Hidden lives

When you awoke this morning, light streaming in through your bedroom window, what was your first thought?

What does a man, in prison for the past 30 years, think about when he first wakes up, shifting his body on the thin vinyl-coated mattress on the top bunk of his two-man cell?

“When I woke up this morning, I…” was a recent prompt I gave to my Lifers’ Prison Writing group at Oregon State Penitentiary. I’ve been running the group for four years now, beginning each twice-monthly session with a prompt, watching the ten men I have come to know so well bend their heads over lined paper as they write, by hand, their stories. I’ve prompted them with words like trust, power, friendship, dreams, food, fear, hope.

When they write, they exercise the one freedom they have not lost, the freedom of expression. When they write, they process experience; they struggle to make sense of the lives they are living. They look for meaning. They become, for just a short while, writers. Not numbers. Not prisoners. Not convicted murderers. Just men writing.

When they write, make their incarcerated lives visible. I think it is important for us on the outside to know about these lives. With more than 2 million men and women behind bars, with our country claiming the highest rate of incarceration in the world, we need to know, don’t we, where we put these people and what kind of lives they live?

The writing of prisoners allows us into this world. I’ve created a small window into this world with this site, TruthtoPower, where I publish the prompt responses and other short pieces by men in the Lifers’ Writing Group. Longer pieces we’ve worked on together for months, through many revisions and much thought, have made their way to the Pen America Prison Writing Contest, winning two first place awards (2018) (2019), one second place , and one honorable mention these past two years.

I write about the lives lived by those behind bars, the lives of those for whom prison is a permanent home, in my book, A Grip of Time.

I hope you will read their work and mine, not because you know someone in prison, but because you don’t.