Ask me why.

Or don’t.

I’ll tell you either way.

As far back as I can recall, talking about my dad was a gamble. Some adult in my orbit was likely to sigh or glance over with pity or make a comment about his choices and his loss and what a shame.

I don't remember ever saying the word “daddy,” and buying a Father’s Day card was not a thing we did. Hallmark didn’t offer a version of “I love you, anyway” or “Thanks for the genetics, pops.” I used to fantasize about creating a line of accurate greeting cards for us children of the unavailable, but honestly, who would spend their hard-earned money on them?

Anyway, it’s too late for us.

My dad has been dead for 16 years. All we have now are tattoos, and the stories that go with them.

My mom has told me a few things about my early years with him—dancing to Stevie Wonder, the little me riding shotgun in his old red Dodge truck. I have been told that I once drank a full bottle of Visine while unsupervised in that truck, which landed me under observation in a hospital. It was his Visine, of course.

“You were his little buddy,” mom told me after he died, on the way to his funeral.

When I was three years old, she packed my brother and me and the entire house while he was at work—and left him to his vices. For the record, I do not blame her for doing so. She had suffered enough.

She didn’t tell him where we had gone for a long time, and when she finally did, he got up one Sunday morning and drove hours to get to our little rented house near Lake Michigan. Upon arrival he found it unoccupied, so he broke in and stole back a painting that my mom had relocated to the rental—and then he, in the words of Paul Simon, turned around and headed home again. My parents would fight (and hate each other) over that painting for years. It's even listed in their divorce decree.

Him not staying to see us that day is one of my earliest memories.

My dad fought harder and risked more for that painting than he ever did for me or my brother. We grew up with the understanding that he didn’t want to retrieve us—not at all, and for whatever reasons seemed reason enough to him.

When we were young, we did visit him a few times—always in the summer and always at his dad’s rustic cabin on a small lake in Northern Michigan where his whole family gathered to play.

After that, there was a decade without any visits because of an overdue child support balance. Well, that, and the fact that my mom would call the police if he came within a mile of our next home, the one she had bought as a divorced woman—the home from which we would walk to and from our small elementary school on the edge of a white pine forest.

My dad never came to my elementary school.

At the family cabin, the old painted metal chairs were always in an unbroken circle.

While us kids would throw sticks in the fire and get high on burnt marshmallows and melting chocolate, my dad and uncle would offer the buzzing crowd songs from their youth, including an acoustic version of Blackbird by the Beatles. My dad was famous for his vocal overlay of the bird sounds at the end of that song—so impacting his version, it was played at his funeral.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night.

Take these broken wings and learn to fly.

You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

We all wept when the bird ended the song, and he laid there silent and still.

There had always been a version of my dad that I loved. The potential dad. The one who was mine to secretly claim and stow away safely from the hurt of my mom, the disapproval of my grandparents, the pity of my teachers. He remained, for years, the guy who might show up one day, and in that small space—he was magical and strong, and he, in his absence, explained everything that was unexplained in me.

My dad could filet a fish in three swift cuts with an heirloom knife. I would tiptoe to the boathouse to watch him clean the day's haul, and every time I opened that screened door he would point the knife down at my bare feet and, cigarette between his lips, warn me to watch out for stray fish hooks on the cement floor—once set, those hooks are difficult and painful to get out.

Ask him how he knew.

Or don’t.

I’ll tell you either way.

I watched one time as he worked tirelessly to wriggle a hook from the gills of a small fish out in the little metal boat. He was sweating and swearing, his bronze back glistening in the sun. There were buckets and nets. In the white top cooler, there were beer cans for him and Pepsi for me and my brother.

I remember feeling sad for the fish trapped in crescent shapes inside those buckets, even if everyone cheered when I pulled one in. I wondered what he might do if I tipped them overboard, back to their home, but I didn't dare. No one else seemed sad, so I learned to act like I wasn’t either—like the whole trapped fish thing was just part of life.

He had asked me to find the needle-nose pliers in the tacklebox to help him out, and I was proud I knew what needle-nose pliers were. I hurried my best and handed them to him but after many more minutes of trying, the fish was still not free.

“God damn it,” he said—

We were not allowed to drink Pepsi at home, and we were definitely not allowed to say God damn it. We were not allowed to say any swear words in front of our mom, lest we wanted Tabasco sauce on our tongues.

One time my brother, no more than eight years old, called me a bastard in frustration over some thing we were fighting about. He was quickly whisked into the kitchen by his upper arm where he was forced to stand in front of the refrigerator with that red sauce coating the center of his extended tongue, his head tilted toward the sky. I felt guilty.

“Do you even know what a bastard is?” My mom demanded to know. She looked in my direction. No, I shook my head, but I knew it was bad.

After she explained, I pointed out the irony of the Tabasco sauce since we were actually real-life bastards.

“That’s enough out of you.” She said.

Taking the Lord’s name in vain might not be fatal if you are trying to save one of his precious creature’s lives, say a fish on a hook—maybe it's a prayer, I think. God damn the hurting of this innocent living thing. God damn all of the hurt on Earth.

And so it went.

Most of my childhood was spent trying to excuse my dad for not keeping any of the Lord’s commandments. He didn’t go to church, I knew that, but it didn’t stop me from wanting to save him, from asking God to save him. When the pastor asked us to close our eyes and raise our hands if we had a prayer request, mine was always something about my dad. Maybe God could help him stop smoking cigarettes or drinking so much.

I once wrote him a letter to tell him that I was praying for him and I was bold enough in it to ask him to quit smoking because, I added, it was bad for him and I did not want him to die. Even then I knew that if he lived long enough, I would become an adult and then I could meet him on my own terms where my mom wouldn’t be hurt by my desire to know him better. I enclosed a picture I had drawn of us playing together in a colorful Crayola world.

He died at 56 anyway.

Me and God were never able to make him do anything.

The fall after the beach bonfires and the God damn it fish, I went back to school and bragged about my dad. I made up stories about how he was a famous musician and about how he could barefoot water ski. In fairness, those weren’t complete lies. He could barefoot water ski—I just never saw it—and his band had won Battle of the Bands in Detroit in like 1970.

In my late teens, the smell of beer on a man’s breath was oddly attractive, and a waft of cigarette smoke connected me to something I wanted—something wild in me.

Many times, I had watched my dad’s ash grow grey and long on unattended cigarettes. I had admired the Marlboro moving up and down in his lips while he fileted the fish. He would smoke while playing bongos or steering the boat, squinting one eye all cool like James Dean or Paul Newman. The click of that lighter, his head-cocked just so—the first, long drag.

Until today, I have been unable to understand my weird, life-long obsession with Ernest Hemingway—why I have always navigated toward his gritty, staccato prose—why I have paid too many times to tour his archived home in Key West. My dad and Hemingway might as well have been brothers, and well, that ruins them both a bit for me now.

If they had let my dad leave the hospital after his surgery, I’ve no doubt he would have unloaded a shotgun shell into his chin too, rather than live with a colostomy bag for the rest of his life. He didn’t make it home, in spite of his snarky comments about wanting to do so. He died in the ICU—after I signed the paperwork to pull the plug, but not before I crawled up into the hospital bed next to him. It was there that I made the only memory I have of snuggling with my dad. He was unconscious by then, so I’m not sure if he heard me whisper,

“You can go, dad, it’s okay.”

Blackbird, fly.

I kept pushing the morphine button for him, and I tried to let him go—knowing full well that I had never really had him anyway.

Ask my children how they know.

Or don’t.

They can probably tell you.

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It has been an amazing ride because this community continues to be full of the helpers Mr. Rogers’s mom told us to look for—there are so many good and gracious and kind people in the world and I think most of them are on Substack. Forget Facebook. Lose Instagram. Substack is where its at.

But, unfortunately, even Substack has a village of sad little trolls. And not the singing, sparkly Justin Timberlake kind.

Exhibit A:

TLDR; This lady woke up on Wednesday and chose to be petty and by petty, I mean downright rude to me—a person she's never met.

As they say in the south, Bless Your Heart.

This woman took time out of her one, precious life to accuse me of being selfish, unhelpful, and “suburban.” She then admitted that my post prompted her to Google if there are ‘black people on Substack’ and she went on to surmise that I have used my son’s incarceration as click-bait—my only motivation, according to her, is to become a rich and famous author. How dare I exploit other people for personal gain.

The odd part is that she is responding to a post I wrote about the plight of a man inside of a Michigan prison, about whom I had received a phone call that day. I do not know him from Adam, and I was simply asking for people to be aware of a gross mistreatment by MDOC.

My usual response to this type of comment is perspective-taking, a deep sigh, empathy skill, and a calm click of the block button—thank you, now go away please.

Normally, I do not feel it necessary to defend my life nor my posts. Women have had to explain themselves and their choices for far too long to jerks not walking in their shoes, and I’m not playing those games anymore.

So, why am I giving this even more air time today?

Because she bothered me.

Like really, really bothered me.

Maybe it was plummeting estrogen or the heat this week or the general amount of shit on my plate right now or maybe it is because…

She’s white.

She’s liberal.

She’s a business owner.

She lives in one of the highest rent districts in our country where median home prices exceed $900,000.

And she had subscribed to my newsletter of her own volition.

Before I could reply to her nonsense, good people came to my defense. Many readers messaged me to tell me what they thought of her comment and where she could shove it. I thanked them, messaged her how she could help the man in my post and asked her to unfollow me, made sure she saw my message, blocked her, and tried to move along.

But I can't.

For clarity, I am white.

I am also middle class (whatever that means these days).

I happen to have a nice remodeled kitchen and I grind my own coffee, but she got everything else wrong. I don't work on an Apple computer. I'm not in the suburbs, and most egregious of all—I don't own a Best Mom Ever mug.

Here's the deal, I haven’t exactly hidden my demographics in my writing but to the best of my conscious ability, I don’t lead with them either. This blog centers on my personal experience of the American “justice” system, most notably how my family has lived through my son’s prison time. I would like to leave it at that, but some other women would prefer to flatten me into a one-dimensional caricature on a page. So let's go.

Perhaps it is time for me to discuss more difficult things.

Demographics

I speak out precisely because I am white and middle class.

In my experience, most white middle class folk with a child sentenced to prison time hide in shame and don’t say anything, don’t advocate, don’t show their faces nor allow the world to see their ugly reality. Relatives of ours told people that my son was just on a long ‘vacation’ in another state.

For several years, I myself, Miss Black Sheep Mom, didn’t say a word to most people. We are taught to hush up. We only whisper about it with close friends at book club. We quietly half-raise our hands for prayers at church when others have their eyes closed. I've had family tsk-tsk (and distance themselves) from this blog.

For valid reasons, many moms I know have chosen not to get into this arena and expose the truth about their own black sheep inside the penitentiary. And that’s their business—I don’t fault them at all. The truth is that we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

A white woman in a justice-impacted discussion sits squarely in the frontline of fire from all sides. Either you are fragile and don't really know the struggle or you are using people to sell “an agenda.” There seems to be no middle ground for us.

