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My day always began in prayer as I crawled off my top bunk. The cramped quarters were my shared domain alongside Red, my celly. We rarely talked in the morning, maybe because we're mentally preparing ourselves for the daily grind of mass incarceration--or my breath stinks and he hadn't informed me yet. Yeah, humor, that was a necessary tool when you're watching an elder who spent 40 years in a cell. Do not misinterpret that I'm laughing at him; more like I'm making him laugh.

Prison sucks! That is a fact that 100% of the incarcerated populace in America would agree with. This became apparently true when I sat in on an interactive journal program where we had intakes participating in a small classroom at Nottoway Correction Center in Virginia. They opened up about their lives, and I just cringed. Our job as peer mentors is to motivate the men, assisting them in becoming more than their worst. Well, I had a notion on how to proceed, but that was das

In the early hours before the sun rears its shiny head, I'm awake. My bunk was the place I occupied as my celly grunted like a wild bear, urinating his bladder into our porcelain toilet. The trickling sound it gave off as it splashed the water in the toilet was deafening as I lay there, desiring anywhere else to be--then he farted, burped, and washed his hands. He returned to his slumber as I was trapped there, wide-eyed. I lived with many men in my decades of confinement, so