The first was Soul Not Skin, a podcast centered around recovery, lived experience, resilience, and the stories that shape us. We talked about prison, higher education, redemption, and what it means to build a meaningful life after making some spectacularly bad decisions.

Here is a link to their page, but the interview will not be up for a bit: Click here:

The second was an interview on YouTube, which also is not up yet but here is a link to an older podcast I did with Dr. Peace: Click here!!!. While many of the topics overlapped, the conversation took a different direction. We discussed my work as a mitigation specialist, teaching criminology, and why I continue to speak publicly about my past even though it would probably be much easier not to.

I genuinely enjoy doing podcasts. There is something rewarding about sitting down with someone who is curious and simply having an honest conversation. At the same time, I still prefer writing. Writing gives me the luxury of thinking before I speak. I can rearrange ideas, delete entire paragraphs, and make sure I am actually answering the question I intended to answer.

That last part is important because my ADHD has a habit of taking over in interviews. Someone will ask me about prison and somehow, ten minutes later, I am talking about baseball statistics, restorative justice, and why gas station coffee deserves far more respect than it gets. I routinely find myself chasing side quests before I realize I have completely forgotten the original question. Writing slows my brain down just enough that I can actually finish a thought.

What struck me after both interviews was that, despite being completely different conversations with different hosts, they both ended exactly the same way.

I cried.

There is one story that I rarely tell because I have a hard time getting through it. Yet it is probably the most important story I have because it explains why I approach this work with so much emotion. People often ask where my motivation comes from. It is not abstract. It has names and faces.

The names have been changed.

A few years after I was released from prison, I added four guys from prison on Facebook. Looking back, I cannot even tell you why. We had survived something together, and reconnecting just seemed like the natural thing to do.

The first was Drank. He was from Champaign, and we ended up becoming cellys (I say that word all the time but rarely type it, I wonder if it is spelled like that or if it is cellies) during work release. He is doing well today. We check in once or twice a year, ask how life is going, and then disappear back into our own worlds. It is probably about as normal as two former prisoners can hope for.

Then there was Scotty. He was in prison because of meth, and I always found the difference between cocaine addicts and meth addicts fascinating. The cocaine guys were almost universally saying, “Never again. That was horrible. I am done.” Meanwhile, so many of the meth guys talked openly about getting out and cooking again as though prison had simply been an inconvenience. Scotty was one of those guys. He got out, went right back to meth, and now he is serving another long prison sentence.

Next was Willie. He happened to be the brother of a longtime friend, so we had crossed paths before prison and then again inside. After we both got out, I helped him enroll in college. I thought maybe he had a chance. Then he disappeared. Eventually I found out why. He had been raping his girlfriend’s seven year old daughter. He is now doing 120 years in prison.

I am not interested in dressing that up with softer language. Sometimes the truth should be uncomfortable.

The last one was Frost. Ironically, he and I were probably the least friendly while we were actually in prison. We only became friends toward the end of our sentences and after we were released. His case had haunted him for years. He had sold fentanyl laced heroin to a friend who died, and I do not think I appreciated just how deeply that guilt had buried itself inside him.

We talked a lot after we got out. We even planned to do a podcast together someday. He watched my strange little climb through academia and criminal justice and was always encouraging. He also happened to be a full blown conspiracy theorist, so we argued constantly. Those debates became part of our friendship.

Then one morning I woke up and saw dozens of people tagging him on Facebook.

He checked out.

Shotgun.

Closed casket.

That is all I know.

You get the idea.

I have no idea whether addiction came back into his life or whether it was depression, guilt, or something else entirely. Maybe it was simply the ghosts that followed him home from prison. I will never know.

That story is why I do what I do.

People often tell me how passionate I am about criminal justice reform, education, reentry, and giving people second chances. I appreciate the compliment, but I do not think passion is really the right word.

It is guilt.

The guilt is probably irrational. I understand that people make their own choices, and I know I am not responsible for the decisions other adults make. Intellectually, that makes perfect sense.

Emotionally, though, I cannot shake the feeling that if I had gotten my own life together just a few years earlier, maybe things would have turned out differently.

Maybe I could have gotten Scotty into school before he went back.

Maybe I could have reached Frost before whatever finally broke him.

Maybe I could have been in a position to intervene before that little girl was abused.

I know those are impossible questions. They have no answers, and carrying them around does not change the past. Still, they sit with me every single day, and they are probably the biggest reason I continue doing this work.

I cannot save the people I already lost. Maybe I never could have.

What I can do is keep teaching. I can keep interviewing incarcerated people. I can keep writing. I can keep showing up for people who have convinced themselves that nobody sees anything in them worth saving.

Every once in a while, one of them believes me.

Maybe that is enough.

Guess this is a short one.

I am crying again.

Cheers.

I grew up in Champaign. I wasn’t from the hood, and I never pretended to be from the hood. But the neighborhood I grew up in was mostly Black, and my parents never taught me there was anything strange about that. I obviously knew I was white. I obviously knew my friends were Black. I just didn’t have all the baggage adults seem so determined to hand children. To me, they were just the kids on my block.

By the time I got to Jefferson, I’d found my people. The Bradley Park lunch table. If you know, you know.

I wasn’t one of the cool kids. Let’s not rewrite history. I caught my share of hell growing up. I wasn’t athletic enough, funny enough, or confident enough. I was just awkward enough to get picked on without being awkward enough to disappear. Somehow, though, my closest friends were some of the coolest dudes in school. Looking back, I don’t know if they ever intentionally looked out for me or if it just happened naturally. Either way, I always felt like they had my back, and that’s something I didn’t appreciate nearly enough until years later.

Then my family moved to a tiny town.

Culture shock doesn’t even begin to describe it.

The people were good people for the most part. Racist? Mostly not. But white? Good Lord. White. It was the kind of place where everybody knew everybody, and anybody who didn’t fit the mold stuck out immediately. For the first couple of years, I was the kid who got accused of trying to be Black. They didn’t usually use those words. Small towns have a much more colorful vocabulary for people who don’t fit into the boxes they’re expected to stay in.