But this is the middle ground.

I refuse to let Other be Other.

My pain is part of the collective pain in this country, and I don’t need permission to share what I share. I fully own my family’s poor choices, addictions, cycles of abuse, and generational dysfunction. I'm out here willing to link arms with anyone (of any race and gender and persuasion) who has been impacted by prison life and needs to feel less alone in the world. I'm choosing to stand up and tell the truth—a truth you would not hear if I stayed safe in my kitchen over a steaming mug.

If you don’t want to read about it, that's okay with me, because frankly I'm not sure most people are ready to go deep here—

My ACES score is 8.

I was raised by my grandparents for several years.

My biological father skipped on child support, and I didn’t see him for eight years of my upbringing.

I was sexually abused by my stepdad.

My mom went to jail and to trial and we had supervised visitations.

I remember using food stamps to get groceries in an era when that was rare and mocked. We lived in subsidized housing for all of my high school years and my jeans had the designer tags cut out of them by the secondhand stores we had to shop in.

I was put on jury trial myself as a teenager for negligent homicide. I was then put in an adult mental hospital later that year.

I became an unwed mother at 20.

I went to college on a Pell grant and then to grad school in my 30’s on scholarships that I wrote for until 3am while raising three kids and working two part-time jobs.

I was a single, working mom for some of those years.

Nearly everyone I have ever loved has been addicted to something.

I worked for years in community mental health and the public school system where scabies, lice, bed bugs, psychosis, and people peeing their pants was a daily reality in my office.

And yeah, my white son went to prison for playing with guns and drugs.

So you better bet that I sit on my ass in my remodeled kitchen with a mug of freshly brewed coffee and thank God every day that I can—because I damn well know what it is like to NOT have safety and NOT have money and NOT have a voice when bad stuff is happening to me and those I love.

And then, I get up with the energy I have left and fight injustice wherever I find it out here. Next week, I'll be in our Capitol on Tuesday to speak with legislators. I am still writing letters to people inside. Though my son is home, I am still taking collect phone calls from the incarcerated.

I’d like to know if my comment-happy friend is doing the same.

PROVE IT

I don't need to prove to anyone that I grew up with close black friends (in their homes and in their churches), that I was the girl other parents didn't want their kids around, and I don't need to tell you that I speak with people from diverse cultures every week.

But I will tell you all of that—because the black people I know don't do this shit. It's always the white lady running her mouth (or typing furiously online) about what other people should be doing with their time and their resources. It’s always the white lady convinced she is helping the ‘less-fortunate’ (with whom she has never broken bread) by pounding on her keyboard in fits of self-righteousness.

Enough.

Our life experiences are not up for debate nor should they be cherry-picked and stomped on by people who woke up to mainline CNN and stay miserable today.

The world changers are giving thumbs up and sparkle emojis. They are in the comments with a simple thank you for sharing or how can we help?

Heroes, all of you.

Life givers, difference makers, honest and brave people just walking other people home.

Thank you so much for being here. 🖤

Irony

After I cooled off a bit about this whole thing, the irony hit me while talking with my son.

This type of backhanded comment toward another person would not fly in prison. She would have immediately been punched in the throat, and as nonviolent as I try to be—well, I’ll just leave it there.

There is still a world where saying stupid shit gets your eye blackened or lip split. Or gets you killed. People in prison learn real quick how to keep their comments to themselves. They also learn to defend their own positions when it is called for.

And today, I felt it was called for.

So—to my fellow white women who behave this way, stop it. You and I do not corner the market on outrage. You and I (as damn clever as we are) do not know everyone's backstory. You and I have no idea what other people—including other white women—have been through and if you don't like something you read here, keep scrolling. Unfollow. Unsubscribe. Better yet, unplug from your damn screens and take a walk in the real world.

In related news, I am cooking up some merch ideas for Black Sheep Mom loyalists and I think a Best Mom Ever mug might be a nice addition. *Let me know if you'd be interested in winning one.

Leave a comment

For those in our Misfit Lit Book Club, the next Live Zoom meeting will take place next Wednesday, June 17th at 1pm EST. Message me if you're wanting to join and I’ll send you the link! We've been reading Bone Valley by Gilbert King and WOW WOW WOW. No matter where you are in this one, please feel free to join the discussion.

And hop over to the Misfit Lit section on the blog for more book club info and a reading schedule!

Otherwise, things are going really well here. Thank you to everyone for your kind messages and comments on Substack about (and for) my son. Stay tuned for news from parole-land!

I have started and stopped and walked away from my computer, wordless, several times over the past few days. Right now, my thoughts are not flowing out of me as I wish they would—as I know they can.

If I had to diagnose it, I would say that I am spiraling. Even with the gift of words that I possess, I do not know how to explain what is happening in my life—nor can I describe what is taking shape in my heart and my head right now.

I only know that we will never be the same.

Backstory

In December, I learned that I had been betrayed in the worst of ways—for nearly a decade. While I am not ready to discuss these matters openly in a public blog, I share it to illustrate that there are about 25 tabs open in my brain on any given day related to the last ten years of my life: what my gut knew and when, what my heart avoided and why, what I wish I had done and what I will do differently now. This thing alone might have been enough to make me crawl into bed and not ever write again.

And then—

In March, on the morning of my 49th birthday, I got a call from my daughter. She was sitting on the side of the road where Find My iPhone had led her to her boyfriend of three years. He was lying dead in a ditch from a roll-over accident. She had arrived before the police and paramedics, and I would race to get dressed and drive to her, and him, before the medical examiner was on scene. I sat there and watched my baby girl pick grass out of his hair, wanting to fix him, to stay with him—wanting to go with him wherever he had gone.

We buried him on what would have been his 30th birthday, the son-in-law I would not get. For weeks, I would lay down for sleep only to see his lifeless body on the ground. I could only bring my daughter smoothies and comfort food which she could not, would not eat. I would clean her house or take her dogs outside and sit in silence with her on their couch. We moved her out of his house on Mother’s Day.

Somewhere in this blurry timeframe, my oldest son called from prison to tell me that he was finally being paroled—after two years of waiting for this decision to come down. We hurried construction on a new bedroom in our basement and then hosted a parole officer for an in-home inspection. I gathered clothing and bedding, shoes and other necessities. I navigated the phone calls and shifting timelines, began counting the days and battening the hatches for a new voyage.

May dawned, and with it the end of the elementary school year. I continued taking my youngest child to piano and swim class and baseball like nothing else was happening in our lives. I attended field trips and Field Day and a live wax museum and read bedtime stories and made sure to hug him extra while overseeing the teeth brushing and putting Skin Repair on new sunburns and spring bug bites. I hosted a birthday party for him and packed lunches and put the too-small winter clothing away to be donated some time in the next three years.

I also tried to keep my protein intake at lioness levels while following through with all of the treatment protocols from Mayo Clinic— at which I had spent 10 days in early May undergoing a battery of brutal but necessary medical tests for chronic post-viral illness.

Female fertility drops off sharply after age 35, and I now know that there is a damn good reason for that. I collapse into bed every night, thankful but overwhelmed. Satisfied but bewildered. Amazed, but beyond exhausted.

And then—

Two weeks ago, I got another phone call on a random Tuesday morning. This time it was my middle son with his own life news. He is making big changes (which I do not have permission to share). Nevertheless, the Earth shifted again on its axis, and I nearly floated into space. I stood in my kitchen, untethered in the weightlessness and the unknown impact of that moment. Of all of these moments put together.

Being a mother is like nothing else a human can experience—and while I still don’t have the words, I’m gonna try to catch you up on the news we've all been waiting for here at Black Sheep Mom.

One Day At A Time

Before I opened my eyes in that dark hotel room, I thought of him inside of his cell. For years, I have started my mornings this way.

Today—just focus on today.

Of course, I also woke with a pounding in my temples and a tension in my neck that felt like I had been dragging a rope tied around a cinderblock all night. Because I had. I have been holding an entire cinderblock prison cell up in my mind since the start of Covid.

In planning for his release, I didn’t anticipate the headache nor that I would burn my tongue on crappy hotel-lobby coffee and spend the morning feeling that burnt patch against my teeth with regret.

I had always pictured him emerging from the prison gates under the glaring rays of the sun but when I pulled back the hotel curtains, rain spit at me against the glass. It was grey and cold and windy outside. And of course it was—no part of this ride was ever going to be sunshine.

It finally hit me in the shower—they’re gonna have to let him go today.

Naked and vulnerable, an hour before I was scheduled to pick him up, only then did I dare to begin to hope. I was shaky, though. I held onto the shower wall and let the water needle my back. A mixture of adrenaline and weariness, anticipation and fear poured over my shoulders. I felt the years of worry beginning to peel up, lifting in chunks like layers of dead skin. I faced the stream of water and let it sting my face too. I lathered with the cheap hotel soap, rinsed, and let a bit of death trickled down off of me into the drain.

I dressed quickly, in baggy jeans and a black sweatshirt. You would think I would have worn fuchsia or bright Kelly green or my ballcap that says, “Black Sheep” but no, I had just packed solid black instead.

“There is something about black,” Georgia O’Keefe had said, “You feel hidden away in it.”

There is an element of being mom, especially a prison mom, that requires you to stay hidden away—to be quiet. I will not make a scene today. I will not shout nor draw attention. I will simply hug my boy and get him to my car and leave without incident, without giving any reason for them to keep him. So, yeah, I wore black like I was attending a funeral. This thing, this whole thing, was scheduled to die today.

I looked at myself in the hotel mirror for a moment—I was puffy and tired. I looked old. I have aged rapidly while he has been down, and I realized that my son would see me at home tonight, in the light of the real world. I wondered if he would be able to see how much time has gone by and what it has done, not only to him but to me.

It was five point seven miles between the hotel and the prison.

I had double and triple checked for two weeks with both prison staff and with my son to verify his release day and time. During those weeks, I repeatedly dreamt that I had missed the day, had the time wrong, or went to the wrong place to get him. He had called my cellphone the night before to confirm that I was in town, that I was ready. Because he was ready—and all of his stuff had been given away to other block mates.

It’s happening, I promised him. This is our last call from there. Sleep, if you can. I’ll see you tomorrow. 8am sharp.

I drove those five miles with the windshield wipers on high, and when the opening riff of “Mama I’m Comin Home” came on my radio, I snickered out loud. Then my face twisted into a near (but not quite yet) cry—

Times have changed and times are strange,
Here I come, but I ain’t the same.
Mama, I’m coming home.

I pulled into the parking lot at quarter to eight, ahead of schedule—in spite of the long line at Starbucks where my husband had bought my son the Iced Mocha Frappe he had promised him at our last visit. He didn’t want just any old coffee today, he wanted dessert first. And why the hell not? We threw in a few egg and cheddar sandwiches and cinnamon rolls too.

As I got out of my vehicle and walked toward the building, I felt like I was in a documentary, like there should have been cameras to capture this last day. Each step, I walked further into the awareness that this would be the last time I would need to drive to this place. As though it was scripted—I slowed my pace, looked around, and took it all in.

