Discover Stories Here

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

Thursday, I'm up at six in the morning, shouting happy birthday to Red, my celly of two years. He tiredly thanked me as our day began. I waited an hour before the cell door opened and out I went, moving down the tier with a mozzarella cheese bar, a vanilla health shake, eight individual vanilla wafers, a strawberry Kool-Aid and my small plastic bowl and spoon. Ramutu ran into me with the small bags of milk I asked him for to make the cream cheese for Red's cheesecake--his bir