Eventually I figured out the social rules. I adapted, made friends, and for a year or two I was even kind of cool. But every now and then life reminded me where I’d come from.

There were a couple of situations where I found myself badly outnumbered. The kind where your stomach tells you this probably isn’t ending with everybody shaking hands. Before I had much time to worry about it, word somehow made it back to Champaign.

And they showed up.

Those same friends I’d grown up with.

Nobody asked them to come. There wasn’t a group text. Nobody posted some inspirational quote about loyalty. They just got in their cars and came because one of their friends might need them.

To be fair, the Foosland crew usually rolled in too, and they were white as fuck.

Looking back, that became a recurring theme.

Years later I ended up in prison.

People on the outside spend an incredible amount of time talking about race. Inside, respect usually matters a whole lot more than matching somebody’s skin color. I never really hung around with the white guys. Part of that was probably because I’d spent my entire life listening to old school rap. I cannot tell you how many times somebody would start quizzing me on 80s lyrics just to see if I actually knew what I was talking about. Somewhere along the line I’d accidentally memorized entire albums, and that became one of the stranger talents I’ve ever possessed. Instant credibility.

Mostly, though, it came down to respect.

Respect isn’t complicated. Don’t lie. Don’t steal. Don’t pretend to be something you’re not. Mind your business. Stand on your word. It’s amazing how many people struggle with something that simple. I suppose I struggled with all that shit until I was like 40, soooo……moving on.

Here is one memory that has never left me.

I was sitting in the county jail waiting to be transferred to prison. I’d just come back from a visit that absolutely wrecked me. I walked back onto the block trying to keep it together because that’s what you’re supposed to do.

One guy looked over at me and said, “You’re safe, bro. It’s all good. Let it out.”

Then somebody else chimed in.

“It’s alright to cry.”

Another guy asked what happened.

Within a couple of minutes, twelve grown men were standing around in a county jail pod talking about grief, families, and crying. Bonding.

If you’ve never been to jail, that’s probably not the picture you have in your head.

I was the only white guy on that block.

Prison eventually ended, but my life didn’t magically get better. Prison didn’t save me. It never did a damn thing positive for me. College did.

Walking onto Parkland’s campus felt almost as foreign as walking into prison had years earlier. I was in my thirties. Everybody else looked eighteen. They were worried about dorm life and weekend parties. I was worried about making rent and figuring out whether someone with my past was actually allowed to belong in a college classroom.

Looking back now, I realize I had no idea that another group of men was about to change the direction of my life all over again.

The first professor who really grabbed my attention was a Black man.

He wasn’t loud. He didn’t have to be. He carried himself with a confidence I’d never really seen before. He was brilliant, and he knew it, but there wasn’t an ounce of arrogance about him. He never had to remind anyone he was the smartest person in the room because it became obvious within about five minutes of class starting. He also happened to be a physically imposing guy. He never acted tough. He didn’t need to. If he couldn’t dismantle your argument with pure intellect, I’m pretty sure he could’ve folded you up and carried you out under one arm.

I remember sitting there thinking, that’s the kind of professor I want to become.

Well...that, except I say fuck a lot and he would NEVER cuss in class.

Not long after that I was working in one of the advising offices through work study. I was filling out my application to transfer to the University of Illinois when I got to the section asking about clubs, organizations, leadership positions, volunteer work, and all the things traditional students spend years collecting.

I had absolutely none of it.

I remember staring at the screen thinking, Well...shit.

I’d spent the previous twenty years doing something entirely different. I was working. Surviving. Getting arrested. Going to prison. Trying to put my life back together. Nobody had ever told me I’d someday be competing with student government presidents and captains of academic clubs.

I honestly thought I didn’t belong.

So I walked into an advisor’s office and told him exactly that.

He listened for a minute, smiled, and said something I’ve replayed in my head for more than a decade. I’m sure I’ve polished it over the years, so this probably isn’t exactly what he said anymore, but it’s exactly what I remember hearing.

He told me my life counted.

He said he’d rather have his own child sitting next to someone who had actually lived, failed, rebuilt, and could bring real experience into a classroom than someone with a perfect list of extracurricular activities but no perspective. My experiences weren’t something to apologize for. They were something I could contribute.

Nobody had ever said anything like that to me before.

I’d spent most of my adult life believing my past automatically disqualified me from rooms like that. In a five minute conversation, he planted the idea that maybe it was the very thing that qualified me.

That conversation changed the trajectory of my life.

I got into the University of Illinois, and not long after that I met another Black professor who changed my life in an entirely different way.

He was one of the first people who encouraged me to stop hiding.

Not just my incarceration.

My entire story.

Up until then, prison was something I treated like a confession. If people found out, I assumed they’d think less of me. I figured I could either be the guy with the prison record or the college student, but I couldn’t be both.

He challenged that thinking without ever making it feel like a lecture. He helped me realize that my incarceration wasn’t simply baggage I dragged behind me. It was lived experience. It was perspective. It was knowledge that couldn’t be learned from a textbook or a journal article.

The day I stopped hiding was the day my life started changing.

Instead of closing doors, my story started opening them.

It led to research; It led to teaching; It led to writing; It led to speaking.

It led to working with nonprofits across Illinois. It led to classrooms, boardrooms, conferences, community meetings, and eventually to a PhD program where I now teach the very subject that once defined my own life.

As those opportunities kept appearing, I started noticing something that honestly hadn’t occurred to me before.

Again and again, the people reaching back to pull me forward were Black men.

The professor who showed me what confidence looked like.

The advisor who taught me that surviving counted for something.

The professor who convinced me to stop hiding.

The nonprofit directors who trusted me before I’d proven I deserved their trust.

The mentors who introduced me to people they didn’t have to introduce me to.

The leaders who kept opening doors after so many others had assumed those doors were permanently closed.

Am I saying white people have never helped me?

Of course not.

Some of the closest friends I have are white. I’ve had white professors, coworkers, attorneys, and mentors who believed in me when they didn’t have to, and I wouldn’t be where I am without many of them.

