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Prison is pleasant? Most of us, I think would respond to this with three simple letters: "W," "T," and "F." But the man makes a couple of points. Firstly, we only grow from challenges. Secondly, personal growth is pleasurable.

De la Noue wrote at the dawn of the 17th century. A millennium before that, the Greek Stoics developed the practice of hormesis. In the modern, scientific use of that term, hormesis describes an organism's apparent benefit from regular exposure to small doses of a toxin. (Medieval parables and 1970s kung-fu movies often depict someone who just drank poison but laughs maniacally because they've been microdosing hemlock for a decade. The poisoned cup has no effect! Hormesis in action!) But the word's original, Stoic sense is the one De la Noue's poem refers to.

Workouts, prayer, meditation, even taking the Ice Bucket Challenge. These are all examples of hormesis at work—activities without instant pleasure payoffs, which contribute to our general happiness. Psychologists and neuroscientists have researched the effects that these not-fun activities have on us. They've come away convinced: we achieve the deepest, longest-lasting happiness from overcoming challenges.

There's more to it, of course. Trauma is real, and some challenges, once overcome, resist the post-traumatic growth that defines hormetic principles. In plain English, we shouldn't go around subjecting ourselves to awful shit, expecting to bliss out. It doesn't work that way. But building a personal habit like, say, waking up 5 minutes earlier to add a stretching routine to our mornings, would be a great example of hormesis.

Prison challenges the hardiest souls. It especially challenged me in the early days. Kept apart from the people I love, restricted from doing the things I most enjoyed, and exposed to violence I never knew before, I experienced my first four years in prison as emotional torture.

I'm still locked up today, yet in many ways I'm thriving. What changed?

There's a long history of people who kept themselves together while surviving horrific ordeals. The Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl and onetime prisoner of war James Stockdale spring immediately to mind.

Frankl and Stockdale each found that having a sense of autonomy, of meaningful agency, was critical to keeping yourself together in the midst of suffering. For the psychologist Frankl, meaning came from helping his fellow prisoners fend off despair in the concentration camps while developing a new therapeutic model. For Stockdale, the naval officer shot down and locked in isolation, meaning came from carrying out his own routine and practices despite the cramped solitude. Both men survived to tell about the importance of creating meaning amid the nightmare.

After a few years in prison, I started submitting my writing for publication. A cellmate suggested that it would be a good way to spread awareness of my case. I'd been journaling for years, but this was at another level. When I started seeing my name in magazine bylines and in contributor notes at the back of literary journals, I realized that my essays and poems had a place in the wider world. Through my writing, I won a measure of freedom. Its taste was as sweet as spring water to someone lost in the desert.

On its own, writing didn't save me. I also had to learn how to pry every little freedom out of my days. Defying the criminal norm was a source of obstinate pride and a way of exercising control. So were getting up early, making my bed, spending as little as necessary on canteen food, and staying true to my nerdy self. Any opportunity to rebel against prison's skewed social structure, I seized.

When you're quiet and respectful, honest and forthright in this environment, it speaks louder than the toughest blowhard on the block. People notice. They respect it. I've kept up my quiet rebellion, one good deed at a time, for years. And I love the person I've become as a result of it.

I tell people all the time that prison is the worst and best thing to happen to me. If I hadn't been falsely accused, wrongfully convicted, and unjustly imprisoned, I doubt I'd have been presented with a set of circumstances that, to paraphrase the poet John Berryman, is as bad as possible without actually killing me. (Berryman, too, placed a high value on ordeal. Maybe it's a poet thing.) The experience has taught me an easy confidence. I no longer struggle with depression or anxiety. I sleep through the night. I smile at strangers.

I make my own meaning in the midst of apparent meaninglessness. That's a skill I doubt anything but prison could've taught me.

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The episode that had the biggest impact—even greater than my Season 4 interview with a very candid deputy warden—was my 44-minute presentation on time management. You might not expect prisoners to be interested in that subject, but for more than a week after they watched it, people were approaching me on the yard to express their appreciation and share their personal takeaways.

When the lights came up on Real Talk's unobtrusively blue set, viewers saw me seated in the familiar tan armchair beside a bamboo plant. I began with a question: "We've probably all heard the saying 'Do your time, don't let your time do you.' But what does that really mean?"

I asked if they could list everything they had done that day, since rolling out of the bunk. Of course they couldn't. Almost no one can. Which, of course, was the point.

"When I first came down, I spent a lot of my days killing time, waiting for the next letter from my public defender or the next chance I had to make a phone call or the next day I got a visit. There were a lot of hours lost during those early years. What have I got to show for that time now?"

It was as much a provocation as what came next.

"Let me respectfully remind you. Life and death are of supreme importance. Time passes swiftly by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken! Take heed. Do not squander your life."

Real Talk was a secular program, but this Buddhist verse speaks to a visceral understanding that many people develop by virtue of becoming a prisoner—the helpless, gnaw-at-your-guts feeling of time getting away from you.

Maybe the verse speaks to you, too. Maybe your days fly by in a blur of borderline meaninglessness—waiting for other people, watching trash TV, or having conversations that go nowhere and teach nothing. Maybe you feel like opportunities are being lost, that you're squandering your life.

After giving some examples of the time-sucks that are distraction, context-switching, and misaligned priorities, I explained how they manifest. Procrastination and choice paralysis are the most common—maybe you know them.

Because the prison won't let prisoner-made video out into the world, I can't just share the episode with you. But here are the 10 time management tips that resonated most with my audience. Maybe they'll work for you, too.

1. Perform an energy audit over a period of 3 to 7 days, so you can see what points in the day you're naturally most alert and effective.

2. Remember that multitasking is the enemy of presence; do brief random centering exercises (e.g., breath meditations, body scans, or attentive pauses) throughout the day to bring yourself into the moment.

3. Create conscious intentions (e.g., "I'm going to do X for Y amount of time, and then transition and move on to doing Z.") before beginning any task.

4. Rank all of your priorities according to the Eisenhower Matrix.

   

   What fits in the first quadrant, top left, are crises, deadlines, and other time-sensitive problems. Do them now. The upper-right is for things to plan out and not rush. The bottom-left is for busy work. And the fourth quadrant is where we put our enjoyable distractions and wastes of time—stuff to eliminate or cut down on.

