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I met Micky J on Augusta Correctional Center, a man who spent 40 years incarcerated in a Virginia prison. He reminded me of the pimp from the classic Superfly movie. His salt and pepper afro was always well-maintained, as was his sculpted body for a 60-year-old man. He worked out all the time and bragged about being in better shape than the younger men around him. What made him most proud was how he kept the tiled floor in the dayroom polished like glass. That was Micky J, no

Tupac Shakur expressed that a rose growing from concrete was a beautiful impossibility. That was why three incarcerated men in a congested dayroom working to attain their associate degree appeared as an anomaly to the outside world. Education changed the lost to the found by offering them a path of success. An average man entered a prison environment with aspirations for survival, nothing more. This was attributed to the notion of what was constantly shared in society: Crimin

My friend Lefty called me into the dayroom, sharing with me that his sister had died, and asked if he could borrow eight dollars. Hi, this is prison, and craziness occurred daily--and yes, I lent Lefty the eight dollars. I remained on the top tier watching him vanish from my view, lugging mackerels and chips. Next to me was my neighbor Chris. Chris was an older white man who hid away in his cell as he worked through his life sentence. We started up a conversation about the st