This isn’t about keeping score.

It isn’t about pretending one group is somehow better than another.

I’m just recognizing a pattern in my own life.

When I look back over 52 years, I think about the kids who had my back when I wasn’t cool. I think about the friends who drove into a small town because they heard I might need help. I think about the men in county jail who reminded me it was okay to cry. I think about the professor who became the kind of teacher I still try to emulate, the advisor who taught me that surviving counted for something, the professor who convinced me to stop hiding, and the nonprofit leaders who kept opening doors after everyone else had slammed them shut.

None of those men owed me a damn thing.

Yet they kept showing up.

One day, when I finally walk across that stage and somebody hands me a PhD, there are going to be a lot of names running through my head. I’ve thought about putting them in this essay, but I think I’d rather save that moment for graduation.

Because they deserve to hear it from me.

Long before a university decided I belonged, long before employers trusted me, and long before anyone called me “Professor,” there were people who saw something in me that I couldn’t yet see in myself.

I’m not trying to make a political point.

I’m not trying to prove anything about race.

I’m simply looking back over my own life.

And this is the pattern I found.

People tell me all the time that I found my purpose. They say I took the worst thing that ever happened to me and turned it into something meaningful. They say I am lucky that I get to study what I lived, teach what I know, and help people who are going through what I went through. I usually just smile and say thanks because explaining the truth takes too long. The truth is, I wish I had chosen something else. I wish I had become the dude who trains cats or restores old cars. Hell, I would have been perfectly happy arguing with customers over the price of a 1957 Topps Roberto Clemente at a neighborhood sportscard shop. Instead, I somehow built an entire life around prisons. Every single part of my life revolves around incarceration, punishment, trauma, and human suffering. That isn’t purpose. Some days it feels more like a life sentence with better parking.

People assume I enjoy this work because I have dedicated my entire existence to it. I don’t. I hate almost every part of it. I spend my days reading medical records that document people slowly dying, psychiatric evaluations that explain exactly how somebody became who they are, police reports describing the worst days of people’s lives, and childhood records that make you wonder how anyone expected these kids to grow into healthy adults. Then I teach about it. Then I write about it. Then I come home and research it for my dissertation. At some point prison stopped being something I experienced and became the air I breathe. I don’t clock out from this job because there really isn’t a version of my life where prison isn’t sitting in the room with me.

One of the weirdest things about all of this is how normal it has become. I can walk into a county jail without feeling nervous because my brain still remembers how these places work. I know what prison smells like. I know the sound different steel doors make when they close. I know the difference between somebody who has done time and somebody who has only watched Oz. That isn’t knowledge I ever wanted. Birdwatchers identify birds by their songs. I can probably identify a correctional facility by the echo in the hallway. Congratulations to me, I guess.

The really cruel joke is that prison never actually lets you leave. I left physically a long time ago, but mentally it just packed its bags and came with me. It followed me to Parkland. It followed me to the University of Illinois. It followed me into graduate school. It followed me into my PhD program. It followed me into every classroom where I have stood in front of students trying to explain why punishment doesn’t work the way people think it does. Now it follows me into courtrooms where I sit next to clients who remind me of the person I used to be. Sometimes I catch myself explaining solitary confinement to students with the same tone someone else would use to explain how to change a tire. Then it hits me that this is not a normal life.

People ask me how I do it without burning out. The truth is, I probably burned out long ago. I just learned how to function while being on fire. There is only so much childhood trauma, addiction, abuse, mental illness, violence, terminal illness, and grief a person can absorb before it starts leaking into everything else. You don’t become immune to it. You just become better at carrying it around. Imagine spending your workday interviewing a sixty year old man with cancer who is terrified he is going to die in prison, then going home and trying to unwind like nothing happened. Imagine reading hundreds of pages documenting how a teenager was abused, neglected, bounced through foster homes, and then acting surprised when he eventually picked up a gun. After a while you stop asking whether this work is affecting you and start wondering what part of you it hasn’t reached yet.

I think a lot of this comes down to survivor’s guilt. I don’t know why I got out when so many people I knew didn’t. I don’t know why professors gave me opportunities they never received. I don’t know why I ended up teaching at a university while there are men I met inside who are every bit as smart as I am but will never have the chance. Luck plays a much bigger role in our lives than most people are comfortable admitting. Timing plays a role. Geography plays a role. Poverty plays a role. Race plays a role. Trauma plays a role. We like to pretend success is earned because it makes us feel better about having it.

Sometimes I wonder if I keep doing this work because I genuinely believe I can change something or because I feel like I owe a debt that can never be repaid. Every mitigation report I write, every lecture I give, every paper I publish, every former prisoner I mentor feels like another payment toward surviving when other people never got the same opportunity. The problem is that the balance never gets smaller. The debt just keeps collecting interest. Every new client brings another story that stays with you. Every sentencing hearing adds another face you don’t forget. Every file becomes another reminder that the system has no shortage of broken people because it has never been very interested in fixing the conditions that broke them.

People sometimes ask if I regret choosing this path. I don’t regret the people. I have met some of the strongest, funniest, most resilient human beings imaginable through this work. I regret that this work has to exist at all. I regret becoming an expert in human suffering. I regret that I can no longer watch a crime show without critiquing the sentencing policy. I regret that my brain automatically starts building mitigation arguments when I read a news article. Honestly, I miss being able to be ignorant. It looked peaceful.

So tomorrow morning I’ll get up, drink my coffee, open another case file, and spend another day swimming around in trauma, punishment, and incarceration. I’ll probably make a few inappropriate jokes because dark humor is cheaper than therapy and my insurance still isn’t that great. Then I’ll come home and work on a dissertation about the very same system I spent all day fighting against. If that sounds exhausting, it is. If it sounds depressing, it is. But somewhere along the way I convinced myself that this is the price I pay for getting out when so many others didn’t. Nobody handed me that bill. I wrote it myself, and for whatever reason, I still keep making the payments.