5. Optimize your mental resources by spending a maximum of 90 to 120 minutes at a stretch on "deep work." Longer than that risks burnout.

6. Transition between big time blocks with buffers—15- to 30-minute periods between major tasks. Use these for little, low-concentration tasks from your day's to-do list (or even a snack break).

7. Take 1- to 2-minute stretch breaks every half hour. Maybe use them to daydream or make a cup of coffee.

8. Practice anchoring with a ritual every time you finish a task. This could be as simple as taking 3 slow, deep breaths or saying, "Ahh, that's done" with every completion.

9. Build productivity momentum by adopting the 2-Minute Rule: if it takes less than 2 minutes, do it now.

10. Do daily checkups. Analyze what techniques worked that day and what techniques didn't. Don't give up on a technique just because it didn't yield immediate results. Figure out what isn't working and why, then adjust as necessary.

I concluded the episode the same way I'll end this post.

"Effective time management isn't about squeezing more into each day, it's about making space for what really matters. When we manage our time well, we're no just organizing a schedule, we're taking charge and designing our life. Time passes no matter how we use it. The question is: at the end of each day, will you have spent it or will you have invested it? 'Take heed, do not squander your life.'"

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The appeal of deuce mystifies me. Of course it does; other prisoners think I’m as square as square can be. Nevertheless, I know how easy it is for dealers to get their hands on the stuff—easier, anyway, than acquiring heroin or meth. And I dont have to be an economist to understand how convenience trumps quality nearly every time. As P.T. Barnum never said, there’s a sucker born every minute.

Being no choirboy, I’ve lost plenty of days (as well as more than a few nights) to substance use. I did some bad, bad things under the influence of some bad, bad drugs. Thankfully, they’re all but ancient history now. These days, I stay vigilant. I’m cautious even with my caffeine intake.

People are free to make their own decisions (to the extent that we can agree free will exists) with what they put in their bodies. I try not to judge. Instead, I generally stand in mute observation of my fellow human beings doing fallible human things. This includes smoking strips of chemical-laced paper.

The effects of deuce can include disorientation, paranoia, slurred speech, vomiting, temporary immobility, irregular heartbeat, seizure, stroke, kidney failure, and let’s not forget the big one: death. I assume it also produces some sort of euphoria, but the visual impression left by seeing someone in the midst of a deuce high should counter any theoretical allure.

My previous cellmate gave me an undesired glimpse into the deuceheads’ world by bringing it into our shared space. On the very day that I transferred back to this institution, I stepped out of our cell for a few minutes, then returned to him and a neighbor sucking a wisp of smoke off the end of an electrical cord they’d fashioned into a lighter. “Oh, sorry, cellie,” he said. “I thought you’d be gone longer.”

It was a simple mistake. It was also avoidable. If only he could stay away from the deuce.

After a couple of days of cohabitation, in a rare moment of sobriety, he made a confession. “I’m kinda jealous, for real, of how you jail,” he said. Translation: he envied that I defy the norm and walk a unabashedly nerdier path. That I’m only interested in belonging to myself. That I don’t try to impress anyone.

It’s ironic, many people find this way of life impressive.

We celled together for three days, which was more than long enough for me to realize that I don’t want to ever, ever live with a deucehead again. I’d seen versions of the fentanyl fold before, but never as severe as this guy’s intoxicated performances.

I’d be sitting, reading contentedly, when he’d take a hit off the end of his jury-rigged electrical cord and, within a minute or so, whether sitting down, standing up, or something in between, start nodding off. Not a little bob of his head, mind you, but full-body collapse, like time-lapse footage of a man’s abdominal muscles atrophying. Eventually he’d fold flat enough to pack into an IKEA box.

Sadly, this phenomenon isn’t limited to prisons. I hear tell of online video documenting the fentanyl fold in real time. I wonder about the intentions of whoever’s posting it. Is their tone one of mocking or of concern?

Because around here, I can tell you, there’s plenty of mockery, mostly from other users. When they see someone stuck at the top of the stairs, or in a slow-mo collapse in the middle of the wing, their reaction is often laughter. I suppose it crosses no one’s mind that the old man teetering on the topmost step and the kid sinking to the concrete floor are having a dangerous disruption of normal bodily function. I have actually seen a man carried from the housing unit on a backboard and later pronounced dead of an overdose, only to hear his envious fellow user say, “He got that good shit!”

The wing I just moved from ran thick with deucers. My first day there, I felt inexplicably nauseated, with a low-level headache that stuck with me until the morning after I moved out. Correlation doesn’t equal causation, but I’m naturally going to blame exposure to the multitude of deuce hits those people were taking throughout the day.

It’s that bad. Nationwide, we have deuce to blame for prisons curtailing contact visits, eliminating paper mail, stopping prisoners from receiving books, and various other depredations. These efforts have only dealt a glancing blow to the epidemic. The real problem, the inconvenient truth that no one wants to acknowledge, is that corrupt staff members, not families or anonymous Amazon warehouse employees, are the biggest source for dealers inside.

Until administrators face facts and take steps to address them in a meaningful way, the problem will endure, and those of us stuck in the system—sober or otherwise—will continue to suffer.

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Nearly two decades ago, I entered into a long-distance relationship. It began with a note on delicate stationery, which arrived smelling faintly like fresh blackberries—one sentence, signed with the initial "S." I sent a poem by way of reply. She responded in kind, and soon our letters spanned pages. Our phone calls became a nightly half-hour treat. She mailed me artwork. She mailed me magazine clippings. She mailed me photos of herself and her life four states away.

A few of the photos were risqué (as risqué as prison mail policy allowed, anyway). Her amateur boudoir pictures went into a manila envelope that I slipped in with my copious legal papers, where prying eyes were less apt to discover them.

There's a saying in prison that nothing's secret here. Even if no one sees or hears what you're trying to hide, the truth will eventually come out. In the 25 years I've been locked up, I can affirm the accuracy of this statement. Modern prisons don't have blind spots. Gossip runs rampant. Privacy becomes a distant memory.

