Continuing the series regarding the origins of my memoir, this was the introduction to the first manuscript I assembled after leaving prison. Long before A Prison of My Own took shape, I believed the prison experience demanded a different form—part journal, part poetry, part memoir, part meditation. Looking back now, I can see how dark my thinking still was. But I can also see the beginnings of the manuscript that would eventually evolve.
INTRODUCTION
I’d been crossing lines and running from my sins since kindergarten. They finally caught up with me at age seventy-six, and I was sentenced to eighty-five months in prison for two counts of wire fraud. The presiding Judge told me that I had already sentenced myself to a prison without bars, but a prison nonetheless, a prison of the soul, that I was not connected to humanity, disconnected to what makes life meaningful and worthwhile. I had a challenging life ahead, he said, and I must figure out how to release myself from this prison of my own making. When I entered prison, the disconnect from humanity was complete. It appeared to me that my life, with eighty-five months of incarceration looming, was essentially over. Fortunately, I received a reprieve after eighteen 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 eighteen months of incarceration, I embraced a life of contemplation, of renewal and the agony of self-reflection. I kept a daily log/journal. But the effort evolved into a more nuanced, hybrid form of writing that is, hopefully, more likely to overcome the ineffability of the penal experience. It was challenging to write in prison: no library, freezing cold in the dorm and no privacy. A long-form narrative was out of the question amidst such conditions, relegating me to musings and spontaneous outpourings whenever and wherever there was opportunity and/or inspiration to compile something. My goal was to convey the experience of incarceration as I was living it, the agony, sense of exile, isolation and the misery of day-to-day confinement. I have added to that post-prison. I’ve tried to recall the visceral presence of prison in my post-prison writings as best I can. Much of the enclosed was written at my bunk with other inmates passing, gawking and often interrupting. Other times, I’d write in the common computer room where an inmate could draft an email to himself. The sessions were terminated after thirty minutes. A two-hour intermission was required before an inmate could return to a computer. There were always lines and other inmates standing behind me.
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 self-loathing. During my time there, I determined that my failure was a failure of character, something inherent, intrinsic and inevitable. Crisis is the test of character; the crisis came and I failed the test. I concluded that men can always dream of a new start and redemption but can never extinguish the history of their malfeasance. Based on that conclusion, and the reality of my age, now at seventy-eight, 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.
During a writing workshop I took with Tom Jenks, one of the country's most respected editors and the author of The Poetics of Fiction, he told me there was "a lot of good writing in the manuscript." But he also believed it lacked the coherent narrative structure needed to sustain a book. His suggestion was to use this manuscript as source material for a longer, traditionally structured memoir. That advice ultimately formed the basis for A Prison of My Own, the memoir my agent is currently submitting to publishers.
Justice Notes is an ongoing series examining incarceration, rehabilitation, storytelling, institutional power, and the lives that exist behind prison walls.
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John is your sentence complete? Are you still under home confinement?