it, even strong cases can stall.

Jack is still alive. He’s still waiting. His illness doesn’t care about paperwork or procedure. Watching him, I keep coming back to the same thought, one I can’t really set down.

What if this were me?

I don’t ask that as a hypothetical. I ask it as someone living under the same rules, sleeping three cubicles away, knowing that the difference between who gets mercy and who doesn’t can come down to timing, health, and whether anyone on the outside is there to help.

(If you have any thoughts, experience, or suggestions about what might be done in a situation like this, I’m listening. I’m writing from inside, with limited options, but not without hope. Sometimes help begins with someone knowing something you don’t. Thank you for taking the time to read, and for holding this with me.)

(Note: This isn’t how I usually write. Today is my twelfth Christmas in prison, and the emotions came all at once in a way I couldn’t sort through or explain cleanly. Writing this piece felt like the only honest way to sit with what I was carrying and let it out as it came.)

I woke up and looked through the plexiglass window,

dirty from years of fingerprints and breath,

steel bars slicing the morning into narrow pieces,

searching for a sign

that today was Christmas.

Lights.

Snow.

Even a hint of peace.

But there was nothing.

Just the same sky that rarely commits to anything,

the same gray that refuses to mark time.

Behind me, the dorm woke up the way it always does.

The C.O.’s radio crackled through static,

voices breaking in and out like authority unsure of itself,

and men gathered around the television in the dayroom,

talking loud enough to keep the day from settling in.

Christmas didn’t come through the window.

It stood beside my bunk instead.

I hadn’t heard it arrive,

which felt right.

“Are you lost?” I asked,

because nothing about this place

suggests celebration.

Christmas looked around the dorm,

at the rows of beds,

at the men pretending today was ordinary,

and said,

“I’ve been born in places like this before.”

I asked where the music was,

where the warmth went,

why it didn’t announce itself

the way it does everywhere else.

“In here,” it said,

“I don’t arrive with noise.

I arrive as memories”

That’s when the past stepped forward.

A kitchen that didn’t feel temporary.

A table that invited me to sit down.

My name spoken without a number following it.

The room tightened.

Not physically,

but with a sort of intention.

“Careful,” Christmas said.

“Memories keep you alive,

but asks for a lot in return.”

I told it the truth.

That remembering is the only thing

getting me through today,

and that some days it costs more

then I could afford to pay.

Christmas nodded,

like it already knew.

“This day is hard,” it said,

“because it asks you to hold

what you can’t return to

without trying to live inside it.”

I looked around at the dorm.

Some men were sleeping through the morning,

as if unconsciousness might protect them.

Some were laughing loudly,

as if volume could keep the day away.

Others stared straight ahead,

holding themselves together without comment.

“They’re fighting too,” Christmas said quietly.

I asked what I was supposed to do

with all this remembering

when there’s nowhere for it to go.

“Don’t use it to escape,” it said.

“Use it to remind yourself

you were someone before this.”

The count bell rang.

Christmas stepped back.

Before it left, I asked

if this day ever gets easier.

“No,” it said.

“But you learn how to stand

without running from it.”

Then it was gone.

The radio kept crackling.

The television stayed loud.

The window stayed empty.

I stood there anyway,

not looking for signs this time,

letting the day move through me

without ceremony.

Christmas in here;

it doesn’t arrive to comfort;

It arrives to test what still remains.

And today,

I hold on.