Following is the introduction to my first memoir manuscript, Prisoner’s Lament. At the time, I thought I was writing a book about the experience of incarceration. I had kept a journal in prison, but a conventional diary seemed incapable of capturing what prison actually felt like. So I experimented with a hybrid form—log, verse, narrative vignettes and stream-of-consciousness fragments.
Reading this introduction now, I’m struck by something I didn’t fully appreciate then. The larger story was already there, in the opening paragraph. In fact, as the introduction makes clear, I knew there was another story to tell. I just wasn’t ready to tell it.
INTRODUCTION
At the age of 75, I received a lifetime achievement award, in recognition of an outstanding career in commercial real estate and a history of significant contributions to community charities. One year later, I was sentenced to 85 months in prison for two counts of wire fraud. The presiding Judge told me that I had a long road ahead. It appeared to me that 85 months was essentially a life sentence, and the only prospective road ahead was a dead end. Fortunately, I received a reprieve after 18 months, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and I was subsequently released and confined to Home Incarceration for the remainder of my sentence.
During those 18 months of incarceration, I kept a log/journal. But the log was just becoming a boring narrative of daily life: “I did this, and I did that.” Over time, the effort evolved into a hybrid form of memoir, comprised of log, verse, narrative vignettes and stream of conscious outpourings, that, hopefully, overcome the inherent ineffability of the penal experience. A log or diary just doesn’t’ get to the emotional cellar that you fall into, in prison. 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, (this 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. I trust that these hybrid scribblings may convey some visceral semblance of my experience and more effectively communicate an inmate’s day to day reality, trauma and truer center of gravity.
You can survive prison, and you can recover from prison, but prison never leaves you. The most painful part of prison is that it confronts us with ourselves and furthers in each inmate, an excruciating state of self-loathing and the sad conclusion that men can always dream of a new start, but can never extinguish the history of their malfeasance. Based on that conclusion, and the reality of my age, now at 78, I can only focus on the depiction of my experience as a cautionary tale, and leave the prospect of new starts to the next generation. The leadup and the narrative that presaged my incarceration, I’ll leave to another project that will require another kind of and more challenging introspection. The following is solely an attempt to profile the experience of becoming an inmate and the dark corridors of incarceration as I lived it.
Prisoner’s Lament was never published as a manuscript, although portions appeared in literary journals and much of the material eventually found its way into A Different Kind of Hell, my collection published by Moonstone Press. It also became source material for much of what followed.
It was Tom Jenks who first helped me understand that the hybrid manuscript was not the book, but material from which a narrative memoir might be written. I began to rethink the form and construct a more conventional narrative of my incarceration.
But I was still writing essentially about prison.
Later, Peter Mountford helped me understand that the story I had set aside was actually the more important story. The memoir didn’t begin when I entered prison. It began much earlier, with the ambition, success, choices and failures that ultimately brought me to a federal prison camp at the age of seventy-six.
Looking back at this early introduction, I’m struck by how explicitly I had avoided that story: “The leadup and the narrative that presaged my incarceration, I’ll leave to another project that will require another kind of and more challenging introspection.”
That other project, and that more challenging introspection, eventually became A Prison of My Own.
Justice Notes is an ongoing series examining incarceration, rehabilitation, storytelling, institutional power, and the lives that exist behind prison walls.
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.