I wasn't prepared for the familiar ache to rise up in me walking across that parking lot—to see other men beyond the fences in the yard in their bright orange hats, in the rain. I relaxed a bit knowing that my boy was not out there today. I practically leapt at the knowing that he would not be out there ever again.

A lump formed in my throat anyway—for all of the moms who were not coming today to pick up their sons.

I walked in the front doors like I had a hundred times before, but this time I marched right past the sign-in clipboard and visitor chairs. No need to declare my jewelry or get a locker key. I wasn’t staying. I walked directly to the front desk agent like I was at a preschool and said, “I’m here to pick up my son.”

The guard, one whom I’ve become familiar with, looked up and smiled. He confirmed my son's last name, and nodded.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll call him down but it will take them about a half an hour to process him. I’ll walk him out when he’s ready. You can wait in your car.”

I thought of the melting iced mocha in the cup holder out there. I thought about the number of times I had confirmed that it was indeed an 8am pickup. I thought about the version of me that decided to leave the hotel with wet hair and how impatient I had been in the Starbucks line because I thought I would be late in getting here—only to be told I could sit in the parking lot and wait some more.

“Okay, see you in a bit.” I said, and smiled.

Do not make a scene.

Of course we would have one final round of prison-life torture. One more wait. It would not, after all, have been a proper prison experience without it.

I have envisioned him walking out over and over for years and though I was about to witness it—I was fidgety and worried and discontented. I decided to wait on the blacktop where the sidewalk meets the parking lot, not in my car. It was still raining so I pulled up my hood over my head.

I will not miss the moment he becomes a free man.

Not for anything in the world.

And then he was.

The door opened and a guard pushed it wide, motioned to my son who had hesitated in the opening, so used to being told when and where to move.

The guard set a garbage bag down on the wet pavement and stuck out his right hand. My son, holding another bag over one shoulder like Rambo, stuck out his free hand and shook the CO’s—an act which would have been forbidden just moments before.

“Don't come back,” the guard said.

“I won't.” My son replied.

Then picking up the second garbage bag, he turned toward me and began walking—one step, two step. Just like the first time I ever saw him walk.

I started to walk toward him.

And then I broke into a run.

Stay tuned, friends.

I want to take this moment to thank all of you for your thoughts, prayers, donations, messages, shares, and incredible support. We have raised $1780 toward his re-entry, thanks to you! This community is so much more than I could have ever imagined.

For my Misfit Lit Book Club friends, I have not forgotten about you! We are about halfway through Bone Valley, if you are following along. I would still like to schedule a Zoom call to discuss the book this month—comment below or message me if you are interested in attending! *Watching Dylan walk out of prison made Leo’s plight all the more real.

Stay tuned for lost essays, unbelievable stories about incarceration (I got a call from someone inside last night), more reveals about our state and our own circumstances (including the rigors of parole)—and hopefully, an interview with Dylan at home.

Leave a comment

This was such a meaningful conversation about the state of American prison through the eyes of our family. What great questions about addiction, punishment, money, prison visits, recovery, and more—Jump in for a listen!

A huge thank you to for her heart, her wit, her brain, and her guts! Talk to you again soon, my friend.

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The horror of modern life is unending.

I even had to make room in my own oversized stainless steel refrigerator by throwing out perfectly good leftovers.

But that wasn’t the worst part.

What really sent me sailing over the edge was unpacking two pints of fresh blueberries. For three straight weeks, I had endured the discovery of mushy berries from the same store. For whatever reason (stress or hormones or any other facet of being female in the world—the doing all of the grocery stuff) in that moment, on that morning I genuinely felt that I could not take another inconvenience. Not even a minor one.

And wouldn’t you know it—the berries were mushy again. I snapped to indignation and victimhood:

“I am so tired of shitty blueberries.” I said out loud.

I paused to lock my elbows dramatically, bracing against the edge of the countertop, against my rising irrationality. The incompetence—the laziness—the waste of time and money this was. I started to concoct mean-spirited assumptions about in-store shoppers. I called them names.

And then I looked up. The high windows over my kitchen shown a bright blue expanse of sky. The sun had just started to peek out from behind gray clouds. A moment of clarity struck—

My son has not seen a blueberry in five years.

As I type, he is sitting on his prison bunk eating a soggy “meat” patty and some cold peas sloshing around in gray pea-water.

People ask me what I would change about the prison system—“How would you make it better?” they challenge me. I do keep a long and detailed list in the event that I am ever gifted a magic-wand, but firstly, as a mom (and a health psychologist), there is no other immediate request than this: Change the way we feed our incarcerated citizens.

(Are you there, RFK Jr.? It’s me, Bridget.)

And while this is partially about that whole ‘we are what we eat’ thing—it's much bigger. American prison food is hazardous to us.

To our collective health.

As in, yours and mine, and that of people we love and want to keep safe.

Prison kitchens are a humanitarian crisis, a public healthcare concern, and a public safety issue rolled into one. And it doesn't have to be this way.

Trials

I have taken some time to read the randomized, placebo-controlled studies wherein groups of incarcerated men were given a few basic nutritional supplements (omegas and multi-vitamins). What researchers found in 2002 should have informed national prison food policy ever since:

Violent incidents involving the incarcerated individuals who received said nutritional supplementation dropped by 37% during the experimental trial. That was a whopping 30% drop from the violence still occurring in the placebo group. *Nothing else in the study nor the prison had been altered.

Afterward, the lead scientist on this project made a shocking claim:

“Having a bad diet is now a better predictor of future violence than past violent behavior. Likewise, a diagnosis of psychopathy, generally perceived as being a better predictor than a criminal past, is still miles behind what you can predict just from looking at what a person eats.”

And these findings have since been replicated though mostly in Britain, Australia, and the Netherlands because American scientists can’t be bothered with it. Obviously, there’s no money in that kind of research.

But think about it—if we could guarantee a near 40% drop in a population’s propensity toward violence, why would the public not opt for funding this option? Ninety-five percent of our incarcerated citizens are coming back to a neighborhood near you and me, and they are returning hungry on too many levels.

And OG Moms know.

What our kids eat undoubtedly impacts behavior, not just in the short term. We want our loved ones to be able to listen and learn, to make rapid connections to consequence, to have stable blood sugar and therefore be less impulsive and irritable, for them to be charitable and kind—not scavenging, hoarding, defensive and emaciated wolves.

My incarcerated son has not eaten fresh fruit—has not even seen a blueberry (mushy or otherwise) in five years. The closest he comes to them is in the visiting room where I could buy him a $3.50 Nutri-Grain Cereal Bar from the vending machine.

And I won’t buy those chemically-gelled bars of glycerin, dextrose, sugar, and corn-fiber. That goo does not contain a single berry. Kellogg’s goes on selling their corporate lies to moms like me at a 600% mark-up—and it is still the best nutrition we can get inside.

My son has been medically underweight for three of the past five years. He was put on a soft foods diet by medical staff to increase his caloric intake, which in actuality is just two extra Uncrustables per day. You, taxpayers, are paying the J. M. Smucker Company a salary to keep my son just above starvation.

“Well, prison isn’t meant to be the country club!”

No it isn’t, but correct me if I am wrong—prison isn't meant to make our citizens more violent nor more unpredictable. If we are in the business of creating rabid dogs rather than offering rehabilitation, we should discuss it. Openly. Often.

Please do not like nor share another news reel about the dangers of “another” repeat "offender" unless you are also willing to talk about the failure of the system which turned him back onto the streets.

Prison—as it exists in this country—is systematically manufacturing communities of starving, desperate, feral human beings. Two million people in the Land of Plenty have to barter, beg, rob, and do favors for unsavory people in order to (partially) fill their bellies with non-food, pre-packaged, nutrient-void slop.

Some of our neediest, most vulnerable (mentally and physically ill) citizens reside in our prisons—and we have the nerve to assume they will “get better” with time served in these places of depravity. Decades of evidence proves that this mindset is the real insanity. Same song, second verse, a little bit louder and a whole lot worse.

Think about the last time you missed a meal or even an afternoon coffee, and then tell me in the comments how you show up in meetings, in long lines, or in the face of increased gas prices when hangry—Then imagine yourself being on the edge of actual hunger every day for five, ten, twenty-five years with high levels of violence and loneliness and degradation in your home.

Rehabilitation, by definition, requires that the providers of said rehabilitation address the functional deficits of the individual undergoing transformation. The deal that we taxpayers have made with the State is that they take custody of those in need of reorientation, and we pay them to provide conditions that will encourage optimal growth and change. They are reneging on our deal, and have been for decades. Prison kitchens (and those running them) are complicit in our crime rates.

I wish I could send my son my mushy blueberries this week.

I wish I could pack him a homecooked meal.

I wish he was not having his mental and physical health destroyed in the process of serving his debt to society—because we will all pay for it when he comes home. He’ll be on state aid, with taxpayer-funded health benefits. Sorrynotsorry about the costs we have incurred to make him more functional on the other side.

That should be happening now.

So What Do We Do?

One of the great parts of the Substack community is that I have linked arms with men and women from all over the country who have been justice-impacted in one form or another.

Last year, I ‘met’ Chandler Dugal here—a formerly incarcerated man who is now hard at work in Maine as not only the author of The Daily Prisoner but also as Director of Operations for the National Prison Debate League, a Senior Paralegal, and an aspiring law student.

We have chatted about prison food on several occasions, and I would love for you to hear his take on what is different in Maine prisons now. I am passing the rest of this piece over to him to share what is possible—and his story should give us hope.

From Chandler:

As Bridget has written, and as I’m sure you all probably intuitively knew, prison food f*****g sucks. Well, most prison food sucks.

Let me explain.

I was transferred from a Virginia Department of Corrections facility to Maine DOC custody on March 17, 2021—St. Patrick’s Day. I was jolted awake at 4:00am by the screeching, grinding sound of the metal door to my cell sliding open. The CO told me to pack my things and bring my small sack of personal belongings with me. Soon I was sitting in a holding cell in the medical wing of the facility, holding a paper take-out box full of oatmeal, runny and overly sweetened to mask the stale flavor of the grains which clearly weren’t absorbing as much liquid as they were supposed to. It was basically the same breakfast I’d had every day for the past fifty days.

I ended my day with a different meal, sitting in COVID quarantine at Maine Correctional Center.

That night there was beef stew for dinner. As I opened the lid of the plastic tray, alone in my cell, at first glance the meal didn’t look all that dissimilar from the “goulash” (i.e., slop) I had gotten used to being fed over the past nine months.

Then I looked closer. The onions looked healthy, not desiccated. The carrots were a deep orange, freshly cut rather than produced from a can. It was made with real beef. Good, hearty stew beef, not ground. It was the first time I’d eaten meat in nearly a year that wasn’t low-grade deli slices or amalgamated with soy. It came with a roll and brownie, both baked in-house.

I assumed this holiday meal would prove to be an exception rather than the rule.

