WaPo: “No prison sentence begins the same, but they all become the same relentless struggle against disappearing. Almost 20 years after my release, prison still has not let me go. I return to prisons now with the organization I founded, Freedom Reads, to let people inside know that they haven’t disappeared. But as a friend wrote: “Nobody should want to go back to prison to feel better about themselves.”…
Every facility has its own slang for solitary confinement. The hole. The box. The SHU. Jail. All evoke terror. But I found solace in the hole. Every minute my eyes were open, a book was in my hands. Because the world of literature was the only thing that kept me imagining a future for myself beyond the vagaries of state custody. It sustained me when everything else, even the voices of the men and boys around me, made me feel so terribly lonely.”