During cell searches, bored guards are known to thumb through people's albums. The ones who eyeball mine are treated to more than the usual portraits and backyard barbecue snapshots. A lot of my loved ones are artists, musicians. The images they send range from self-portraits taken at cool angles to travel shots in Cuba, Australia, Germany, Indonesia, Thailand, Iceland, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Ecuador, Ghana, Peru. Following a trip, they'd sometimes pack a whole stack of prints into an envelope, which I'd flip through slowly, soaking in the proxy ambiance of faraway places.

Friends occasionally felt weird sending pics from their journeys, fretting that it seemed almost like flaunting their adventures to a man unable to leave his cage. But if it wasn't for them, I'd get my fix from the Travel Channel or from magazines in the prison library. Pictures are how I get around: in my mind.

The racy photos sent by S. were how I imagined our relationship into something more than a mere letter exchange and short nightly phone calls. The mind is our largest erogenous zone, and her photos became part of our sex life, a precious intimacy.

Our long-distance romance died a quiet, anxious death in September of 2009. Following a weekend trip out of state, she ghosted me. Two weeks of increasingly worried phone calls went unanswered. Then a guard handed me her breakup postcard at mail call. I'm sorry. I can’t, was all it said. I read and reread those four words. The card smelled as sweet as everything else she'd sent me.

I was heartbroken but clung to her letters and photos like I clung to hope that she'd come back into my life. However, as weeks became months, reality settled in.

Grief ran its course. I eventually tore up her correspondence. I peeled her photos out of my album and shredded them, too. Flush after flush, I risked clogging my cell's toilet with those little pieces of paper. The smell of blackberries spiraled away with them.

Those hidden photos comprising some of our most intimate exchanges, however, fell into an abyss of forgetfulness. Alongside old court filings and legal correspondence, they'd been stashed so well that even I didn't find them again—until I got this urge to pare down my property.

In the days before tablets, Missouri prisoners could receive up to 25 photos in an envelope. The canteen sells 10-page coil-bound albums that let you adhere prints to a sticky page overlaid with cellophane. Every resident's allowed one album, but a few people purchase two, then bind pages from one into the other so it holds twice as many pictures.

Taking the pictures of S. out of mine cleared precious space. It felt cathartic, like a physical representation of life's openness to possibility.

In July of 2022 the Department of Corrections stopped its residents from receiving postal mail. People can still send handwritten and typed letters, as well as photographs and printed images, but these go to a processing center in Tampa, Florida, which scans them and sends them in electronic form to our tablets. The originals are shredded after 45 days.

Keeping personal belongings to a minimum pays off in prison. You never know when the next surprise shakedown or unexpected cell move might throw everything into disarray. Having your photos saved on a password-protected device removes the anxiety about careless searches and nosy or malicious cellmates.

On the other hand, our tablets are provided through a contract between the state and Securus Technologies, a for-profit prison telecommunications company. Precariousness is baked right into the user agreement that almost no one reads:

We reserve the right to modify, suspend, or discontinue the Unity Product and the other Securus services, or any part thereof, at any time and without notice (except as required by applicable law). We are not liable to you if we exercise such rights, even if your ability to use Content is impacted by the change.

If Securus ever loses its contract with Missouri or the company makes changes to how it stores our data, thousands of incarcerated people will lose nearly a decade of their precious emails, videos, and photos.

There's an irony in this. People talk about the permanence of data in our networked world, how everything you do online leaves an indelible footprint and can be tracked, a trail of cookie crumbs disclosing the minutiae of your inner life like years of psychotherapy ever could. Yet for the prisoner it's the opposite.

Isolated, disenfranchised, and oftentimes forgotten, the person sent away to serve a prison sentence lives a life of deprivation and heightened impermanence. The most meager resources can be denied. Comforts are few and fleeting. What little we do have means much more than it otherwise might.

Photos remind us of the lives we left when we came to prison. They also show us the shape that others' lives take in our absence. To the imprisoned, connection with the outside world is the bittersweet air we breathe.

As sad as losing S. made me feel, having photographs of her to hold and smell throughout the span of our relationship brought us closer. And although I'm allergic to nostalgia, stumbling upon those secret pictures of her, almost two decades later, prompted me to reflect on memories I willfully tried to purge. Considering them, and how I've changed since then, connected me to my humanity in an unexpected way.

I didn't want anyone digging through the trash finding her photos, so I tore them to small pieces and flushed them down the toilet, the same as I had done with every other reminder of her. It didn't feel cathartic this time, only practical.

I wonder about the men and women coming to prison in this age of touchscreens and WiFi, who will almost certainly never experience the kind of accidental discovery that I made. Are those people protected or are they deprived? What long-term effects will transient digital photos have on their relationships, their memories?

My photo album's spine is starting to crack. My tablet shows no wear and tear. I wonder which will give out first.

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I ended up on the opposite side of Missouri, where I made a pretty good life, all things considered. But 8 years is too long to be this far from people I'm close with. Crossroads was an hour's drive north. My mother visited nearly every weekend. But she's made it to ERDCC only twice this year. A couple of friends drove down in May. That's it.

After deeply considering the hardship this trip represents for my loved ones, I made a difficult decision. I requested a transfer back to Crossroads.

So-called convenience transfers are a thing of the past. The Missouri Department of Corrections today considers requests only from prisoners who have lived in a good-conduct wing for at least 3 years and want to be closer to their families. Thankfully, I meet both criteria.

Crossroads was relatively new when I first came to prison. Its stark concrete yard glared painfully in the summertime, and over the years there was less and less to do there. By the time I left, there were no clubs, no formal educational or enrichment opportunities, and what programs they offered were insultingly remedial. The guards were stern, the rules excessive. The warden was equal parts tyrannical and incompetent.

Reliable, up-to-date information is scarce, but I hear the place has changed. Someone who transfered 3 years ago says Crossroads now lets residents order art supplies, make purchases from food trucks at special events, and attend outdoor movie nights in the summer. Seeing my mother again is more important, but perks like these might be nice.

Transfers always happen on Tuesdays. They don't tell you when you're going, because they don't want anyone informing an outside party and plotting some elaborate action-movie operation. Some guard will just come knock on my door at 4:30 in the morning. "Case," they'll say when I sit (as I certainly will) bolt upright, "pack your property. You're transferring."

Within a couple of hours, I'll be on a clattery, crowded bus, shackled and in belly chains, en route to the transfer hub in Jefferson City. And from there, back to Cameron. If I'm lucky, the second leg of my trip will be a quieter, cushier ride in a Crown Vic, with a pair of guards who let me take in the scenery.