The next night we had chicken alfredo over linguini with a side of steamed broccoli. There was more chicken on that one tray than I had eaten in the past month or more. I don’t think I’d had broccoli since I’d left home. I was genuinely stuffed, and satiated, for the first time since I had been inside.

Over the coming days I realized that every single meal contained at least one fresh fruit or vegetable. As I would soon learn, the latter was almost always grown right at the facility. In the county jail in Virginia we had fresh vegetables once a month, in the form of a side salad on “pizza day.” I don’t remember getting fresh produce once during my two months in a Virginia prison. I remember a lot of rice and beans, bread, and that damned oatmeal.

Another realization struck me on my third day in Maine—

The COs are eating this food too. When I was in general population and eating in the chow hall, I watched officers getting meal trays through the serving slot (a narrow slot in the wall so that the server couldn’t see who they were feeding) just like the residents. Same food, same portions; everyone acting like it was normal. I never saw that in Virginia. Those guys wouldn’t have been caught dead eating our food—except maybe on pizza day, but that’s kind of understandable.

A few days into my time in Maine, I started sleeping better. I started feeling better. This food wasn’t hyper-processed, overloaded with sodium, and made by the lowest bidder. It was real food.

Memorial Day brought an honest-to-God cookout tray. Cheeseburger, hotdog, pasta salad, potato salad, lemonade. On Independence Day we were fed steak and ice cream (not the little cups of vanilla you’d get in elementary school either, but Moose Tracks, which is the best flavor and I will die on that hill). The meat was a little tough to cut without a real knife, but I suppose the lack of real cutlery was understandable. I didn’t hear anyone complaining.

On a random Friday that summer, we had salmon. I don’t even really like fish, but you can be damn sure I ate that salmon.

How did Maine DOC manage to do all of this?

They just decided to.

Surely it costs a fortune though, right?

Maine DOC saves money feeding the people under its charge this way.

Where do all the ingredients come from?

We grow it ourselves.

Savings from growing (rather than buying) produce are put back into improving the quality of items that can’t be made in-house, such as proteins and dairy products. MDOC facility kitchens buy many of these products from local farmers (helping the local economy) rather than, say, buying powdered eggs from a massive conglomerate headquartered halfway across the country.

When the agricultural program grows more produce than the residents can eat (which happened every year without fail while I was in custody) the excess is donated to local food pantries.

So just to be clear: we can give prisoners better food, save money, and help feed the hungry in the wider community.

Don’t believe me? See for yourself:

That’s nice and all, but what about punishment?

The punishment was that I didn’t get to decide what time I could wake up, eat, use the toilet, shower, and sleep for three years. The punishment was not being able to see my family, save for one or two hours a week, and being strip-searched after every visit. The punishment was that I missed birthdays, holidays, and my childhood dog dying. And I had it way, way easier than most.

Look, I get it. There’s a part of the human psyche that wants bad things to happen to “bad people.” There’s a straightforward sense of justice to that. But here’s the kicker. It makes people do more bad things when you treat them (and feed them) like animals. And they act better when you treat them (and feed them) like human beings. So, we can either focus on punishing people, and expect that to rehabilitate them despite all evidence to the contrary, or we can start doing things differently.

Maine serves as the example.

Maine’s prison system used to be every bit as Shawshank-y as Stephen King wrote about. And not just back in the day, but as recently as the mid-2010s. I know, because I lived with guys who had been there for decades. The COs weren’t shy to talk about the good/bad (depending on the moral compass of the particular CO) old days, either. Oh, and there’s a documentary about that, too.

It’s different now. And it’s no small coincidence that big changes in behavior immediately followed big changes in how people were being fed. As stated in the Seeds for Change documentary above, in 2016 Maine DOC started a pilot program for organic gardening at Mountain View Correctional Center. Keep that year in mind as you read the following, straight from a panel presentation delivered by MDOC Commissioner Liberty at a major international corrections conference:

“Over a seven-year period 2017-2024, MDOC accomplished a significant reduction in the following categories:

Assaults Resident on Resident: 77 Percent Reduction

Assaults on Staff: 88 Percent Reduction

Resident Self Injurious Behavior: 98 Percent Reduction

Suicidal Behavior: 65 Percent Reduction

Restrictive housing: 84 Percent Reduction (Over ten year period)

(Less than 1% of Residents now in Restrictive Housing)”

Every Maine DOC facility now has an organic gardening program.

Sure, there’s more to all that success than just food. Normalization, massive reduction in the use of solitary confinement, expanded access to work and educational programming, evidence-based practices and revamped staff training all play a role.

The food, in this humble felon’s opinion, undergirds all of that.

Try building a positive, rehabilitative environment wherein everyone gets pissed off three times a day because they’re eating garbage. Now try doing it at a place where everyone is genuinely excited for their next meal, and the men and women who grew, prepared, and cooked it all sit down together to eat it—with the guards.

Maine’s gardening and fresh-food program doesn’t need to be an outlier. Most of our nation’s incarcerated population is housed in rural facilities. The land is there, waiting to be used. The people are there to make use of it, starving to put some meaning in each day. It’s low-hanging fruit (and vegetables). We can make Maine’s program the nationwide standard, and reap the benefits of what we sow.

How do we do it?

Well…

What if we just decided to?

A huge thank you to Chandler for his struggle and his work! Please subscribe to him below.

It feels like I should have something profound to say this week but I don't.

Whether I am just tired or living in a new stage of acceptance—the second Sunday in May is just the second Sunday in May. I will be skipping past the Mothers Day posts kindly exposing how “hard" this weekend can be. It is no longer consolation that other women are suffering—and it is certainly not a revelation.

Motherhood is nothing but the Olympics of holding on and letting go.

Prior to being the mother of an inmate, I assumed that the bad guys were locked up for a good reason, and that we were all safer as a result. I never asked what was happening in our prisons and frankly, I never cared. That is called passive indifference, and I no longer have the luxury.

Especially on family-centric holidays.

This past week, I heard a mom speak about her son’s suicide inside a local county jail. He had been in a solitary cell for 30 days and all family contact had been denied. After banging on his windowless door for an hour— pleading for help— he hung himself. His mom only knows of his last hours because his fellow inmates wrote to her after his death.

I heard another mom speak about her young daughter who was left alone in a cell, enduring a horrific series of seizures over a 72-hour period. Instead of medical care, she was given solitary confinement—where she died.

I know a mom who called the cops on her teenage son during a mental health crisis in their home, which resulted in him being arrested, charged, and put in an adult prison where he spent five formative years, mostly in an isolation cell.

Happy Mother's Day.

Because all prisoners have moms—Moms who are not allowed to visit, moms who can’t afford to visit, moms who are too far away to visit, moms who can no longer stand to visit, and moms who secretly visit without their friends or family knowing.

I am in the Not Allowed to visit category again this year (more on that here), but it is just one of the many barriers between us.

My son's facility just denied him my snail mail this week—marking it a violation of Prisoner Mail Policy QQ. #22: “Voluminous.” It was a paper print-out of my latest blog post which totaled 13 single-sided pages. Policy states anything beyond 12 pages “poses a threat to security, good order, and discipline.”

They also refused my son several of the books that I sent him last month because they did not have the proper receipt. Though I sent a receipt via email to the warden’s office, it was not the “Invoice Copy” which is, as of recent changes, the required documentation. This receipt, should you ever need it, is buried three layers deep in your Amazon account, accessible on your laptop only. Look for the one labeled packing receipt.

And no—they will not return those books. The mail room employees must have one hell of a library somewhere. I will have to reorder those books, re-paying for the exact same ones.

When you say, Do the Crime—Do The Time, you have no idea what we are saying. Mom, if she hangs in there, does the time too.

I gave birth to my son when I was 20-years-old.

I did not have a college education, I was unmarried, and I lived four hours away from my own family. Determined to do my best, I rushed head-long into being a mom—marrying his dad and inhabiting his dad’s world. We added two more kids before I turned 25. We built a home. I got my first degree. My husband worked from dawn until dusk, and I spent those years moonlighting as a martyr.

Being a stay-at-home mom was the hardest job I have ever done, until I became a prison mom.

Whenever anyone asks, “What would you tell your younger self?” I always think of that naïve and neurotic girl trying to do it all, trying to be all. I want to pull her aside to show her our wrinkles and greys.

What would I say to her? How about, “Slow the fuck down.”

I treated that whole season like a marathon, running breathlessly toward the balloon arch and medal ceremony at the end. For those just tuning in—there is no end and there certainly is no medal.

There are 80,000 moms in a U.S. prison right now. There are 1.25 million kids this weekend with a parent inside razor wire. There are two million American people locked in a cell the size of your half bathroom—and almost 30,000 more will get arrested today.

Never in my younger years did I think my Mother’s Day reflections would include thoughts about prisons and punishment and system failures, but here we are. I introduced myself to a room full of strangers this week as the Black Sheep Mom—and they immediately understood the moniker. I am not, by any measure, alone in this perspective.

When 50% of Americans have had an immediate family member in some type of locked cell, it is an epidemic. Half of our flock are black sheep.

So, no, there will be no brunch at the prison this weekend. There is no hug from my oldest child awaiting me. There is, however, a phone bank in the yard.

My son will wait in a long line this Sunday—no matter the weather—to make a call home. Before I hear his voice, I will be warned that it is a call from a Correctional Facility. I will be offered the option to report this prisoner for extortion or victimization, and I will be given the choice to block the number. I will be thanked for spending my money with GTL on my Mother’s Day and eventually, I will be told that I have one minute to say what's left to say. Then, I'll be hung up on.

And I will be more thankful for these difficult moments than you could ever imagine.

UPDATE:

This Sunday will, Lord willing, be the last Mother's Day that I will have to take a call or visit my oldest child inside prison walls.

He has been granted parole.

Though this is not breaking news for our paid subscribers, I want to thank ALL of the readers who have supported us through these difficult years.

Truth: I am struggling with the enormity of this new chapter, but we are hopeful and grateful and ready as we'll ever be. We have waited so long for this news.

Your subscription to Black Sheep Mom has and will continue to help us with transitions, and the blog will continue to center on carceral themes, the parole processes, and stories of other inmates and their families. My son wants to be a part of telling the truth, post-incarceration. We will NEVER not be working in this space.

My book is also in the works, and I will be releasing some of it sporadically as we move toward publishing.

The Ask: My son will be coming home with no worldly possessions—other than the books we've sent him in prison. From toiletries to bedding to clothing to a phone to a vehicle, he will have to build again from scratch.

If you would like to offer a one-time donation to secure basic necessities for him, we would be so thankful. You can gift any amount through this LINK. Conversely, if you can consider bumping your subscription up to paid during this transition time, I will make sure that every dollar goes toward furnishing his room and meeting his other basic needs. Even $8 a month buys toothpaste, soap, and shampoo!

Mostly, just thank you for being our supporters. You've made all the difference to us. Stay tuned for more reality as it comes. 🖤

The note below is a JPay message from my first Mother’s Day as a prison mom (during Covid lockdowns). What a heartbreak and a blessing to be able to look back, knowing how far we have come.

I married two of them.