It happens more than you'd think. I'll be standing somewhere minding my own business and some guy will lean over and start bitching about immigrants or trans people because apparently my bald head, beard and whiteness are some secret membership card for MAGA. Then I tell him prisons should be abolished and healthcare should be universal. You can literally watch their brain melt. I go on talking about universal healthcare, labor rights, prison abolition, housing as a human right, and why billionaires probably should not exist. The look on their faces never gets old.

That is the problem with political labels. Most people have absolutely no idea wtf they even mean. They just attach them to whatever kind of person they have already decided you are. To a lot of Republicans, anyone slightly to the left of Ronnie Reagan is a communist. To a lot of Democrats, anyone who criticizes the Democratic Party is MAGA. According to the internet, everyone is either a fascist, a Marxist, or a Russian bot. There is apparently no other option.

People call me a liberal all the time. Sometimes it is intended as an insult. Sometimes they think they are giving me a compliment. Either way, they are wrong.

I am not a liberal. I am a leftist. Those are not the same thing.

Na, I do not identify as a communist, socialist, or anarchist. I pull bits and pieces from all three. I have no interest in becoming a partisan lemming for any ideology. I spent enough of my life watching people surrender their ability to think critically because they wanted to belong to something. I am not doing the same thing just because the team carries a blue flag instead of a red hat.

Politics is weird because people eventually stop having opinions and start having faith. The second your politics starts looking like church, I'm out. I spent enough years around religion to know I don't need that shit. Especially one where the scripture is written by dead European dudes and every disagreement gets you accused of betraying the revolution.

I steal ideas. I take what works and throw away what does not. If Marx was right about something, I will use it. If Kropotkin said something useful, toss it in the bag. But, those folks have been dead forever and did not exist in modern society. I take much more from folks like Ibram X. Kendi, Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon, and Michel Foucault. I have learned from Kendi’s work on racist policy, Davis’s writing on prisons and punishment, Fanon’s analysis of colonialism and violence, and Foucault’s ideas on discipline, surveillance, and social control. That does not mean I agree with every word any of them ever wrote. It means I read people critically instead of joining their fan clubs. To be honest, sometimes I don’t know wtf Fanon and Foucault are even talking about!

I do not need Kendi, Davis, Fanon, Foucault, Marx, or anybody else to become another prophet. I can learn from an author without treating their books like sacred fucking texts. I can recognize the value of an argument while still criticizing its limits. In fact, that is what reading is supposed to be. You take the useful parts, challenge the weak parts, and connect them to what you have actually seen in the world. At least that is what I thought education was before academia became another place where people choose teams and defend their favorite theorists like sports franchises.

If some libertarian accidentally proposes something that helps people instead of corporations, I will take that as well. If an idea makes people's lives better, I don't give a shit who said it..

People assume leftists spend all day reading Marx. I don't. I've probably quoted Angela Davis more in the last five years than Marx. That does not mean I think he was irrelevant. He was obviously influential, and he helped define and organize a lot of ideas about class, labor, exploitation, and capitalism. But he did not invent leftism. He did not invent the idea that workers get fucked by the rich. He did not invent the idea that wealthy people accumulate power by exploiting everyone below them. He did not invent the “spectre of communism”. He gave language and structure to ideas that had existed long before he came along. And, he was rich (yeah, Engles bankrolled him, but they were all rich white dudes regardless of how you want to spin things).

Some people on the left treat Marx the same way people on the right treat the Founding Fathers. Every sentence becomes scripture. Every disagreement becomes heresy. The man was a philosopher, not Moses coming down the mountain with stone tablets. Sometimes he was right. Sometimes he was wrong. Sometimes he was probably sitting around angry, broke, and writing long sentences because Twitter (or whatever the fuck it is called now) had not been invented yet.

My politics are actually pretty simple. I believe people should contribute what they are able and receive what they need. I know that phrase is usually associated with Marx. For some reason I always half remember it as Leninism. Maybe that is because political theory has too many angry dead men and not enough pictures. Either way, I care much more about the principle than the name attached to it.

Folks should give what they can and they should take what they need.

Call it socialism, communism, mutual aid, basic human decency…call it Tuesday. IDGAF. Feed people. House people. Give them healthcare. Stop making survival a full time job.

I am not interested in winning arguments about ideological purity while people are sleeping under bridges.

Now, liberals are not necessarily bad. Liberal actually used to be a good word. It still can be. The problem is that both Republicans and Democrats have manipulated the label so much that it barely means anything anymore. Republicans use liberal as shorthand for godless communist child groomer. Democrats use it to describe anyone willing to vote for their candidate after spending six months explaining why that candidate is terrible.

Liberals usually believe capitalism can be fixed. They believe elections, regulations, social programs, and civil rights protections can make the system fairer. I am much less convinced that the system can be gently adjusted into justice, but I understand the argument. Most liberals I know genuinely want people to have healthcare, education, civil rights, and some basic level of economic security. Many of them are decent people who can think for themselves.

The problem is that liberals often get trapped inside party politics. Every four years becomes another hostage negotiation. We are told that this is the most important election of our lifetime. We are told that democracy itself is hanging by a thread. We are told the candidate is not perfect, which is usually a polite way of saying the candidate does not support half the things we supposedly believe in. Then we are ordered to shut up, stop asking questions, and enthusiastically support the bare minimum candidate because the other person is worse.

That is not inspiration. That is extortion with yard signs.

Liberals can also get lost in identity politics, language policing, and symbolic victories. Yup. Identity matters. Language is overemphasized. Representation is important. But those things become dangerous when they replace material politics instead of strengthening it. Changing the vocabulary does not automatically change the conditions people live under. You can use all the correct words and still be completely useless to oppressed people.

Then we get to the shitlibs.

A shitlib is basically a liberal who has wandered so far into performative politics that they have lost sight of actual human beings. Their politics exist mostly online. They mistake reposting for organizing. They confuse being offended with being oppressed. They believe correcting someone’s vocabulary is revolutionary action. They fancy themselves activists because they attended one rally, changed their profile picture, and publicly shamed their aunt for using terminology that was acceptable six months ago.

