Justice Notes: A Different Kind of Hell
A White-Collar Journal forum for criminal justice, lived experience, and the personal search for redemption
This week I’m sharing the introduction to A Different Kind of Hell, my collection of prose poems written during my time in a federal prison camp. They reflect what prison felt like in its rawest form: isolation, exile, and the quiet anguish most inmates never reveal.
Below is the opening to the book, published by Moonstone Press. At the end, you’ll find a link if you’d like to order a copy.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF HELL
You can survive prison, and you can recover from prison, but prison never leaves you. On certain days, it feels like afterlife, other days, like a typical work day, and most days a bad dream enduring the slow torture of meaningless, menial tasks. I lived among one hundred other inmates, more wilderness than community. There is nothing more solitary than living among the exiled. I entered prison a ghost and returned an apparition.
In July of 2018, I was sentenced to eighty-five months in federal prison for two counts of wire fraud. I was assigned to a remote prison camp, north of Boston. Prison is a kind of Dantesque “Dark Wood,” half dream and twilight zone, while the tactile world plays out in frightening unreality.
In A Different Kind of Hell, I try to convey some visceral semblance of an inmate’s day-to-day reality, trauma, true center of gravity, and the oppression of captivity.
It was challenging to write in prison: there was no library, the dorm was freezing cold, and I had no privacy, relegating me to musings and spontaneous outpourings whenever and wherever there was an opportunity and/or inspiration to compile something. My goal was to convey the experience of incarceration as I was living it, the sense of exile, isolation, and the misery of day-to-day confinement.
For the most part, inmates keep their anguish private, despite the inner turmoil that prison life presents. As inmates, we collectively manage, as best we can, to act as if this is just another workplace environment (it was a working camp), never acknowledging the real day-to-day wearing down and the darker and solitary realities of enduring prison life.
Prison camps are at the lowest rung of the federal prison system; residents of the facility are primarily white-collar offenders. However, the population includes a diversity of other criminal offenders, including drug dealers and gang members who have earned relocations to a prison camp from other higher security facilities. It’s a wearing, demanding existence of grueling regimens and protocols.
The most painful part of prison is that it confronts us with ourselves and furthers in each inmate an excruciating state of self-loathing.
The following is an attempt to profile the experience of becoming an inmate and the dark corridors of incarceration as I lived it.
If this introduction resonates, you can read more in the whole collection, published by Moonstone Press. It gathers the prose poems I wrote while incarcerated, each a glimpse into the hidden realities of confinement.
Order A Different Kind of Hell from Moonstone Press.
Thank you for reading White-Collar Journal. Subscribing is free, and I hope you’ll continue with me as I explore stories of incarceration, justice, and redemption.
If this piece resonated with you, consider sharing it or leaving a comment. To support this work and help spread awareness about justice reform for white-collar defendants, subscribe to White-Collar Journal and stay connected. John DiMenna is a member of the White Collar Support Group.
To leave a comment, Substack may ask you to verify your email address (a one-time step to prevent spam). You don’t need to subscribe or create an account. Just check your inbox for a one-time link.