My bosses asked me, when I broke the news, "What are you going to do there?" Without knowing quite what awaits me, how could I satisfactorily answer?

They offered to write a letter of recommendation. I also requested one from my previous boss, the recreation director, whose praise was generous. As a rule, DOC employees treat the appearance of overfamiliarity like a level-4 biohazard, so I appreciate these people sticking their necks out for me. It just illustrates the positive impression I've made here.

Which is all well and good, but I'm of two minds about leaving.

My usual attitude is to rip the Band-Aid off. I'm also a bad-news-first kind of guy. The sooner we can put the unpleasantness behind us, the sooner we can begin recovering. So of course I want to get this move over with and start reestablishing myself.

And yet there are people I like spending time with, privileges I wouldn't mind enjoying for a few more weeks, tabletop games I'd like to play a few more times, books on those Freedom Library shelves that I still want to read, a longtime cellmate whose routine fits almost seamlessly with mine.

Whether I'm told to pack my things next Tuesday or the Tuesday after that is out of my hands. The extent of my proactivity was to compile a community-betterment file—a pack of information about good stuff I did at ERDCC.

The folder contains: the curricula I developed for my computer literacy and public speaking workshops; my 2nd Opp facilitator certification; a flyer and contact information for Freedom Reads; a list of components and prices for assembling a five-channel in-house broadcast center, like the two I helped build for other prisons; and other resources for bringing these things to Crossroads.

I'll propose each and accept whatever verdict comes. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I just know that if Crossroads is still the glaringly barren assemblage of concrete that it was when I left, then any suggestions the administration takes will make it a better place than when I arrived, all those years ago. And if they're denied or ignored, at least I'll have hugs from my mother.

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Just like everywhere else, people in prion exist on a spectrum that runs from couch potatoes to fitness nuts. I can tell you that the lazy are legion. For every guy pumping iron in the gym, there are at least three eating Little Debbie snack cakes on their bunks, entering their day's second hour of watching Below Deck.

I started exercising on Day One, and almost as quickly stopped. My cellmate, a rough-and-tumble country boy, invited me to acompany him and his buddies to the gym. It was a kind gesture, but they were just throwing weight around and shooting the proverbial shit. Plus, I've never vibed with white supremacists. So the arrangement lasted a couple of days. He was soon moved to another housing unit, and I went back to reading A Brief History of Time.

I'm no Below Deck or Zebra Cakes enthusiast, I just detested most physical exertion that wasn't in pursuit of material aims. Sports don't interest me, I find combat unappealing, and an old injury keeps me from most forms of aerobic exercise. Unless I was doing mechanical repairs on a car or building a house, I thought, why exert myself?

A decade later, someone loaned me a fitness book, intimidatingly titled Convict Conditioning, that offered a fitness regimen I not only tolerated but actually enjoyed. Handstand pushups? Pistol squats? Some of the exercises illustrated looked like circus tricks. That measure of exotic allure made me fall in love with bodyweight workouts.

Needing no special equipment, I could do the exercises in my prison cell. (Hence the name Convict Conditioning.) The book provided a step-by-step plan, starting from the assumption that the reader had never worked out before. I hadn't exercised in so long, that might as well have been true.

Transferring to another facility, I became a novelty as the new guy who was always out on B-Yard doing one-armed pullups. (It's less cool than it sounds; I only weighed 156 pounds.) A handful of people called me "Superman," which was fun.

But let's be clear: I'm no musclehead. In the gym, where I exercise alone, I steer clear of the squat rack and only use the bench press about once a month. Also, I work out two, maybe three times a week.

The guys wide-as-a-doorframe power lifters who lack full-range neck motion can be found milling around the Smith machines during recreation periods. Grimacing to make their forehead veins protrude beyond the next guy's, they regard weightlifting as a job. Most of them, however, seem to forget leg days. If you watch them pace between sets, you'll see them tottering on legs like itty-bitty stilts. If you need a smile, looking at them always does the trick for me.

There's also CrossFit, which exists here, as I assume it does outside of prison, as a small, dedicated (not to say cultish) subculture. You'll see its members—lean, drenched in sweat, and looking furious—doing burpees and alligator crawls all summer across the softball outfield. Quarterly competitions here feature the same handful of guys every time, in tight rotation for first-place wins.

The CrossFit challenges might be more interesting for spectators if the prison furnished them with tractor tires, battle ropes, glockenspiels, or whatever CrossFit athletes normally use. But good for them, having such an exclusive club.

Only about 10% of the people in my housing unit do CrossFit or use the gym's weight room on a regular basis. This might strike you as unusual. The fact is, Missouri facilities don't experience the same brutality as, say, Florida prisons. Inmates here feel less pressure to build powerful, intimidating physiques, because living within the Missouri Department of Corrections presents fewer threats to personal safety than doing time elsewhere.

People I see on the yard or in the gym seem to prefer playing basketball, handball, softball, even badminton and Pickleball. My own workouts feel more like being on the jungle gym at recess. Throughout the facility, playtime and teamwork tend to win over brute physicality or athleticism for athleticism's sake. Which should inspire in everyone at least a tiny bit of hope.

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"Why do you ask?" I wanted to know.

His question seemed ridiculous. A professor I was most assuredly not. My last experience with formal education had been as a highschool freshman. I dropped out at fifteen, earned my GED that fall, and never looked back.

"You've got all those folders in your footlocker: 'Manuscripts,' 'Submissions,' 'Poetry.' You don't normally see stuff like that in here. Not that organized, especially."

Tidiest cell in the wing; that's how I roll. As for the contents of those neatly labeled file folders, they're the byproduct of transforming life without parole into a life of letters. I write, and my writing gets published. The process leaves a paper trail.

It's actually an old story. I loved learning, but it wasn't classwork that bedeviled me, it was socializing. A "gifted" child, a "precocious" youth, a "brilliant" young man—I'd received all the labels that spell either destiny or doom for the prodigy saddled with them. Later came "weirdo," "freak," and "pariah," which were almost better for their honesty.