Many of them come from privileged backgrounds, especially academic ones, where politics is mostly theoretical. Their biggest political risk is getting ratioed on social media or having someone write a strongly worded email to their department chair. They love cancel culture because punishment is easy. Persuasion is hard. Building coalitions is hard. Organizing working people is hard. Publicly humiliating someone for saying the wrong thing gives them the emotional satisfaction of power without requiring them to actually change anything.

They are usually obsessed with linguistic gymnastics and wedge issues because those are easy to perform. They can spend three days debating whether someone used the correct adjective while a family is figuring out which meal to skip. They can write a seventeen paragraph post about harm while never helping a harmed person. They can quote every major theorist on oppression and still treat the maintenance worker, waitress, cashier, or formerly incarcerated student like they are invisible.

One thing academia has done that drives me absolutely insane is convince people that reading the right authors somehow makes them morally superior. It doesn’t.

I’ve met people who could quote Foucault from memory and treated the janitor like shit. I’ve met people who never finished high school who understood compassion better than most professors I’ve known.

Reading theory doesn’t make you a good person. It just means you’ve read theory.

That is not activism. That is theater.

Sometimes it is worse than theater because it can actually hurt the people they claim to support. Their constant purity tests make ordinary people feel unwelcome, ignorant, and disposable. They treat people who do not know the newest vocabulary as enemies instead of people who might be persuaded. Then they wonder why working class communities stop listening to them.

I spend my days talking to people whose lives have been shaped by poverty, abuse, addiction, homelessness, violence, incarceration, mental illness, and loss. I have never had a client tell me their biggest concern was whether someone called them a convict instead of a formerly incarcerated person. They worry about whether they are going to prison. They worry about whether their children will still speak to them. They worry about getting their medication. They worry about finding housing with a felony record. They worry about whether anyone will hire them when they get out.

Those are real problems.

Nobody has ever asked me if they qualify for emergency food assistance because somebody misgendered them. Nobody has ever worried about losing custody of their kids because somebody used the wrong adjective.

They worry about rent, the price of their prescriptions, whether they are going to prison.

That’s why performative politics pisses me off so fucking much!!!

Then there are neoliberals, who might be the most dishonest group because they pretend to be liberals while promoting an economic system built around markets, competition, private property, and individual responsibility. They are bootstrappers wearing rainbow pins.

Their ideological roots can be traced back through classical liberalism and thinkers like John Locke. Locke wrote about “life, liberty, and property.” Americans later cleaned that up into life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, probably because saying property out loud made the whole project sound a little too honest.

Locke helped create the intellectual foundation for liberalism. Somewhere along the way property became more important than people. That’s the part where I get off the bus.

That is why neoliberalism sounds so much like libertarianism. Because it basically is.

Neoliberals are libertarians who learned how to use the correct pronouns, are cool with LGBTQ folks (because they have a gay son), and pretend not to be racist.

Honestly, I have more respect for actual libertarians. I disagree with them on almost everything, but at least they usually know who they are. They will tell you they believe in small government, private property, individual liberty, and letting the market sort things out. Fine. I think that leads to a society where rich people own everything and everyone else rents oxygen (hey, we are well OTW there, aren’t we?), but at least the argument is honest.

Neoliberals want the same economic outcomes, but they package them in progressive language. They will tell you housing is a human right while running Air BnBs. They will tell you healthcare is a human right while defending an insurance system that profits from denying care. They will tell you they support working families while opposing raising the minimum wage.

They love diversity as long as the boardroom remains white AF.

Now, because I call myself a leftist, people sometimes assume I spend my evenings sharpening a guillotine and making a list of local landlords. Sometimes, I do. The French Revolution gave us powerful political imagery and some truly elite memes. When a billionaire complains about paying taxes while people ration insulin, the guillotine does occasionally appear in the imagination.

But I am not interested in revenge fantasies. I do not wake up wondering which rich person should lose their head. I wake up wondering why one person is allowed to accumulate more wealth than entire communities while people working full time cannot afford rent, food, or healthcare.

The problem is not simply that individual rich people are greedy. The problem is that we built a system that rewards greed, protects accumulated wealth, and treats endless growth as a moral good. If every billionaire disappeared tomorrow but we left the same system intact, we would just create another batch of billionaires. Maybe keep the guillotines in storage for decorative purposes, but the real work is changing the structure.

The older I get, the less patience I have for ideological purity. I have met conservatives who would give a stranger the shirt off their back. I have met self proclaimed revolutionaries who would step over a homeless person to get to a protest about homelessness..

Politics is not morality. Party affiliation is not character. A yard sign is not a personality.

I care about outcomes. Feed people. House people. Educate people. Provide healthcare. Treat addiction. Invest in neighborhoods before investing in prisons. Give people meaningful opportunities instead of endless punishment. Build systems that help people survive, recover, and eventually thrive.

Maybe my politics come from my own life. Prison did not save me. College did. Relationships did. People who believed in me did. Access to education did. Social capital did. Prison gave me punishment, isolation, stigma, and a permanent target on my back. Everything positive that happened afterward came from opportunities the system usually denies to people like me.

That experience made me skeptical of anyone who thinks suffering builds character or poverty motivates people. Most people do not need to hit rock bottom. They need someone to throw them a rope before they get there.

So stop calling me a liberal. I am not one.

If your politics don't reduce suffering, I honestly don't give a shit what you call them.

And yes, I still think the guillotine memes are funny.

Every once in a while, somebody asks me a question that makes me wonder if they have ever read a single fucking thing I have written.

“Do you think prison played a role in the success you have today?” Or, “aren’t you glad that you went to prison considering where you are now?”

Come on. Seriously?

No.

Fuck outta here!

Prison did not save me.

Prison did not fix me.

Prison did not rehabilitate me.

Prison did not teach me how to become the person I am today.

Prison did nothing positive for me. Nothing.

And I need people to stop trying to force my life into that tired ass framework where incarceration is secretly good for people. Where prison is some kind of brutal but necessary intervention that finally makes a person wake up, straighten out, and become a productive citizen.

That is bullshit.

It is also insulting.

