In 2004, I entered the New York State prison system after spending almost three years on Rikers Island, in New York City, slowly to be ground through the jaws of the criminal-justice system. At 27 years old, with a fresh 28-years-to-life sentence for murder and selling drugs, I had a ninth-grade education and not an ounce of character.
During my first few years, I fell into the prison scene: I shucked and jived, smuggled drugs, stuffed them into my rectum, pushed them out, sold them, smoked them, snorted them. I had fights. I went to solitary.
After I was stabbed, I was sent to Attica because I wouldn’t say who did it. Attica’s the worst prison in New York State — but some of the best things have happened to me here because of two educational programs.
When I killed Alex, we were both empty young men. He was 25, I was 24, at ugly stages of our lives. I hate that I made that the final stage of his.
In 2009, I joined a creative-writing workshop with Doran Larson, of Hamilton College. He sported a fedora, and once a month a handful of us would breathe in his erudition like oxygen. Someone would read a piece in progress, then the rest of us would offer feedback. We’d do a quick free write. Then we’d discuss an assigned reading. We’d unpack the work of Montaigne, whose prose had me with my fist to my forehead at times, or Hemingway or Fitzgerald, or pieces from a Best American Essays anthology.
Then I enrolled in a program offered through Genesee Community College. Derek Maxfield, a stout, bearded, bespectacled scholar of the Civil War, led us on mental journeys to the theater where Lincoln was assassinated, to the Deep South during Reconstruction and Jim Crow, through sharecropping, lynchings, and poll taxes. Because I’m white, it was uncomfortable to hear. I sat shamefaced among my peers, most of whom were black.
The slim, quirky English-composition instructor, Michael Gosselin, told a self-deprecating tale about when he took his adopted black son to a water park. A suspicious stranger asked him what he was doing there. Gosselin, who is white, replied that he was there with his son.
“I know,” he told us, “how it feels to be profiled because of the way I look.” It’s hard to make murderers melt, but he pulled it off during his first session with us before leading us through lessons on metaphors and tropes, on Aristotelian ethos, pathos, and logos.
The motherly sociology professor, Josephine Kearney, made me feel innocent, childlike. She’d have us sit in a circle (I love circles) as we’d hash out whether society shapes circumstances that determine our lives or whether we are free, as individuals, to make our own choices. Those theories aren’t abstract when you’re behind bars. I mean, I’ve got my own sob story — grew up poor, father committed suicide, mom a bit wacky — that might align with the society argument. But I know that because of my skin color, I had more opportunities than did most of my fellow prison mates.
In a course on human relations, we read Victor Frankl: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
After class, filing into the corridor, I feel good, proud of my classmates and myself. I snap out of that dreamy state when I hear the guard bark the same orders I’ve been hearing for years. “Eyes forward, keep it paired off, stop at the next yellow line.” Marching back to C Block, peeking out the corridor windows, I see a fresh, sublime snowfall blanket the gloom of the yard, around which prisoners strut menacingly, aimlessly. Through the three-story arched windows of the neo-Gothic brick cellblocks, hundreds of TVs illuminate the night.
When I killed Alex, we were both empty young men. He was 25, I was 24, at ugly stages of our lives. I hate that I made that the final stage of his. His mother had deep, unconditional love for him, the kind that was so powerful and yet so powerless. The kind that might have sustained him through his dark times as my mother’s has sustained me through mine. I’m sorry.
We are all sorry.
John J. Lennon is an inmate at the Attica Correctional Facility, in New York State. His website is johnjlennon.wordpress.com.