A pair of well-worn Red Wing work boots turns me on. I like a guy who can rope and ride and mend the fence with his rough, meaty hands. Frequently, my throwback playlist will offer me “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone,” and I will sing at the top of my lungs, nostalgically:

Where is my John Wayne? Where is my prairie song? Where is my happy ending? Where have all the cowboys gone?

But for all of this damsel in distress dalliance, I have to admit that I have my limits. I cannot stand the site of a guy in a lifted, customized truck.

Instant turn-off.

Without ever seeing his bank account, I know that he spent more on after-market modifications than he invested into a 401k last year. I know (that I know that I know) he is the dude dm’ing every woman in his feed all week long with bullshit like “Morning, beautiful,” just hoping to get some lame, sloppy piece by Saturday night. This is the married guy who thinks the truck-snapback-beer trifecta earns him a weekend hall-pass when his wife takes the kids to her mom's.

Gross.

Not all pick-up owners are him, but every time I see this guy I am compelled to offer him condolences.

Sorry about your tiny penis, bro.

Which brings me to prison guards.

*Yes, I know there are decent and kind and empathetic corrections employees. Yes, I know it is a difficult job. Yes, I also know what I am about to say does not apply to all of them. But, dude—

Never in my life have I seen smaller dicks in one group—at lobby desks, ducking in and out of the visitation room, in their sprawling frat party walking across the parking lot at shift change. We see their penises repeatedly because they have to get them out and measure them in front of us, all of the time.

If I get nervous when visiting, I use the old speech class trick: Imagine them naked. Imagine them naked in their black socks with nothing but that stupid taser on their hip.

Sorry about your tiny penis, bro.

But really, I’m not.

Because they have used their unfortunate shortcomings as justification for treating other people (including my own son) very badly. They took the disillusionment from their high-school locker room to the academy where other small penises taught them how to make it look bigger. Now, they get up every day and tuck it into a costume that allows them to play alpha in a world of men (and women) who only let them think that they have control.

Because trust me, they do not.

In my many years of visiting prisons all over our state, I have watched my fair share of 350+ pound, wheezing, gimpy guards struggle past. These poor souls can barely make it across the room without stopping to catch their breath to open the next door.

I always look at my son in those moments, a silent acknowledgment between us. They wouldn’t stand a chance against him nor the other 99.9% of the men inside without their weapons.

And they know it.

Honestly, I could take them if I had to. All one-hundred-twenty-five pounds of the crackling middle aged, white woman I am. I guarantee I lift heavier than some of these guys—and I've been sick for 4 years.

When it takes nine of them in riot gear to subdue a single, unarmed man who has already been cornered in a cell, when they have to kick inmates in the face and wield pepper-spray like Ax Body Spray on local bar night in 2008—it tells all that we need to know.

“Stop fighting!” they wheeze repeatedly while crushing an incapacitated, motionless prisoner on the ground. No one is fighting you, bro, that is just what an elevated heart rate feels like.

Am I being harsh?

Absolutely not.

These ‘men’ have done things to my son that you wouldn’t imagine if we didn't tell you. Yet, some of these stories are not yet mine to tell, and they may never be. I asked my son if he had examples of poor treatment to share for this piece. He thought about it for a day and then called me back to say, emphatically, no. He warned me about sharing too much.

His former cellmate was suddenly transferred to a psychiatric hospital and pumped full of Haldol after he told the public about his own mistreatment, subsequent to filing a lawsuit against the D.O.C. for injuries received at the hands of a notoriously reckless CO (since cited for breaking another inmate’s back last year).

Someday, though, we envision offering a blog series about the things that have remained unspoken here. Stories that include both the kindnesses and the horrors my son has known in prison under his guardians.

Because someone needs to bear witness.

They openly mock helpless, disabled, and elderly inmates. They laugh at them aloud. As Emmett Tatter told us recently, these guards tell grieving men that they don’t deserve their visiting mothers. They get on the intercom and joke about the psych med-line: “Come get your therrrrrapy!” one shouts over the loudspeaker, with a laugh, every morning in my son’s facility. What kind of person gets off on the pain of others? Who clocks in every day to make a suffering individual’s day harder? Who kicks a man when he is already down?

We deserve to know because we pay their salaries.

These ‘men’ make up lies and charge the people in their “care” with bogus infractions in order to lessen their own workload. They relocate warring individuals into the same cell for sport. They don’t answer calls for help—letting our sons and daughters suffer and die alone in pain. They smuggle drugs into our prisons, and they have sex with rape inmates.

No, I’m not being too harsh.

Last week, I watched through the window as my dog dug up a mole and began to bat it about the yard, flipping it into the air—playing at killing it. I ran onto the deck and shouted at her to stop. She looked up, but she didn’t stop. I had to run toward her to get her to back off and leave that helpless thing alone.

I know that this post is just me standing on the deck of the prisons of this country screaming—we see how some of you treat defenseless, vulnerable beings and we also see the ones among you who do nothing to stop it. Dogs.

Dick-less, the whole lot of you!

When I get to leave the prison where my son resides for the last time, I will thank those who have been kind—and there are a few. And then, in my head, I will slip into full crash-out mode. With everything in me, I will be saying all of the things that I have held in for five years through the hot, stinging eyes of an exhausted but fighting mama wolf—

Don’t think I don’t see your insecurity and depravity, the protected little life you live out behind your bunker walls, where you cower behind a union and a public façade of “honor.” You’re the guy who has to come to a prison to feel any sense of power in your life. You’re the guy who has the chance to make a real difference every day and instead chooses middle school. You’re the guy who will still have to be here, petty and small and ineffective, when we drive away. Good luck, bruh.

Oh and—sorry about your tiny penis.

But really, I’m not.

For all of my blathering about the injustices of prison life, I am also sensitive to the fact that heinous crime occurs and when it does—beautiful, innocent people are brutally victimized, their lives forever altered. I stand with those who have experienced despicable human acts, unspeakable trauma, and life-altering crime.

Several years ago, I was riveted by a podcast about the murder of an 18-year-old women in Florida. I listen to the nine-part series to and from work everyday—obsessively. No stranger to injustice, I was extra, extra appalled by Florida's indifference to finding the truth about her murder. I became a frequent commenter about it on social media platforms, I shared the story every chance I got, and I followed the case closely until in 2024, the man convicted of her murder was let out of prison.

Because he didn’t do it.

I was beyond thrilled to see that the majority vote in both our polls and in personal messages to me made Bone Valley: A True Story of Injustice and Redemption in the Heart of Florida by Gilbert King our 2026 second quarter Misfit Lit Book Club pick.

This book tells the full story of the Leo Schofield case in Polk County, Florida. He was arrested, charged, and imprisoned in 1987 for the murder of his young wife. It would take 36 years behind bars before the true killer was named—and Leo was set free on parole.

If you haven't listened to the podcast feel free to dive in, but this book is an even deeper look into how wrongful convictions happen—a double victimization by our justice system. It is no longer enough to say that the authorities “get it wrong.” In this and so many other cases like it, the investigators and prosecutors manufacture injustice, they cling to unethical behavior, and viciously tamper with witnesses and evidence. And they steal innocent people’s lives in the process.

This book is also about prison life and visiting prison. It is about a family waiting, achingly, for someone to come from incarceration. It is about next level redemption and forgiveness. Ultimately, this book is about what we make out of indescribable heartbreak and loss.

And dear writers,

This book is also about the process one author went through to research and then expose these gross injustices while trying to make a living writing other things. He was out of his depth—he admits that—but he did it anyway, and he helped change the course of judicial history. We get to follow him into the prison and into numerous heated interviews, where raw humanity is exposed on both sides of this story. *If you choose the audio version, you’ll hear the actual interviews.

Heads up: this is a comprehensive book full of details about several crimes, including but not limited to, Michelle Schofield’s murder. Though it is not true crime per se, it is crime descriptive. Sensitive readers should take care.

Unfortunately: This is a new book, so it is only available in hardcover. Please—don’t let that deter you. Check out free sources if you cannot afford to buy this one outright. My library had three copies and if you have Spotify premium or Hoopla, the audio book is free. As noted, it features recordings from the original podcast “Bone Valley,” which you can find here.

Reading Guide for Bone Valley

As always, I have broken this down into do-able chunks that will take us through July. Read at your own pace or follow the schedule below. No one is counting your pages and you can join our discussions if you are not on pace.

Week 1 (Apr 21–27): Chapters 1–2 (30 pages)

Week 2 (Apr 28–May 4): Chapters 3–4 (30 pages)

Week 3 (May 5–11): Chapters 5–7 (45 pages)

Week 4 (May 12–18): Chapters 8–10 (45 pages)

[Meeting to chat?? TBD]

Week 5 (May 19–25): Chapters 11–12 (35 pages)

Week 6 (May 26–June 1): Chapters 13–14 (35 pages)

Week 7 (June 2–8): Chapters 15–17 (45 pages)

Week 8 (June 9–15): Chapters 18–20 (45 pages)

[Discussion #2: TBD]

Week 9 (June 16–22): Chapters 21–22 (35 pages)

Week 10 (June 23–29): Chapters 23–24 (35 pages)

Week 11 (June 30–July 6): Chapters 25–26 (40 pages)

Week 12 (July 7–Mid-July): Chapters 27–End (40 pages)

[Wrap Up Zoom Call, Date TBD]

We will meet a few times this summer on Zoom (I’ll send out links at a later date) to chat about this incredible story. I promise, you will never be the same after reading this. Are you joining us? Please R.S.V.P. in the comments, or message me anytime if you will be reading along!

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Also, please be inspired to invite true crime friends—the more the merrier.

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I say hello only to prompt her, that annoying computer lady with her sing-song list of warnings. I have made a fun habit out of preempting her nonsense by singing along—

“This is a pre-paid call from…If you feel you are being victimized or extorted by this prisoner…Thank you for using GTL…”

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If Jesus were brought to trial and condemned today, we would not frame pictures of a figure hanging on a wooden cross. No, we would have to iconize an empty white garment draped over a metal gurney.

His death was a state-sanctioned, politically-endorsed execution.

But nothing to see here—the rainbow eggs and jelly beans are back!

It is time to pull our white shoes from the closet and dig out the pastels. Those of us who believe or kinda believe or try to believe or used to believe but still do the family obligation thing will shimmy into our Sunday best, gather together, and hug all of the peoples inside the steeples. We will join in song and celebration—the tech team and floral swags, on point.

We have dutifully ordered more basket filler and yard toys from Amazon (an evil incarnate) but, hallelujah, the loan came through just in time to make a down-payment on the Easter ham after the St. Patrick corned beef put us in the hole last month.

It’s all watercolors and bluer skies, birth and renewal and the hope of things to come—what a beautiful season to celebrate a human execution. Because, like it or not, Easter is fundamentally about crime-and-punishment.

Before we get to the third day, we have to walk through the first day and witness Jesus’s death as it was intended—an example of how power elites deter social uprisings and regime change by the poor, dirty, rebel outsiders.

