Prison Camp: INCARCERATION
A White-Collar Journal forum for criminal justice, lived experience, and the personal search for redemption
This piece serves as an introduction to my hybrid collection, A Different Kind of Hell, but it also stands alone as an attempt to describe what prison does to the interior world, and what remains long after release.
You can survive prison, and you can recover from prison, but prison never leaves you.
INTRODUCTION
In 2016, I was sentenced to eighty-five months in a remote prison camp north of Boston.
Prison is a kind of Dantesque “Dark Wood,” a twilight zone, while the tactile world plays out in frightening unreality. In this fragmented collection, I tried to convey some visceral semblance of an inmate’s day-to-day reality, trauma, and the oppression of captivity.
It was challenging to write in prison: no library, freezing cold in the dorm, and no privacy—relegating me to musings and spontaneous outpourings whenever and wherever there was opportunity or inspiration to compile something.
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, never acknowledging the real wearing down and the darker, solitary realities of enduring prison life. It’s a 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 self-loathing.
A writer, more by circumstance than aspiration, I chose a hybrid form to more effectively chronicle my fall from grace and the dark corridors of incarceration as I lived them. A long-form narrative didn’t resonate with me. That’s what prison does to you. Everything’s a departure in prison.
I wrote most of it in prison and the rest in a cocoon after my release, where I reside, still searching in my own dark world for the genesis of my criminality.
The presiding judge told me I wasn’t connected to humanity, disconnected from what makes life meaningful and worthwhile. I had a challenging life ahead, he said.
When I entered prison, the disconnect from humanity was complete. I lived among one hundred inmates. More wilderness than community. There is nothing more solitary than living among the exiled. I entered prison a ghost and returned an apparition.
This essay serves as an introduction to the full manuscript, A Different Kind of Hell, available from Moonstone Press.
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.
Up Next on White Collar Journal:
Wednesday (Justice Notes): Criminal Justice Reform
Thursday (Notes from Exisle): Log/Verse: Daily, fragmented reflections
Sunday (Prison Camp): More Stories from prison
If you’re new to White-Collar Journal, you can read earlier chapters and essays on incarceration, justice, and reentry at whitecollarjournal.com.
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.
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