Because when you look at everything I have done with my life and give even a tiny piece of the credit to prison, you are taking something away from me. You are taking my work, my choices, my pain, my education, my growth, and my stubborn refusal to fucking quit, and handing some of that credit to the institution that tried to destroy me.

Fuck that.

Prison did not build me.

I built me.

And the evidence is pretty fucking clear.

When I got out of prison, I did not immediately become the person I am today. I went right back to much of the same bullshit I was doing before I went in. Same thinking. Same behaviors. Same environment. Same patterns. Same lack of direction.

So where exactly was all that magical rehabilitation?

Was it hiding in my property box?

Did I accidentally leave it at Vienna?

Because if prison had transformed me, why did I return to the same shit? The same job. The same friends. The same drugs.

The answer is simple.

Prison does not give you a new life. It gives you a criminal record.

It gives you trauma.

It gives you debt.

It gives you damaged relationships.

It gives you years of lost wages.

It gives you employers who will not hire you.

It gives you landlords who will not rent to you.

It gives you a permanent label that follows you into job applications, housing applications, professional spaces, academic spaces, and every fucking place where somebody gets to decide whether you deserve access.

Then, after creating all those barriers, society waits to see if you can somehow climb over them.

And if you do, people want to give prison partial credit.

Absolutely the fuck not.

What changed my life was college.

Education did for me what prison never could.

College gave me something prison never even attempted to give me. It gave me a different way to understand myself and the world around me.

It gave me language for things I had experienced but could never explain.

It gave me access to people, ideas, institutions, and opportunities that had always seemed like they belonged to somebody else.

It gave me a place where my mind actually mattered.

It gave me social capital.

It gave me relationships.

It gave me mentors.

It gave me opportunities.

It gave me a new identity.

And, maybe most importantly, it gave me the ability to imagine a future that was different from my past.

That is what changed me.

Not a fucking cage.

And here is the part that really pisses me off.

Many of the same kinds of people who now want to ask whether prison deserves some credit for my “success” are the same kinds of people who would have questioned whether somebody like me belonged in college in the first place.

A felon?

A former prisoner?

A middle aged guy with a fucked up past?

College might not be for him.

Maybe he should learn a trade.

Maybe he should just be grateful someone will give him a job.

Maybe we should not lower standards.

Maybe people with criminal records do not belong here.

Funny how that works.

The institution that punished me gets imagined as the thing that saved me, while the institution that actually changed my life was something people like me were never really expected to enter.

I was supposed to be grateful for punishment.

I was not supposed to demand opportunity.

But opportunity is what saved me.

Education is what saved me.

People believing I was capable of more helped save me.

Being given access to spaces where I could build relationships, develop skills, gain credibility, and create a different identity helped save me.

And, yes, I saved myself.

I did the work.

I filled out the applications.

I sat in the classrooms.

I wrote the papers.

I earned the degrees.

I dealt with the shame.

I dealt with the imposter syndrome.

I walked into rooms where I knew people would judge me the second they learned about my past.

I kept going.

I kept writing.

I kept teaching.

I kept studying.

I kept building.

I kept showing up.

Prison did not do any of that shit for me.

I did.

This does not mean I did it alone. Nobody does. I have had professors, mentors, friends, colleagues, students, organizations, and communities who opened doors for me and helped me walk through them.

But that is exactly the fucking point.

People helped me.

Education helped me.

Relationships helped me.

Opportunity helped me.

Belonging helped me.

Prison did not.

Prison was the enemy.

It still is.

Prison took time from me that I will never get back. It put a label on me that I will carry for the rest of my life. It made nearly every step forward harder than it needed to be.

And somehow, because I managed to survive all of that and build something afterward, people want to turn my survival into an advertisement for the thing I survived.

Imagine doing that with anything else.

Imagine watching someone escape a burning building and then asking whether the fire deserves some credit for making them a stronger runner.

That is what this question sounds like to me.

My life is not proof that prison works.

My life is proof that people can succeed despite prison.

There is a massive fucking difference.

I am not a prison success story.

I am a story about what can happen when someone who has been to prison gets access to education, relationships, opportunities, and people willing to see something beyond a criminal record.

I am a story about what happens when a person is allowed to become something other than the worst thing they have ever done.

I am a story about education.

I am a story about social capital.

I am a story about opportunity.

I am a story about refusing to accept the identity that punishment tried to permanently assign me.

But I am not a story about the rehabilitative power of prison.

So stop trying to use me to justify cages.

Stop trying to turn my life into some conservative morality tale about how prison scared me straight.

It did not.

I was not scared straight.

I was educated forward.

And if I had not gone to college, there is a very real chance I would have ended up back in prison.

Not because prison failed to punish me enough.

Because punishment was never what I needed.

I needed a future.

College gave me one.

Prison did not.

So when you look at my life and ask whether prison deserves some credit for who I became, understand what you are actually asking me to do.

You are asking me to thank the cage.

You are asking me to give credit to the institution that took from me.

You are asking me to use my survival to legitimize the system that made surviving harder.

No.

I will not do that.

Prison did not save me.

Prison did not make me.

Prison does not get to claim me.

I did this.

The people who believed in me helped me do this.

Education helped me do this.

Opportunity helped me do this.

But prison?

Prison can fuck off.

And, so can anyone who asks me those stupid fucking questions!

Let me start with the legally required bullshit disclaimer before somebody screenshots half a paragraph and sends it to the FBI, the Attorney General, WCIA, or their cousin who took one criminal justice class at Parkland.

Carol Ammons has been indicted. She has not been convicted. She is presumed innocent.

There.

I have now demonstrated a better understanding of due process than approximately 87 percent of Facebook.

But I have been reading about the federal indictment of State Representative Carol Ammons, and I keep having this weird feeling that I have heard parts of this story before.

Political money. Money allegedly being moved around in ways prosecutors say were dishonest. Records and statements that allegedly did not accurately explain what the money was really for. Attempts to conceal the true nature of financial transactions. Political consequences.