And that is all well and good if you take comfort in the redemptive possibilities offered by Jesus’s life and his progressive message, but the chocolate crosses in the grocery store check-out are a bit over the top. Someone, somewhere in a corporate meeting actually pitched the idea of making a candy mold of a human torture device.

And then they marketed it.

Since my son went to prison, I have refused to wear a cross.

You can call me too sensitive or ridiculous or even sacrilege, but until you are in my shoes maybe don't. God may very well have allowed the political torture of his own son, and you may find solace in the symbolism, but if that God knows my heart (and any God worth worshiping would) he sees why I can no longer stomach—let alone promote—governmentally sanctioned blood lust by adorning myself, in all things, a silver cross.1

There were no Catholics at the death of Jesus.

There were no Evangelical Christians there either.

Shockingly, no one at the murder of Jesus was wearing a cross at all. Not even his closest friends and family—which was, in reality, a whole bunch of moms and aunties.2

For me, Easter is about a middle-aged woman watching her son be dragged before the courts. It is a seasonal spotlight, if not for all of its nostalgia, on what man has historically done to other men in the name of ‘justice.’

I find it rather confusing to look around in the Year of Our Lord 2026 and see that it is the Christians in the crowd still chanting for the Death Penalty. God Bless Texas and the whole Bible Belt still wants to fund harsher prisons and DeSantis down in Florida with his “swift justice”— what a God-fearing man they say.

What Would Jesus Do?

Well, there are clues.

A first-century doctor named Luke interviewed eyewitnesses to Jesus’s final hours. He reported verbatim what people heard Jesus saying to the filthy, lying, thieving criminal next to him: “I’ll see you later at my house.”3

Then there was that one time the religious leaders dragged some poor woman accused of adultery to the center of town and literally threw her in front of Jesus—asking him to endorse the death penalty on her for a “crime” that would have involved not just her but a [conspicuously absent] male counterpart.

Jesus responded, and I quote, “If you’ve never done anything wrong, go ahead.”4

Awkwardly, everyone just left.

Jesus also told a whole bunch of tattle-tale, lawyering zealots to “Stop worrying about other people’s failures and deal with your own.”5

His enduring message was flat out—judge less harshly, forgive more, have mercy on other people. He flipped tables over abuses of power. And wait for it—he died to offer redemption.

The Bible fails to mention chocolate bunnies, but it does feature a few text threads about goats. Specifically, it talks about sacrificial goats and frankly, I think Russel Stover has missed an incredible merchandising opportunity here.

In Jesus’s time, during the annual purification ceremony of Yom Kippur, it was Hebrew tradition for an official to strap the “sins” of the community to a poor, unsuspecting goat which was then led out of town and abandoned to die a horrible demon-death in the wilderness somewhere far, far away from the people who had strapped all of their crap to its back.

They called Jesus the Sacrificial Lamb as a result of that heinous tradition—Behold him who takes away the sins of the world, and all of that.6

What kind of barbarians would do such a thing?

Well…

It’s us.

The idea that society must symbolically transfer human wrongdoing onto another—animal or person—as an act of atonement is now American. We are still very much scapegoating. We have even monetized it and convinced good people that it is patriotic.

Every day, we bundle up all of the sins that we, the chosen few, have deemed abominable: addiction, sexual deviancy, shoot—add poverty and mental illness in there too, and then we cast the animals out. Go be somewhere else. Don’t get any of that on the rest of us. Die alone, and we'll call it justice.

We should just own it, friends—we are Old Testament folks, not a nation of “Jesus followers” because if you believe that Jesus was capable to take away the sins of the world that means that you have to believe anyone can be redeemed and restored in real-time. Not “prayed for” and then injected with poison for their sins.

If you put on pastels and celebrate Easter, then you have to serve redemption for breakfast, lunch, and dinner the rest of the year too. Celebrating Easter means that we are responsible to come up with systems that search for redeemable qualities in people and offer them what Jesus offered—another chance to live and live with renewal and abundance and all of that weird Jesus Saves! stuff. Call me crazy, but a Christian nation should be doing Christ-like things.

I've no other way to say it—mass incarceration and capitol punishment violate the principals and examples and teachings of Christ's life, and our current criminal justice system renders his death useless.

It would take me weeks to unravel the arguments for and against the death penalty here and, frankly, I am not going to do that. You already believe what you believe about killing people for killing people based on what you have seen and heard and done (and what Insta accounts you follow) in this life. Your ideas about judicial homicide, are yours, and mine are mine.

This blog is not my attempt to convince anyone of anything.

But society deemed it necessary to cast my son into isolation to be hungry, beat-down, and shamed for his sins of addiction—with a whole bunch of their shit strapped to his back. Forgive me if I tend to see our country and all of its gross contradiction in full-color now.

I cannot stand talk of grace and redemption, when the people speaking those words vote for harsher judgement and steeper punishment for drug addicts.

Where is the mercy of the cross here, friends?

When I hear the stories of the men and women who have woken up to find themselves in prison this morning—including those on death row—I take note of their filthy childhoods, the squalor and poverty they have endured. I hear about unspeakable abuses upon them as children, where mental illness and disease and ‘undesirable’ genetic traits altered their understanding of the world. I hear of cycles of addiction and isolation and the abject failure of the adults who were supposed to care for them—foster systems, school systems, juvie systems.

I also know from personal experience that one moment, one bad decision can alter your life permanently. As a result, I could never be the first to throw a stone or flip a switch.

As the great writer and attorney Clarence Darrow once wrote, “I’ll believe in the death penalty when they start executing rich people.” And to his point, I think it's time that they just release the full Epstein list already.

Happy Easter, America!

Links to a few good books on the reality of American death penalty:

Crossing the River Styx (The Memoir of a Death Row Chaplain) by Russell Allen Ford

Last Words of the Executed by Robert K. Elder

Here is the recording of today’s Zoom Call where we discussed Tolstoy’s Resurrection—a mammoth piece of literary humanity. A huge thank you to those who joined in, and a big welcome to those of you watching now!

TLDR; Tolstoy is a master. Read this book.

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We will meet again on Weds, April 22nd at 1pm (EST) to launch Q2’s Misfit Lit Book Club pick (take poll below). The link for that meeting is [HERE], but I’ll send it out beforehand too!

The Summary of today’s call:

Tolstoy wrote Resurrection as a moral indictment of the criminal justice and prison systems of his time (1890s). More than a century later, the unsettling questions he lobs over the fence still remain unanswered.

Firstly, let us consider his title—

Why do you think Tolstoy named this novel ‘Resurrection’?

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I promise that it was mere coincidence that we have ended this novel just days before Good Friday and Easter—the pinnacle of the Christian Church calendar. For the record, Tolstoy had developed life-changing internal conflicts with the Big C church, and he was openly wrestling with the orthodoxy. He found himself, as is clear in this book, far more invested in his own self-inquiry and moral action rather than institutional rigmarole.

Tolstoy chose to end this book with a reading of Christian texts. Why? Was it helpful to you in driving his points about morality home? Or nah…

When a “system” causes harm, who is responsible?

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Every system is made up of the human parts which make it function. Courts are manned by human beings, laws are written and re-written by human minds, juries are made up of twelve homo sapiens and their human opinions.

If a “court” then gets something wrong, who should be held responsible? Not the judge (who has immunity), nor the lawmakers (who have immunity), nor the juries (who have immunity and anonymity). Essentially, in our model, no one will ever be responsible for taking someone’s life from them wrongly or pronouncing false/harsh/misguided penalties.

In the book, we read about Katyusha being sentenced to hard labor in Siberia over a clerical mistake. A brief misunderstanding in sentencing guidelines results in her being sent away for brutal punishment—and this still happens every day in this country. Who is responsible for wrongful convictions or for abuses in prisons? Could it be us, the taxpayers, who pay to keep it going?

What was the most impactful social encounter of this novel for you?

Leave a comment

We have so many options from which to choose—

1. The rich people eating so grossly, concerning themselves with frivolity, indulging only their senses.

2. The jury.

3. The poor kid who breaks the law out of necessity.

4. Encounters at the prisons.

5. The brother-in-law scene.

6. The visit to the peasants.

7. The exiles who are dropping like flies on the march to Siberia.

8. The visits to officials for help.

9. Insert your own ______________.

Personal Reflection

For me— it was the discussions about prison conditions with “good people” who were “just doing their job.”

A large chunk of this book witnesses Nekhlyudov (a respected person in society) petition authorities, political acquaintances, and corrections staff for reasonable interventions, visitation, and policy clarifications—and he is met with roadblock after roadblock at every turn.

This part of the book is not fiction!!

It often feels like no one really cares when it is your incarcerated loved one who needs someone to intervene with human care. My son went three years without dental intervention, in spite of pain, in spite of him asking for help through proper channels, and in spite of me petitioning from the outside on his behalf through both legal and medical channels.

Over and over again, my concerns fell on deaf ears at the prison level. When I visited the Capitol and met with elected officials about my concerns, they referred back to the hapless D.O.C. for answers. The heads of our D.O.C. will not reply to any requests and the pencil pushers and PR people below them are indifferent, aloof, and rude—on their best day.

IMO, Tolstoy accurately characterizes each of the law men, overseers, officials, and prison employees I have known. They (and their families) will tell you that they are “good” and “just” people doing society a favor by upholding policies. After all, they’re “just doing their job.”

But rules books are not moral, in and of themselves.

Laughing at an inmate in pain is not justice. My son literally had an corrections officer point at him from the control panel of his pod and laugh like a kindergartener would—he said it was a na-na-na-boo-boo moment, a grown man in uniform pointing and laughing. My son was then cuffed up and sent to the hole for telling him to “grow the fuck up.”

So, yeah, coming to work and choosing to treat people less than you does not make you society’s best—I don’t care what badge nor experience you hold. Looking away when someone needs help isn't honorable. In case it needs saying, beating handcuffed and isolated people is low-life behavior—and is far too common for me not to mention in the wake of this book.

Tolstoy knew it in 1899, and ain't shit changed.

Resurrection suggests that the biggest problem isn’t bad laws or prison conditions, but rather the moral indifference of ordinary people.

Other considerations we touched on:

1. Jury deliberation: Even good people on a jury can be instructed wrongly. What moral responsibilities do we have as citizens to be informed jurists? What moral responsibility does the court have to correct errors/delays in sentencing (in real-time, not years later)?

2. Bureaucratic Indifference: People are being paid to look away. When and how do we hold our elected officials accountable for high recidivism rates, death rates, drug smuggling by prison officials?

3. Continued Social Biases: Why did the Oscars snub The Alabama Solution? Why do we still support the death penalty when it has not deterred crime?

4. Prison Failure: “Prison cannot guarantee our safety, because those people don’t stay inside forever. They let them out. It works the other way round: these institutions drag men down to the lowest levels of depravity and vice, and this increases the danger.” Part II, Chapter 34, 1899

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Russian Tea Cakes Recipe

And now, for the fun part.