It was my fault, really, for being unapologetically odd in an intolerant world. I stood too stiffly and walked too fast. I spoke like an adult. I missed people's subtle and not-so-subtle cues. I made unseemly observations that no one else dared make. Eventually I took up smoking. And like my cigarettes, I was extra toxic for lacking a filter. Ironic, then, that mine was the mouth with the bad taste left in it.

I laughed off the guard's request (at least half serious) for academic advice and went back to my typewriter. In the cell, he'd left almost no trace of a search, for which I was grateful, but his question stuck with me.

Years before, when I came down, another prisoner, Jon Marc Taylor, told me how he earned a PhD from his prison cell. Marc led a personal crusade to get Pell Grants reinstated for prisoners. His papers and articles advocating Pell Grants' value for society were widely published in law journals and glossy magazines like Forbes.

Until very recently in my sentence, prison education was practically nonexistent. GED classes were available only to people who were close to release. And forget about college. The only way you were getting into higher education was if you leapt through the prison's bureaucratic hoops, then paid though the nose for correspondence classes.

Marc explained to me that Pell Grants for prisoners were eliminated by the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill. But, he said, serious learners still had a few options available. He encouraged me to write to private schools and make my case for a scholarship. "A smart guy like you has so much potential," he insisted.

Spoiler alert. I didn't write any letters. The bad taste was still there.

Marc died of a heart attack in prison some years ago. I think he'd have been encouraged to see the freshly resuscitated field of prison academia. The Second Chance Pell Grant Program expanded in 2020, after a successful four-year pilot initiated by President Obama. At last count, at least 130 colleges and universities now offer higher education programs to the incarcerated.

A study by RAND Corporation found that participants in prison education programs were 43% less likely to return to prison. We might quibble over how that figure breaks down, but no sane person would claim that education isn't valuable—to society and to the people in it.

The incarcerated students I'm acquainted with stand apart from the prison's general population. They tend to be more serious, more community-minded, more intrinsically motivated. Most of them talk about matters beyond gossip and what's on the trays at lunch—they have conversations. These differences seem learned, not constitutional; not inborn but instilled.

In or out of prison, how could anyone not support a program that delivers change on that level?

Still I scoffed at formal education for myself. Until I saw the flyer last week for a bachelor's degree in business from Central Methodist University. I'm not by nature a "business guy." If I'm any type at all, I'd consider myself a creative. So what the hell possessed me to apply?

In something of a perverted way, it was the seeming mismatch that interested me. We have a framed quote in one of the classrooms where I work. (If you said Missouri Reentry Centers were singlehandedly keeping Successories alive, I might believe you. We've got a lot.) I point it out to people often. It reads, "If it doesn't challenge you, it won't make you grow."

I do like a challenge. It keeps life interesting. After all, I know what I can do; do I know what I can't?

It could turn out that school, even at age 47, isn't for me. Which would be OK. All I'll have lost is a Pell Grant I'm unlikely to use otherwise. However, if CMU accepts me as a student and I move forward on this track toward a degree in business, I'll have proved myself wrong. I welcome the possibility.

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It's easy to be cynical about. We assume that most jailhouse conversions are insincere—and with good reason. The mantle of religion is a widely recognized (if widely ineffectual) "good-guy badge." For every earnest Malcolm X there are at least two charlatans belatedly donning the moral camouflage of religion.

Some shoot for the moon in their performance of faith. Hoping to bolster their image, they might carry a Bible around, attend every possible chapel service, loudly criticize others' devotion, or wear multiple religious necklaces at a time. (I've heard it said, "Anyone trying to look that good must've done something really bad.") Others do only the minimum necessary to achieve their manipulative goal. Either can be hard to watch.

It's not like we can see what's inside someone else's heart. Still, why believe someone's had a come-to-Jesus moment when they're lying, cheating, and stealing at every available opportunity? I see a lot of hypocrisy around the yard.

Motivations vary; jailhouse conversions aren't always about virtue signaling. There are multiple reasons that someone might convert overnight, or that a previously nonreligious person might suddenly profess a given faith.

A big one is protection, real or imagined. Certain religious groups look after "their own." They place a premium on loyalty and side with members of the group even when they know those members did wrong. Sound like a gang? Religion and gangbanging are not mutually exclusive. I would argue that gangs differ from religion mainly in their level of cultural acceptance.

Another reason to proclaim a faith is to eat less processed food. Religious Jews make up about .11% of America's prison population, and those who want to keep kosher have the option to do so. They're served special diets that, here in Missouri, include canned tuna and fresh spinach. (Far better than the meatloaf patty the rest of us have to eat.) Anyone can officially declare themselves Jewish and sign up for a Certified Religious Diet. To qualify for it, all they need to do is eat in the dining hall often and not buy any trayf (i.e., non-kosher) canteen products.

Probably the least likely reason a prisoner would declare themselves part of a particular religion would be to buy swag. The Missouri Department of Corrections allows Christians to buy crosses, Muslims to buy kufis, Catholics to buy rosaries, Buddhists to buy malas, and so on. If it's swag they're after, all they have to do is be part of the right group. Prisoners' catalog orders are processed four times a year.

Interestingly, people in prison for sex crimes are more apt to profess Christian beliefs than those locked away for property crimes or violent ones. Anecdotal evidence suggests that sex offenders constitute approximately half of the Christian service attendees at my facility. This number seems disproportionate. I doubt more than one fourth of people in the prison's population have sex cases. What explains Christianity's appeal to those convicted of sex offenses, you're free to speculate.

Of course, there are many who hold earnest religious feeling, irrespective of whether they developed it before or after their felony conviction. I know several people like this. They seem genuine in their faith, mostly because they talk little about their chosen religion and speak in understated terms when they do—the opposite of what someone seeking attention does.

Eighteen years into my own prison sentence, after much self-examination and protracted internal debate, I visited the chapel and filed paperwork to declare myself a practitioner of Buddhism. I'd been extremely hesitant to do so. Not only have I long held a distaste for religion, I didn't want to be contaminated by the stink of a jailhouse conversion.

After eight years of Buddhist practice, I've gotten good at not discussing it. Anytime I can address a topic through neutral, secular means, that's usually the direction I go. If someone's dead set on discussing religious matters I might drop my guard and cop to harboring Buddhist ideals—but only then. I don't want my spiritual practice questioned, my character sullied.