According to reporting on the federal indictment, Ammons faces eight counts of wire fraud, one count of making a false statement to a federal agent, and one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice. Prosecutors allege she participated in schemes involving campaign funds, state grant money, payments involving her daughter, and illegal cash kickbacks. The indictment alleges Ammons and her daughter received more than $100,000 in financial benefits through the schemes.

Again, ALLEGE.

Nobody has convicted Carol Ammons of shit yet. But the outrage machine is already fully erect.

The Illinois House is already moving to investigate her. She has been removed from House Democratic caucus meetings and committees while the allegations are pending.

People want resignations. People want her removed. People want prison. People who could not define wire fraud if the definition was tattooed on their forehead are suddenly experts on federal financial crimes.

“LOCK HER UP!”

Interesting. Because Donald Trump was not merely indicted for falsifying financial records.

He was convicted. Thirty four fucking times.

A Manhattan jury found Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. According to the Manhattan District Attorney’s announcement of the conviction, the case involved falsified business records connected to a scheme prosecutors said was intended to corrupt the 2016 election and conceal damaging information from voters.

Thirty.

Four.

Felonies.

And what happened? Well, he received an unconditional discharge.

No jail. No probation. No fine.

The conviction remained, but there was no additional punishment. You do not have to take my liberal, woke, Marxist, CRT loving word for it. Here is the AP reporting on Trump’s sentence.

Then he became President.

Again.

America is fucking amazing.

For years, I have listened to people talk about “accountability” like it is a sacred fucking text handed down from Mount Sinai.

Accountability. Consequences. Deterrence. Respect for the law.

Until, apparently, you are important enough.

Then suddenly criminal justice gets very nuanced. Then we have to consider the “unique circumstances.” Then punishment might interfere with important responsibilities. Then we need to think about the broader implications.

Funny how that shit works.

Carol Ammons is now being accused of serious crimes. If the government proves those allegations beyond a reasonable doubt, then we can have a conversation about accountability.

But I am fascinated watching people who spent years explaining why Trump’s 34 felony convictions were “just paperwork” suddenly transform into Elliot fucking Ness because a Black woman from Urbana has been accused of financial crimes.

Now paperwork matters. Now financial records are sacred. Now concealing the purpose of money is a threat to democracy.

Holy shit.

What an incredible coincidence.

And before the other side starts jerking itself off, Democrats are not innocent in this hypocrisy either.

Some of you screamed “CONVICTED FELON” every time Trump’s name appeared on your television.

Felon.

Felon.

Felon.

You used that word like it was the scarlet letter.

Trust me.

I know something about that fucking letter.

Now someone you like has been indicted and suddenly you remember that people are more than criminal allegations. Suddenly you remember due process. Suddenly you understand that an indictment is not a conviction. Suddenly the criminal legal system might be political, excessive, or unfair.

Welcome.

Some of us have been trying to tell you this shit for decades.

The criminal justice system did not suddenly become complicated when it reached someone you voted for. It was always complicated.

You just did not give a fuck when the defendant was poor.

Or Black.

Or addicted.

Or mentally ill.

Or someone whose name would never appear in the newspaper unless they got arrested.

That is what pisses me off. Not that Carol Ammons is being investigated.

Investigate her.

If there is evidence, present it. Let her lawyers challenge it. Let a jury decide.

That is supposedly how this shit works.

What pisses me off is watching Americans completely reinvent their philosophy of criminal justice depending on whose name is printed at the top of the indictment.

Trump commits financial crimes? Political persecution.

Carol Ammons is accused of financial crimes? Lock her up.

Your favorite politician gets charged? Due process.

Someone you hate gets charged? Why are they still walking the streets?

Your guy lies? Complicated legal theory.

Their guy lies? PRISON.

We do not have a criminal justice philosophy in this country. We have teams.

And apparently the Constitution comes with a fucking jersey.

I have been a convicted felon for nearly twenty years. I have lived with the label. I have lost opportunities because of it. I have had people question my character because of it. I have had to prove, over and over and over again, that I am more than the worst shit I ever did.

So forgive me if I find it fucking hilarious watching powerful people and their supporters discover redemption, context, proportionality, prosecutorial discretion, and the presumption of innocence exactly five minutes after someone they like gets investigated.

Maybe Carol Ammons is guilty.

Maybe she is not.

That is what a trial is for.

Trump, however, was convicted of 34 felonies. That is not my opinion. That is the jury’s verdict on all 34 counts.

And America handed him the nuclear codes.

Again.

So maybe we can calm the fuck down with pretending our outrage is about “respect for the law.” It isn’t. It is about whose felon you like.

And apparently, in America, the difference between a dangerous criminal and a misunderstood public servant is whether you voted for the motherfucker.

I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out why performative activism irritates me so much. Not just annoys me. I mean genuinely pisses me off. I think I finally figured it out.

For some people, activism is a hobby. For others, it becomes a lifestyle, almost a personality trait. They wear it the same way someone else wears CrossFit or veganism. But for far too many people, activism has become a form of poverty pornography. They do not actually want to get intimate with pain, suffering, incarceration, addiction, homelessness, violence, or oppression. They want to observe it from a safe distance. They want just enough exposure to feel compassionate without having to sacrifice anything meaningful in return.

The issue itself is often secondary. What they are really chasing is the feeling of being a good person. They attend the rally, post the infographic, update their profile picture, sit on another committee, organize another planning meeting, and then move on to whatever the next social media outrage cycle happens to be. Last month’s cause is forgotten before anything meaningful was accomplished because the point was never lasting change. The point was emotional gratification. It is activism as self care. It is emotional masturbation dressed up as social justice.

That is probably why I struggle to relate to so much of what passes for activism today. I do not have the luxury of treating prison and punishment like subjects I occasionally visit. They are where I live.

My past is prison. My academic life revolves around prison. My professional life revolves around prison. My research revolves around prison. My writing revolves around prison. Every week I sit across from people whose lives have been shaped by trauma, addiction, violence, poverty, mental illness, and incarceration. I cannot simply close the laptop, turn off the lights, and go be somebody else. There is no separating the work from my life because, in many ways, the work is my life.

