Justice Notes: Origins of A Memoir
A White-Collar Journal forum for criminal justice, lived experience, and the personal search for redemption
Origins of a Prison Memoir
Shortly after my release from federal prison, I applied to PEN America’s Writing for Justice Fellowship. At the time, I was still struggling to understand what had happened to me and how to write about it.
Like many inmates, I kept a journal while incarcerated. But I soon found that a traditional journal was incapable of capturing the experience. It recorded events, routines, and observations, but failed to reach the emotional reality of prison life.
The application below is adapted from the project proposal I submitted as part of that fellowship application. Looking back, I can see the beginnings of the work that would eventually evolve into A Different Kind of Hell and my memoir, A Prison of My Own.
PEN AMERICA FELLOWSHIP: PROJECT DESCRIPTION-IMPACT ON PRISON REFORM-PROJECT APPROACH:
The project is a hybrid form of memoir, comprised of several literary forms and is based on my experience as an inmate in a federal prison camp. Traditional, long form narratives don’t communicate the true visceral experience of incarceration; and poetry alone, is absorbed only by a narrow group of readers who must navigate its symbolic language, understood almost exclusively by its author. For the most part, inmates keep their anguish private, despite the inner turmoil that prison life presents. I believe that only a mélange of genres can effectively communicate the experience.
One of the major issues raised by prison reform advocates, has been the incarceration of non-violent offenders (especially White-Collar offenders), in favor of other remedies, such as community service and Home Incarceration, which are, arguably, more productive and less costly to the community. For example, as an alternative to incarceration, I proposed thirty-six months of Home Confinement and a commitment to work fulltime for a nonprofit development that would provide housing for homeless veterans in South Florida. Instead, the court imposed what was, effectively a life sentence, (85 months at the age of 76), and relegated me to a regimen of meaningless menial tasks that provide no benefit to society or provide meaningful reclamation opportunities. Many of the inmates at Devens (where I served my sentence) were white collar offenders, many in their 50s, 60s and 70s, and many with successful business backgrounds and still capable of making productive contributions to society, had they been sentenced to Home Confinement. They still would have been managed by the government and certainly still punished by loss of reputation, financial diminishment and their activities under daily oversight with many restriction and loss of privileges.
I believe that a visceral depiction of the experience of an elderly white collar offender will be more effective than a journalistic essay to communicate the questionable benefits of this strategy, while highlighting the emotional wasteland of incarceration, as implemented by the federal government’s department of justice through their agent, the Bureau of Prisons, an inefficient, lumbering bureaucracy whose primary mission is to maintain its own existence and the jobs it provides to themselves. I trust that my experience, through this medium will provide a compelling tableau for those engaged in the prison reform effort.
Punishment, rather than reclamation has been the true center of gravity in our current penal system, evidenced by the sentencing guideline formula which discourages judicial discretion, often resulting in terms of sentence that are disproportionate to the offense.
What I learned since the early years of my release, is that prison resists straightforward narration. The routines are repetitive, the days monotonous, and yet beneath that surface lies an emotional landscape that is difficult to describe. The experience seemed to demand multiple forms: memoir, journal entries, poems, letters, inmate profiles, court documents, and fragments of memory.
The proposal above was written before I had any real sense of what the finished work might become. Reading it now, I recognize both the certainty and the confusion of that moment. I was trying to make sense of incarceration while still carrying much of its weight.
The manuscript I envisioned eventually evolved into something different than I first imagined. But the central challenge remains the same: finding a way to communicate an experience that is at once deeply personal and largely invisible to those who have never lived it.
Justice Notes is an ongoing series examining incarceration, rehabilitation, storytelling, institutional power, and the lives that exist behind prison walls.
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