As long as religious freedom is Constitutionally guaranteed, prisoners will continue declaring themselves whatever they want to be (or believe they can fake). Their reasons for doing so are always going to be as varied as their reasons for coming to prison in the first place. Quarters may be tight, but we've got room enough.

Well, almost. My upstairs neighbor and his Christian rap have got to go.

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Dharma in Hell: The Prison Writings of Fleet Maull, by Fleet Maull

I truly hope that more and more prisoners will find opportunities for service in their world. Service doesn't have to be a big deal or project, it can come in all shapes and forms: hospice work, starting meditation groups, or even just simple kindness or learning how to deeply listen to another's pain. Wouldn't it be great to transform America's prisons so that they become a source—not for crime and violence—but for positive social change?

As someone in prison who drifted into Buddhist practice, I took an interest in Fleet Maull's personal evolution. During his 15 years behind bars for drug trafficking, beginning in the mid-'80s, Maull transformed from a student of Buddhism to a teacher, leading meditation groups and dharma talks with his fellow prisoners at MCFP Springfield, where he also started what became a national prison hospice network.

I've often marveled at the selfless compassion shown by hospice workers. My own limited emotional bandwidth has kept me from volunteering as such, even as I wonder sometimes whether or not my reason for opting out doesn't actually make the best possible reason for opting in. (I'm complex in my obstinacy.) Still, I haven't taken steps to become a hospice worker.

This collection of Maull's writings didn't wow me with profound observations or literary élan, it impressed with his deep, heartfelt humanity, what Buddhists call bodhicitta, commonly translated as "lovingkindness." Despite landing in one of the worst environments imaginable, he found peace and love. I'm always telling people that prison is the worst and the best thing to happened to me. I suspect Maull would understand what I mean.

The Fermata, by Nicholson Baker

I first stopped time because I liked my fourth-grade teacher, Miss Dobzhansky, and wanted to see her with fewer clothes on.

Arno Strine, the narrator of The Fermata, wields his astonishing, unexplained time-freezing power to undress unsuspecting women, surreptitiously watch their most intimate moments, plant sexually explicit material where he knows they'll find it, and in multiple, cringeworthy scenes, sexually assault them. All this in what the author defends as a literary exploration of power dynamics and human sexuality.

I'm no pearl-clutching naïf, but The Fermata offended me. It offended my aesthetic sensibilities, at a minimum. As I read its passages of Penthouse Letters–style dreck, navigating the awkwardness of Baker's countless ugly euphemisms for body parts and sex acts, I kept waiting to see how this seemingly capable writer would elevate his story and justify all the pornographic wallowing. He never did.

Baker published The Fermata in 1994, a period in America that we all recognize as one of shifting cultural values. But even given the "product-of-its-time" excuse, the actions of the book's antihero protagonist overshoot the boundaries of what defenders might call "guy stuff." Arno's activities are criminal, plain and simple. I kept thinking, couldn't Baker bring Arno to justice, or have the man show an iota of remorse for his actions? I held out hope for at least one of those outcomes every time I turned another of The Fermata's tedious 304 pages.

Arno Strine can stop time. Nicholson Baker apparently has the same ability, otherwise why would he have wasted his own and that of who knows how many readers, writing such crass, self-indulgent garbage?

The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead

The capacity to suffer. Elwood—all the Nickel boys—existed in the capacity. Breathed in it, ate in it, dreamed in it. That was their lives now. Otherwise they would have perished.

Happenstance doesn't get enough credit. Shakespeare knew a little something about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but too many people today are jaded and believe that every significant event has to have some grand propose behind it. Not every one-off is the result of conspiracy.

Colson Whitehead's gut-wrenching Nickel Boys acknowledges this and leans hard on dumb luck as a plot device. This is to his credit.

His fictional Nickel Academy is based on the real-life Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a reformatory that operated in Marianna, Florida, and whose horrors only came to light within the past fifteen years. Its survivors' website (searching "white house boys" should lead you there) presents firsthand accounts of the school's depredations, and Whitehead attributes by name several former residents whose personal stories helped him write The Nickel Boys.

How the book's protagonist, a black teen with college prospects in the Jim Crow South, ends up in the school, a victim of its horrors, shows that Whitehead understands a thing or two about bad shit happening, how it can come from seemingly nowhere, set upon you, and leave you bruised, bloodied, or worse.

The Nickel Boys swept me up in its harrowing narrative. Its principal characters, the idealistic Elwood Curtis and the canny Jack Turner, make the perfect foils for the school's barbaric ways—one seeking to overcome through diplomacy, the other just trying to survive until his release date. The depth of their friendship shapes the course of the book and leads to an astounding ending that satisfies, even in its cruelty.

The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje

[I]n the Villa San Girolamo, in the hill town north of Florence, in the arbor room that is his bedroom, he reposes like the sculpture of the dead knight in Ravenna. He speaks in fragments about oasis towns, the later Medicis, the prose style of Kipling, the woman who bit into his flesh. And in his commonplace book, his 1890 edition of Heroditus' Histories, are other fragments—maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books. All that is missing is his own name.

Dimly recalled from the one time I watched it, disrupted by frequent commercials on basic cable, the Oscar-winning film adaptation of The English Patient came to mind when I pulled the novel off the library shelf. Well, I thought, here's something that might be worthwhile.

The novel's premise is easily explained. Four people find themselves at an Italian villa at the end of World War II—a nurse, a spy, a bomb expert, and the eponymous but nameless patient, whose body is charred almost beyond the recognizably human. Brought together by chance and the vicissitudes of war, each character wrestles with their past and how to make a future when the entire world seems in need of remaking.

We come to some things late and wonder why we didn't care about them sooner. From almost the moment I started reading Ondaatje's fine work, I was hypnotized by the beauty of its interiority. It manages to sublimely convey each character's inner life, their respective pasts and present thoughts, without ever verging on tedium.

Lest I make it sound like another quiet, mannerly British story in which once-glamorous people swan around a great ruined house and sip a lot of tea (as the film version kind of did), allow me to clarify. The English Patient has sex, bombs, plane crashes, spycraft, and indeed, mystery. I don't think anyone made as much as one cup of tea, the whole book.