I have had this recipe for over twenty years, thanks to my incredible chef-friend Karina. It is a worthy throwback this week—to simpler times in my life, to imperfect messes in the kitchen, and chats over [coffee] tea. Here is the OG recipe card:

Ingredients

• 2 cups butter, softened

• 1 cup powdered sugar (plus more for dusting)

• 2 teaspoons vanilla

• ½ teaspoon salt

• ½ teaspoon almond extract

• 4½ cups flour

• 1½ cups nuts (pecans, if you have them)

Instructions

1. Cream together the butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla until smooth and light.

2. Gradually mix in the flour, salt, almond extract, and nuts. The dough will thicken—let it.

3. Form into a ball, cover, and chill in the refrigerator for about 30 minutes.

4. Roll into 1-inch balls and place on a cookie sheet.

5. Bake at 400°F for 8–10 minutes, until just lightly golden.

6. While still warm, dust generously with powdered sugar.

Mostly, enjoy with a friend who lets you be you.

*Gluten free? Dairy Free? → Try [this beautiful recipe] instead.

Our Next Book—

If you haven’t noticed, we read differently here.

The Misfit Lit Book Club is an option for people who want to dig a little, question some things. This is a small group of readers who endeavor to change the world.

Our next book will not be Russian Lit but I promise it will be impacting, nonetheless. If you're interested, you’re welcome to check it out next round. Please take a second to vote for what you would like to read next time (touch the answer you want to vote).

The reveal is coming!

If you think you might want to join in next quarter, reply ‘book club’ or email me to be included in future book club updates.

Leave a comment

And yeah, that tracks.

It’s spring here in the north where we are all a bit grey and bloated. I have also recently endured another nasty viral outbreak in the wake of stress and travel, and this time, it has manifested itself as open sores on my face. I am not only an anonymous manatee, I look like one who got chewed up by a boat prop. All fleshy and bobbing about in life— a sea cow, a water potato, an aquatic marshmallow with scabs.

Thanks, Google, for pointing it out.

In related news, I am turning forty-nine next week. I had geared up to ignore this birthday, to file it away as insignificant—forty-nine is an odd number with no milestone effect, no real purpose other than to mark the last of a decade. The end of something. “It’s just another day,” I'll say with a coy flick of the wrist.

But you’re here for honesty, so—forty-nine is actually a big deal to me. I made it through another brutal year of my kid’s incarceration and weathered a bunch more crap that I still haven’t processed well enough to share with you. The dealer dealt some real garbage for the last round, but I am still playing the hell out of my hand.

If for no other reason, I am here to celebrate that.

When I was a kid, I used to spend my entire recess on the swings next to a dark-haired girl named Nikki. Every day through first (or was it second?) grade, we would pump our legs up to the sky and sing The Gambler by Kenny Rogers—in its entirety—as loud as we could.

“Every gambler knows that the secret to survivin’ is knowing what to throw away and knowing what to keep.”

At forty-nine, I am so much better at knowing what to throw away than I have ever been. That is, I think, precisely what our forties are for—dropping the expectations. Letting go of the nonsense. Jumping off of the magical-thinking train that hauls us through our thirties.

Case in point:

No one is taking you to Ireland for your birthday, Bridget.

Take your damn self.

I am definitely not offering claims on the year ahead. I’m either gonna do it, or I’m not. It’s either gonna happen or it won’t.

Parole, better health, writing my tell-all book.

I now accept that life rarely goes the way I want—and certainty never in the preferred time frame. Just yesterday, I was twenty-five and this week, I’m forty-nine—with a totally different set of eyes, a different heart, different beliefs, and damn it, different skin.

I would like to take a moment to apologize for my former proclamations about graceful aging—It turns out that I will be spending just a few minutes of my “one wild and precious life” lamenting my youthful skin and formerly supple joints. It turns out, I lament—a lot. The truth is, you can be grateful and still mourn.

Sure, there was a brief season of acceptance when the first grays popped up but I see now that that was just curiosity—the flaming afterburners of youth, the thrill of climbing to new altitudes.

I spent my early forties eating up Instagram shares, conjuring the energies of the matured muses like Helen Mirin and Meryl Streep. It never dawned on me that they both have professional hair, makeup, and wardrobe staff to help out with gravity.

The hard truth is that passing a mirror at forty-nine leaves me genuinely gobsmacked. Someone please tell this gets easier because I am not accepting my face slowly disappearing with any grace whatsoever. It was much easier to “accept” myself when my skin was starting to sag. It is a completely different scenario now that it has sagged.

Past tense. Done deal.

And yes, I know there are levels to this, dear sixty and seventy and eighty-year-old friends. I know that you find my musings at this mile marker a bit silly. I know that I will experience more and more astonishment on this journey, if I’m blessed more decades, but nevertheless—my creases tour has begun in earnest. Even my knees have developed frown lines. My neck-skin started giving ‘tortoise’ this year. You don’t come back from reptile neck without surgery and, thanks but no, I’m not chancing death from anesthesia because I don’t like my décolletage in family pictures.

Anyway, I finally understand at my core why Diane Keaton wore turtlenecks in July and why Nora Ephron resonated so well. Year forty-eight was the year that I started considering filters. Then I deleted Facebook. Then I stopped posting on Instagram. I figure, if I have to use a filter on my face (which makes it not actually my face) the picture isn’t that important. That's not thriving. That's screaming help me!—I’m desperate to be someone else. And btw, the ‘90s trends on socials are killing me right now.

What were you like in the 90s, mom?

Forty-nine years ago this week, my mom named me after a first-generation Irish immigrant—a true Bridget if ever there was.

A 1910 census places that Bridget as head of household after she was widowed at twenty-six when her husband drowned in Lake Superior. She was left with five children under the age of eight in the wilds of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

To survive, and keep her kids alive, she sold hardware goods door to door on foot, in a region of the country that averages eighteen FEET of snow per year. She walked those streets in heavy, wool dresses and flimsy leather lace-up boots. She never remarried. She never held a drivers license. And shockingly, she never posted a selfie.

She just lived her damn life.

I have a picture of her standing out in front of her home, the one she owned free and clear as a single woman before World War II. Tough as nails, sweet as pie, with her shock white hair and deep wrinkles. She lived independently until her kids insisted that she move to Detroit with them during the auto-boom, where she eventually died on her eighty-ninth birthday.

Our name, Bridget, means strong. Bridget—the prop-scarred manatee, the ancient turtle with sagging skin, the woman without a filter. Let’s do this, forty-nine…

"Aging is not for the weak. One day you wake up and realize that your youth is gone, but along with it, so go insecurity, haste, and the need to please. You learn to walk more slowly, but with greater certainty. You say goodbye without fear, and you cherish those who stay. Aging means letting go, it means accepting, it means discovering that beauty was never in our skin— but in the story we carry inside us." —Meryl Streep

Coming up this month on Black Sheep Mom—

We will meet LIVE next Friday, March 27th at 1pm (EST) to discuss Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy.

Here is the LINK for the Zoom Call. (Passcode, if needed, is c6uW9A)

This will be the final meeting for this book, and all are welcome to join. I'm bringing Russian Tea Cakes (recipe share pending)—feel free to come with food and beverage or whatever makes you comfy.

We will meet again in mid-April when our next book (and reading schedule) will be announced. Reminder: we read one book per quarter. Please give me an idea where we're heading below.

Lastly…

We're still looking toward a favorable parole outcome. Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers this month. If you want to keep the coffee flowing, we could definitely use a few more pots.

Buy My Son A Coffee

If you have landed here, you have, no doubt, traveled some distance in life. You have come from places others can hardly imagine. Black Sheep Mom doesn’t just appear in any feed, it arrives to the passionate souls.

We are so lucky to have you here.

My name is Bridget, and I have a son in prison.

When you have an incarcerated child and you dare to mention it, the looks are humbling. A record scratches somewhere and the music stops. People try to be gentle, but nonverbals betray them. Feet shuffle, hands fidget, eye contact gets weird.

In that moment, a question hangs between us: What did he do?

The question itself is common, and maybe justified, but I often make it about me. I carry a heavy sense that I, his mom, somehow contributed to a bad-ness in the world.

What kind of parent were you?

Have you no shame?

Well, there are three versions of every story: yours, mine, and the truth.

There are nearly two million people incarcerated in the United States, and every one of them was born to a mother. Until we are in it, we can remain blissfully unaware that 50% of Americans have a relative living inside of an American jail or prison.

And in spite of these facts— the stigma is enough to keep a suffering, perplexed mom silent. I have, in fact, been quiet for a long time. Not because I am ashamed of my son, but because I have been keenly aware that the outing of these truths could be a liability to my professional reputation and/or make other people uncomfortable. You see, I’m not just a prison mom.

I am a licensed psychologist. I have three other children. I have a spouse and seemingly shiny life that you would never know is linked to prison matters.

But I am over all of that.

Black Sheep Mom isn’t just a personal tale — it’s a call to understand how incarceration affects all American people. It is a reckoning.

My posts include real-time stories from prison visits and calls, emotional honesty, policy insights, and links to facts and figures which impact not only our family, but yours.

Because what my son and two million other inmates are exposed to, exposes you.

Americans collectively spend over $2 billion a year as taxpayers only to see over two-thirds of our prisoners re-arrested within three years of release. Over 95% of State prisoners are slated to come back to the community at some point in the future, and a full 46% of them will be reincarcerated within five years.1

All of us are getting completely ripped off.

Please Know

I am not here to push an agenda.

I am Team Us.

Black Sheep Mom is not a platform to convince you of anything, but to open a discussion because frankly all of the red people, the blue people, those who have stars or those who have none upon thars— everyone is welcome here.

Please jump into the discussions within these most popular posts:

Behind the Wall

Your presence here matters more than your subscription tier.

Most of my posts are open to the public, some are not. Sometimes the information that I have to share is personal. Given that my son is housed in a maximum security prison at Level Four, it is not safe to allow the general public, the D.O.C., and casual trolls access to these posts. Details about our lives are reserved for our community, for those who are invested in the discussion and change for the better in this world.

Paid subscriptions 100% fund my son’s commissary, book purchases, phone calls, and JPay messages. Our paid subscribers are life to us. You are sustaining a real man in a real prison in real-time, and there are no words that will ever convey our gratitude.

I send out an email newsletter every other Friday. On alternate weeks, I throw in extra content, chats, throwbacks, and other insights for paid subscribers.

Lastly, if you like a challenge, join our Misfit Lit Book Club! We read one justice-adjacent book per quarter and meet on Zoom to chat periodically. I would love to see you there.

Never miss an update—every new post is sent directly to your email inbox. For a spam-free, ad-free reading experience, plus audio and community features, get the Substack app. And always, message me or comment. That's what I'm here for!

🖤 Love, Bridget

For the next minute only, do NOT think about a white bear.

Okay, go.

⏳️

You’re thinking about a white bear, aren’t you?

Don’t Think About It

The above psychology experiment, pioneered by the late Daniel Wegner, proves that our attempts to suppress thoughts often make them more persistent.

This is called the ironic process theory.

Trying not to think of something can paradoxically increase its presence in our minds—resulting in either better observation and understanding or increasing our anxiety, obsession, and self-control failures.

