Learn from the experts

We learn from experts, from those who know. They know because they have thought long and hard about the subject, because they’ve studied it. And sometimes, most powerfully, because they have lived it.

I am not an expert on prison life. But for the past four years I have learned from experts, from a group of men who have lived behind bars for twenty, twenty-five, thirty or more years. They are members of the Lifers’ Writing Group I started at Oregon State Penitentiary. They write powerfully, with humor, with heart, with courage, with regret, with confusion and with insight about their everyday lives: sleeping, eating, working, making and losing friends, getting married, sitting by the bedsides of the dying.

I tell some of the stories they have shared with me in my book, A Grip of Time. I have also helped them craft and polish their stories for submission. Two of these stories won national recognition in 2018 Pen America Prison Writing Contest.  Two more won in 2019.

A number of shorter pieces appear on the site I created here. These stories are powerful, important and timely. They are a testament to how people can live lives of meaning and purpose in places designed to deaden meaning and eliminate purpose. They are a challenge to all of us to consider how people, people who have done bad things, might be human beings capable of growth and change.

These stories, written by experts, can help us learn about the criminal justice system we have created, the system that has made the United States the undisputed #1 jailer in the world.

I am so delighted that on Monday the Washington Post devoted an entire issue of its magazine to publishing personal stories, essays and art produced by those formerly or currently incarcerated. Let these stories, by the experts, help us non-experts have informed, humane conversations about crime and punishment, about incarceration and rehabilitation, and about the hidden lives lived by millions—yes, I said millions—of American citizens.