Moonglow, by Michael Chabon

At the end of my grandfather’s life, his doctors prescribed a powerful hydromorphone against the pain of bone cancer. A lot of Germans were busy knocking holes in the Berlin Wall around that time, and I showed up to say goodbye to my grandfather just as Dilaudid was bringing its soft hammer to bear on his habit of silence: Out flowed a record of his misadventures, his ambiguous luck, his feats and failures of timing and nerve.

This second book I've now read by Michael Chabon brought me less enjoyment than the first one, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, but don't thing that I didn't like it. Quite the contrary. Moonglow distills the life of Chabon's space-obsessed, World War II-veteran grandfather into a funny, tragic, mystifying narrative that defies easy classification.

The New Yorker ran a personal essay by Chabon around the time that I believe this novel was published. In it, he wrote about his dying grandfather's love of Star Trek and how he passed long hours bedside, writing Trek fanfic while his grandfather lay in narcotized slumber. Doing so was his way of feeling a connection as his grandfather inched closer to death each day. It seems that Moonglow offers another perspective on the same period.

Part historical fiction, part magical-realist yarn, part memoir, part out-and-out lie, it reimagines much of the mid-century life that Chabon's grandfather lived and frames it as high adventure. From the man's discovery of an intact V-2 rocket in a German barn to his quixotic hunt for a pet-eating snake near a Florida retirement community, to his lengthy love affair with a woman of unfathomable troubles, the twisting, turning narrative of Moonglow is an erratic tale by an unreliable narrator, told by a proxy in the form of a liberties-taking novelist. The book's worth basking in.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel

What sounds like a simple, maybe goofy premise—a queer coming-of-age story by a lesbian who grew up in a funeral home—becomes an ironic, deeply literary tale in the hands of Alison Bechdel. Her graphic memoir (the first I recall reading since Maus) delves into the complicated relationship between the junior Bechdel and her dad, whose possible suicide came not long after she came out to her parents.

It's a vertiginous read, erudite and darkly funny. Bechdel's willingness to glide along in the archest highbrow tone juxtaposes in the best ways with her occasional crudity. Her artwork breathes life into the hand-drawn figures as they navigate their ill-suited domestic lives together. I love how she never resorts to tidy answers or tries to wrap everything in a bow. Life almost never does, after all, so why should Fun Home?

The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro

It would seem there is a whole dimension to the question "what is a 'great' butler?" I have hitherto not properly considered. It is, I must say, a rather unsettling experience to realize this about a matter so close to my heart, particularly one I have given much thought to over the years.

Can there be a more emotionally constipated type than the English butler? Ishiguro's narrator, a butler called Stevens, fits the role to perfection as he rehashes the glory of the British empire and his former gentleman employer during a weeklong road trip.

There's dry absurdity in everyone's stiff-upper-lipping and calm-keeping carrying on, for which Brits of a certain era are renowned. There's also dignity, which Stevens speaks an awful lot about, but his idea of dignity differs from its conventional definition. Stevens figures that out, too. It just takes him a while. Watching him get there, you can't help feeling pity.

The Remains of the Day is a subtle, frustrating, ultimately moving book about the delusion of great purpose that can beset us when we take ourselves too seriously, and about the perils of ignoring our own humanity in the service of others.

The Sun My Heart: Reflections on Mindfulness, Concentration, and Insight, by Thich Nhat Hanh (translated by Anh-Huong Nguyen, Elin Sand, and Annabel Laity)

With awareness, each of our daily acts takes on a new meaning, and we discover that we are more than machines, that our activities are not just mindless repetitions. We find that life is a miracle, the universe is a miracle, and we too are a miracle.

Every encounter I have with the writings of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh enriches me. In his introduction to The Sun My Heart, the author suggests, "You may like to read a few lines, then close it and put it back in your pocket, and read another few lines sometime later." I took this bite-sized approach, occasionally reading a few pages before bed, in lieu of meditation, and found that The Sun My Heart reads like an eloquent conversation on the philosophy and psychology of Buddhism, with an extremely brief stopover in the land of theoretical physics.

It's interesting, if not enlightening stuff for the student or engaged practitioner. A Buddhist snack, you might call it. Perfect, since one doesn't want a multi-course enlightenment dinner right at bedtime.

Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, by Benjamin Dreyer

If words are the flesh, muscle, and bone of prose, punctuation is the breath. In support of the words you've carefully selected, punctuation is your best means of conveying to the reader how you mean your writing to be read, how you mean for it to sound. A comma sounds different than a semicolon; parentheses make a different noise than dashes.

The chief copy editor for a major publisher (in this case, Random House) is bound to have opinions on a great many grammatical and punctuational matters, and Benjamin Dreyer delivers plenty of them. His sometimes snarky perspective on stylistic matters, from semicolon placement to split infinitives, was something this word nerd could really sink his teeth into.

Not that my reading of Dreyer's English was quibble-free. Many of us could do without his long list of "confusables"—words that he sees writers frequently mixing up. (Someone, somewhere, might struggle to remember the difference between "ordinance" and "ordnance”; not me.) But I did appreciate Dreyer weighing in on the Oxford/serial/series comma: regardless of the name you give it, use the damned thing and save everyone uncalled-for confusion.

Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany

Very few suspect the existence of this city. It is as if not only the media but the laws of perspective themselves have redesigned knowledge and perception to pass it by. Rumor says there is practically no power here. Neither television cameras nor on-the-spot broadcasts function: that such a catastrophe as this should be opaque, and therefore dull, to the electric nation! It is a city of inner discordances and retinal distortions.

William Gibson and Jonathan Lethem are well-regarded authors of speculative fiction who rave about Dhalgren. Some critics regard the book as a postmodern monument. At 801 pages of itty-bitty type, it does feel monumental.

I recognize facets of Delany's scuzzy, ill-defined dystopia worth oohing and aahing over. Delany wrote this very queer, very diverse novel in the early '70s, when gay rights were barely conceptualized and racial equality still struck mainstream America as a groovy idea.

But the meandering of a nameless young, probably psychotic, pansexual man through an evacuated city didn't need to go on so long.

I don't quite get the appeal. Am I a philistine? A simpleton? Within the first third of Dhalgren, I started to formulate three wishes.

#1: I wished that the Kid (as the protagonist becomes known) would either get an actual pair of footwear or just throw away the single shoe he spends almost the entire book wearing. Even if it has a meaning, it's just silly.