People occasionally ask me why I write so much about incarceration. The honest answer is because I do not know how not to. This is not a topic I discovered after reading a few books or attending a conference. I lived it. Then I went to school to understand it. Now I work inside it. Tomorrow I will probably interview another client whose life has been devastated by circumstances most people spend their entire lives trying to avoid. Then I will come home and write about it. Not because it is enjoyable, but because someone has to tell these stories if we ever expect people to see those labeled “criminals” as human beings.

Sometimes I honestly wish I had chosen a different life. I think about it more often than people probably realize. Maybe I should have become a businessman. Maybe I should have opened a small company somewhere and worried about profit margins instead of sentencing ranges. Hell, if I could do it all over again, I think I would work with animals. Dogs do not ask you to justify your existence every day. They do not care about your criminal history or your politics. They either trust you or they do not. There is something refreshing about that.

But that was never going to be my path.

Somewhere along the way I decided that if society insisted on talking about “criminals,” then I was going to keep standing in front of people saying, “Hi. Nice to meet you. I’m one.” That decision has come with a price that most people never see. Being radically honest about my past has limited where I could live, what opportunities were available to me, and which doors quietly closed before I even knew they existed. It has affected friendships, relationships, employment opportunities, and countless moments where my felony became more important than anything I had accomplished afterward. Shit, in Illinois I cannot even run for city council because of my conviction.

Most people spend their lives trying to bury the worst thing they have ever done. I built an entire career around exposing mine. My niche became destigmatizing the label “criminal” by refusing to hide behind it. Whether that was courage or stupidity probably depends on who you ask. Some people respect it. Others absolutely hate me for it. There are very few people who fall somewhere in the middle. Nobody says, “Chris Miner? Meh. He’s alright, I guess.” It is almost always one extreme or the other. Either I am the real deal or I am somebody they cannot stand.

The truth is, I do not particularly enjoy that. I would love for everyone to like me. I would love to write safer things, say the expected things, and avoid uncomfortable conversations. Life would almost certainly be easier. But if I started saying what people wanted to hear instead of what I actually believe, I would become exactly what I criticize. I would become performative.

Ironically, the people who seem most offended by me are rarely conservatives, prosecutors, or prison staff. More often than not, it is performative white liberals. The people who believe politics is primarily about signaling virtue to other people who already agree with them. They become furious because I refuse to play the language game. I am apparently not the right kind of progressive because I ask questions I am not supposed to ask. I refuse to pretend that morality belongs to one political party. I refuse to memorize a new approved vocabulary list every six months just so everyone knows I am one of the good ones.

Meanwhile, the people I actually work with could not care less about any of that. They are trying to find somewhere to sleep. They are trying to stay sober another day. They are trying to convince an employer to overlook a felony conviction. They are trying to reconnect with children who barely know them. They are trying to survive. None of them have ever asked me whether my terminology was perfectly current. They care whether I answered the phone. Whether I showed up. Whether I treated them like a human being instead of a case number.

That is the difference between performance and presence.

Performance is cheap. Presence is expensive. Performance earns applause. Presence costs sleep. Performance gets social media engagement. Presence means sitting with people on the worst day of their lives and carrying pieces of that home with you. Performance ends when the meeting is over. Presence follows you into your car, your home, your relationships, and your dreams.

Maybe that is unhealthy. It probably is. But I would rather care too much than just enough to convince myself I am making a difference.

I have watched organizations spend months planning meetings that never produce action. I have watched committees debate language while the people supposedly being helped were still hungry, still homeless, and still sitting in jail. I have watched people collect marginalized communities the way other people collect baseball cards, each new cause becoming another opportunity to demonstrate how enlightened they are.

I simply do not have the patience for it anymore.

Because while some people get to visit injustice whenever it is fashionable, some of us never get to leave.

J…

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Good morning.

I’m gonna say this once because this AI accusation shit is starting to genuinely piss me off.

Some of y’all discovered ChatGPT five minutes ago and suddenly think you’re forensic linguists.

Now every time somebody writes more than three coherent paragraphs without emojis and a motivational quote at the end, people start whispe…

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Prologue: I rarely use the word shame in my actual writing here, but it is lurking behind every word. I intend on writing a book on shame one I complete my dissertation and become “Dr.” Miner, which should be a year from October. Anyhow, after this, I have to switch back into academic writing mode, so you might not see me much. So….cheers!

And then t…

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That’s me.

People love the idea of me.

The story.
The comeback.
The formerly incarcerated guy who clawed his way into academia.
The activist.
The advocate.
The powerlifter.
The published writer.
The “inspiring” guy who can talk about prison, trauma, mental health, shame, desistance, social capi…

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What does that even mean anymore? Seriously.

The “system” impacts everybody. Taxes impact everybody. Inflation impacts everybody…

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As a crowd gathers ‘round an angry young man
Face down on the street with a gun in his hand
In the ghetto.”

-EP

Today I walked into work knowing I was about to meet two kids whose lives have already been cracked open in ways …

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That proverb hits a little different when you have actually been that kid. Or that grown man who never really stopped being that kid.

Let me say the quiet part out loud right at the beginning. For a lot of us who ended up in the system, shame was not the problem. The problem was the complete absence of it.

People love to talk about shame like it is this t…

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There are people who go to work and never think twice about the building. It is just a place. Fluorescent lights, bad coffee, a chair that squeaks when you lean too far back. You badge in, you badge out, you complain about the thermostat and keep it moving.

Then there are people like me, who walk into a building that alr…

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Sorry to inundate your emails with my scribbles, but my last post was not meant to be. You see, most of my Substacks begin as LinkedIn or Facebook posts. I spit out some ideas, then I am like “wait, I need to expand on this.” So, writing happens. Unfortunately, yesterday I erred and posted the acutal LinkedIn post instead of the that it motiva…

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We love the gate-opening stories. The mentor who took a chance. The professor who “saw something” in you. The administrator who bent a rule. Those stories get framed as grace, generosity, redemption arcs. And some of that is real. I would not be where I am without people who opened doors that were very …

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