#2: I wished that more characters cared even an iota about personal hygiene.

#3: I wished that an agent or editor had told the young Delany to cut his manuscript in half, then remove another fraction. It's just too much. He describes characters' every muscle twitch, hair flip, and sexual position. The minutiae overwhelmed me. Worse yet, it bored me.

But I did read it.

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What follows isn't meant to be a complete lexicon, nor are these terms universal. Prisons are little cities; lingo can vary from facility to facility, and certainly from state to state. Also, ugly things happen here. What the vernacular describes can therefore be ugly too.

You've been warned.

ad seg n. (see also hole, below) administrative segregation; a housing unit or other specified area in which inmates are held in segregation from the prison's general population for disciplinary or protective reasons.

bake cakes v. engage in homosexual acts, especially intercourse.

bit n. any period of time spent in prison on a charge or a series of related charges: Ivan's been down awhile on this bit.

book n. a magazine.

booty bandit n. one who assumes a predatory role in pursuing homosexual relationships.

boy n. one who is tied (see below) to another, usually older inmate.

bullet n. a small, tightly packed ball of any illicit substance, contained within a rubber or plastic casing, intended to be swallowed or keistered (see below) for concealment or transport within one's rectum.

cadillac n. any item tied to the end of a long piece of string, swung or slid from cell to cell in a lockdown setting (e.g. the hole [see below]) in order to transport said item: When Baker ran out of instant coffee, Jones sent him some by cadillac. • v. send something to someone in this manner: Hey, Smith, cadillac me a stamp! • adj. of high quality; indulgent or expensive: He put cocoa, creamer, and crushed butterscotch candies in that cup of Folgers to make a real cadillac coffee.

camp n. a prison.

cellie n. cellmate.

check-in n. protective custody (see also PC), a restricted housing unit for prisoners whose life, for any reason, would be endangered in general population. • a resident of such a unit: Prisoner traffic is on hold until the check-ins cross the yard.

cho-mo n. someone convicted of any sexual offense against a minor; a child molester.

CO n. corrections officer; a prison guard.

coal hauler n. one who is not themself black and has a black daddy (see below).

creep n. a sex offender.

daddy n. the dominant figure in an exploitative homosexual relationship.

deuce n. any of several highly addictive substances regarded as equivalents to K2, also called synthetic marijuana, which pose significant health and security risks.

dime n. a 10-year sentence: He's doing a dime for burglary. • (often drop a dime) snitch (see below) on someone: Dude dropped a dime on his partner and got the man busted on a dope deal.

down adj. serving a prison sentence: Ask the new guy how long he's down.

fifi n. a contraband assemblage of materials, such as latex gloves, trash bags, empty bottles, pillow, etc., used to simulate female genitalia for the purpose of sexual self-gratification.

flag n. a piece of paper or cloth displayed in or on one's cell door to indicate to passersby that privacy is desired: Joe must be using the toilet; he's got the flag up.

flick n. a photograph.

freak n. a homosexual. • (often play the freaks) make sexual overtures or remarks solely for the sake of homophobic humor or to make the target of such remarks uncomfortable.

freecase v. blame or sentence for an offense one did not commit: They tried to freecase him with another robbery, but he wasn't even in this state when it happened.

hole n. a housing unit or other specified area in which inmates are held in segregation from the prison's general population for disciplinary or protective reasons. • (often make a hole run) smuggle an illicit substance into a segregated are a for the express purpose of selling it for substantial profit.

house n. a housing unit within a prison. • n. one's own cell.

ID n. a roughly 2"×3" piece of paper laced with deuce (see above), likened to the size of a prison identification card.

keister v. insert (something) into one's rectum, usually a bullet (see above).

kite n. any note or memo sent elsewhere within a prison: To get a copy of his account information, Rusty had to send a kite to the case manager.

mainline n. the collective movement of prisoners to and from the dining facilities: The residents of Housing Unit 4 were allowed into the gym once mainline was completed.

metal n. a shank (see below).

minute n. any excessive length of time: That old man's been doing time for a minute; he knows what's up.

motor oil n. strong, thick coffee.

movement n. in maximum-security facilities, the controlled release of prisoners to a given location: The house released Jones to the kitchen at the 1 o'clock work movement.

mud n. coffee.

old head n. an older inmate, especially one who has served a lot of time.

PC n. protective custody (see also check-in), a restricted housing unit for prisoners whose life, for any reason, would be endangered in general population. • a resident of such a unit: Most of the PCs are pasty white dudes.

population n. the general population (also called gen pop or GP), regarded as distinct from restricted housing units such as ad seg (see above) or PC (see above).

rape-o n. a sex offender.

roll v. transfer to another prison: They rolled Mike this morning; I think he went to Charleston.

shank n. any improvised stabbing or cutting weapon. • v. use such an item: Kyle shanked Rollins in the chow hall this morning.

skate v. travel out of bounds within a prison, typically for recreational purposes: A couple of 4-House residents skated on 3-house's yard time.

square n. an employee of the prison, who is neither a correctional officer nor administrative personnel (e.g., cook, recreation officer, maintenance engineer, librarian, etc.).

stamp n. a roughly 1"×1" piece of paper laced with deuce (see above), equivalent to the size of a standard USPS "Forever" stamp.

stinger n. an electric immersion element with which to heat water for soup, coffee, noodles, etc.

store n. the prison commissary. • n. an illicit operation run by an inmate, typically selling foodstuffs for trade or on credit, at exorbitant rates.

street adj. different in quality from what is available in prison: How long has it been since you ate street food? • n. (usu. the streets) society, as distinguished from prison: George has been on the streets since November.

thumper n. a shank (see above).

tied v. in a position of subservience to another inmate, usually sexually: I heard the new kid's already tied with Boone.

turn out v. coerce or otherwise convince a heterosexual prisoner to engage in homosexual acts: Andy got turned out within a week of his arrival on the camp.

westside n. a wick, generally made from tightly rolled toilet paper, used for lighting cigarettes and smokeable drugs in the absence of matches or lighters.

wild adj. (as multiple sentences) consecutive, rather than concurrent: He got nineteen years—two sevens and a five—running wild.

wobble head n. one who takes medication for a mental health condition.

yard dog n. a correctional officer assigned to supervise or patrol the prison yard.

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