It depends on what you are “not” thinking about.

In my case, the state of life inside American prison is something that I have implored myself not to dwell on. Not because I don’t care (clearly I do), but because I have to function every day.

I flew to Texas last week, and as always, I left home with a bag of mixed thoughts. Even after years of doing this, flying to another state makes me feel like I have left my son at an abusive daycare—as if me being right outside the door would protect him anyway.

Leaving home just increases the odds that white bears will appear. White bears will come up in conversation with Uber drivers. I will pass white bears on my way to a hotel. And the damn heartless news cycle will show me dozens more.

Case in Point

“Everyone knows you can get more drugs in prison than you can outside,” said Michigan's House Rep Pothusky in a statement before a February 24th hearing on the condition of Michigan prisons.

“Do we know where they are coming from?” asked another Representative.

“I can tell you that they are not being parachuted over the walls,” testified a former MDOC employee.

Several former employees, as well as the man who independently oversees Michigan’s prison conditions, shared personal knowledge that drugs are—by and large—coming in through State employees. Covid proved that, they said.

More specifically, Corrections Investigative Officers were openly called out as known smugglers of contraband. State Investigators work for internal affairs—they are the prison system’s internal police. They exist to investigate misconduct, corruption, crimes inside facilities, and [sometimes, maybe kinda sorta] staff wrongdoing. They organize the K-9 drug searches, for goodness sake.

Just so we’re clear—

The people who are paid to ensure that the prisons are safe are the ones slipping illegal drugs into strategically placed mop buckets in said facilities.

That was the sworn testimony last week.

I watched that hearing on a flight after a friend from Michigan texted me the link. White bear, white bear, white bear. During much of it, I was shaking my head so violently that the man in the seat next to me must have thought I had a seizure disorder.

I met his eyes twice to assure him that I was okay.

But I was not okay.

As the committee sat through the testimony about prison conditions and drug smuggling, I was hearing LIVE on YouTube what my son has told me privately for years. I pictured him on his bunk. I pictured his junkie cellmate pacing the floor beside him.

And then I put my phone away and begged myself not to think about the white bear for a little while.

You Do the Hokey-Pokey

We all know that there are drugs inside our prisons, and that the problem is worse than it has ever been, but—

Do we know about the assembly line of fatal overdoses?

Do we realize that there are entire units standing like statues in fentanyl folds—right in front of the guards—and no one is doing anything?

*Watch The Alabama Solution to see it with your own eyes.

And while the DOC still wants us to believe that visitors and families are the main source of contraband, study after independent study has revealed that staff violations make up the bulk of contraband-related incidents every year.1234

As a family member, I can scarcely get a piece of lint past the guards when I check in.

I am not allowed to wear hoodies or jackets to the prison. My pockets are turned inside out. I take off my socks and hand them over. My shoes go through scanners. I walk through metal detectors, barefoot, and then get fully patted down (around the bra line and then a nice inner thigh to ankle rub). I open my mouth, lift my tongue, shake out my ponytail, and turn myself around.

Clap, clap, clap.

That’s what it’s all about.

Even if a family member could get one small piece of K2 paper past the hokey-pokey at the entrance, how we pass it to our loved one while under constant video and staff surveillance in our visit is beyond me.

I have to throw away all food wrappers before delivering food to my son from the prison vending machine. I am not allowed to bring him water in a cup. In fact, I have to stand at the drinking fountain and drink my own cup of water—no cups are allowed between us. I sit across from him at a low, see-through acrylic table for each visit and I am allowed only two moments of contact—one hello hug and one at goodbye—both closely watched by multiple staff personnel on either side of us.

When our visits are over, he is taken out and strip searched—the kind that requires a bend and cough. Every. Single. Time. Even if we had achieved the impossible to this point, there is no paper nor contraband making it beyond that point without guard approval.

Trust me, as a witness to this whole thing. It is far easier for an officer to be shady. And they have motive.

One single drug-soaked piece of paper can fetch upwards of $35,000 inside a correctional facility. These employees are making $50,000 a year to put their lives in danger every day inside a toxic and corrupt work culture where no one is watching them watching. This isn’t rocket science.

Google “drugs smuggled by corrections officers in [your state]” just for fun—

I found that a New York prison guard had 49 drug-laced pages on him and another day in the same month, another CO had an entire comic book of drug sprayed paper en route to his network of dealers inside.5

It isn’t the families fueling the drug epidemic in our prisons.

White Bears

As if on cue, on the day following the hearing that I had watched on the plane, there surfaced a news article about a man named Casey Wagner—an Arsenal Sargent at (yup) a Michigan prison.

The report detailed his arrest on February 20th. Another huge white bear sighting. Sgt. Wagner had been busted with over 196 guns, dozens of homemade explosive devices, and a whole bunch of stolen prison munitions, pepper spray, and riot gear.

Weapons and gear that, I will remind you, Michigan taxpayers bought.

As usual, I went down the side trails with my little red basket because my son lives in those twisted forests—and what a treasure trove of more bear droppings I stepped upon. Sargent Wagner was also found in possession of one ounce of methamphetamine as well as packaged, saleable marijuana—enough to be worth thousands of dollars inside.

This is a man who had been stationed at the front gates of an American prison for years, positioned perfectly to allow the free-flow of contraband. The DOC statement about his arrest is a cut-and-paste which assures us that the department is aware of this one bad actor. Except he’s not.

Here are just a few recent news stories from Michigan. Separate MDOC employees. Separate MDOC prisons. Separate dates. *Follow the links to read the articles.

Prison guard charged for trying to get drugs into UP prison

• The estimated value of the seized items was approximately $443,000 per Michigan State Police.

• 15 sheets of suspected K2 paper, 50 A12 suboxone strips, 514 N8 suboxone strips, 74 grams of marijuana wax and 62 grams of methamphetamine were seized.

MDOC officer sentenced for smuggling drugs into prison

• Employed by MDOC since 2000.

• He pled guilty to nine felonies: three counts of delivering narcotics or cocaine, plus two counts of manufacturing or delivering a controlled substance and one count of maintaining a drug house.

Michigan Corrections Officer sentenced for smuggling drugs inside prison

• He was caught smuggling 151 strips of Buprenorphine.

• His charges carried a possible 12 years in prison—he got 90 days.

Whistle-blower alleges corruption at Michigan Department of Corrections

• This source has named over 50 MDOC employees involved in drug smuggling activities including current and former prison guards, nurses, and “non-custody” staff responsible for inmate support.

Former Michigan Corrections Officer Charged with Drug Distribution

• This officer had “54.8 grams of methamphetamine, 309 suboxone strips, 10.2 grams of heroin, five syringes of what was assumed to be liquid THC, a plastic bottle filled with marijuana wax, six Oxycodone pills and 5.86 grams of cocaine on prison grounds.”

• He faced up to 90 years in prison. He got three (which is seven years less than my son got for some methamphetamine dust in a baggie).

Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Against Lakeland Correctional Facility

• A Michigan mom sued MDOC after learning about a [known] drug smuggling operation that killed her son.

• This case involved a female MDOC corrections officer, her inmate lover, and them smuggling drug-laden basketballs into the prison yard.

• One man died and two were hospitalized (in one week) but no official action was taken.

And it’s not just in Michigan.

It’s everywhere.

There are so many white bears in the corrections world that even if you don’t want to picture them, you have no choice now.

Update: Parole

Please visit the chat for more about where we are this month. Prayers, please!

Update: Your Support

Black Sheep Mom is now one year old and subscription renewal season is upon us! If you signed up to support us last year, you're probably getting a notice to renew.

Your support has continued to allow my son basic necessities in prison, and you've given me the inspiration to keep writing. You’ve no idea how many times the words “you have a new subscriber” has brought me to tears. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.

Maybe you are able to become a Founding Member or maybe you can make the bump up to a yearly subscriber this time, but if a paid subscription is not possible for you right now, there are still so many other ways to share the love—your likes, comments, shares, and restacks bring more readers and support our way too. Please consider sharing my emails when you can!

Share Black Sheep Mom

As always, you can buy my son a one-time coffee HERE too. For reference: A four-ounce bag of coffee is about $10 and that lasts him five or six days.

Update: Misfit Lit Book Club

We are now more than halfway through Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy. You can find all of the book club updates in a separate tab on my home page. Click below:

Misfit Lit Book Club

Please plan to join us on Zoom on Friday, March 27th at 1pm (EST) through this LINK where we will discuss Resurrection in its totality and explore what we have taken away from this very underrated work. I will be there LIVE with tea and cake because this Zoom will be the week of my birthday and anyway, who needs an excuse for tea and cake?! Please bring your lovely self and all the treats you desire.

**Even if you have not read the book or are just a few pages in, you are welcome to join us! Always.

This chat is for anyone standing in the high winds of Life.

We discussed the realities of accepting what is, looking for the good, learning to let go, setting boundaries, and listening to our bodies when they need to rest.

In addition to having an awesome name (which she spells correctly, lol), Bridget offers a gentle, accepting embrace for us all. Her own story has inspired me, and I'm so grateful for her loving work in the world!

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An ever increasing desire to scale the steps of my Capitol building and flip someone off to their face.

If you know, you know.

In my home, I am the malcontent who obsessively clears the countertops of where-did-all-of-this-come-from, the maniac who purges the junk drawer and bathroom cabinets, the house-elf who throws away the leftovers while muttering and sighing.

I am also the one who neatly gathers our tax forms into a clean manila envelope every year.

As the 2025 statements came rolling in over the past two months, I felt every bit of my age. And while complaining about taxes is the very thing that birthed our modern nation (and remains a national pastime), my irritation is very specific—

I wrote a $720 check last year to fund incarceration. So did my husband.

And so did you.

Of course, if we factor in the costs for community policing and courts, it's more like $1,700. Worse—that’s more than we paid for our local libraries, fire departments, emergency services, and local parks combined in 2025.

“Well, that's the price of keeping our neighborhoods safe,” you say. “If that is what it takes to keep criminals off of my street, I'll pay double.”

And to that, my inner Columbo smiles and interjects—

It’s just… one little thing.

Probably nothing but what’s bothering me is…

If safety was the end-product, I wouldn't feel so hesitant to let my seven year old ride his bike in our neighborhood without me. If investing in Corrections led to actual Correction, the system would be ever-shrinking, not expanding.

What Are We Doing?

You can argue that you might be willing to pay more in taxes to be saved from the likes of my criminal drug-using son (45% of prisoners are in for non-violent crime) but from where I sit, that’s just piss-poor budgeting.

Prison is one of the LEAST cost-effective ways to improve community safety, and 95% of our incarcerated folks are coming home anyway.

While we are toiling to pay top dollar for the construction and maintenance of more state-run cages, our young and impulsive citizens pace their days into less employability. Our tax money is contributing to recidivism and more violence—and collectively, we keep signing the annual contract.

While I’m not going to use this piece to explore alternatives like drug treatment over prison, there's a valuable point to add here: Every $1 spent on substance use treatment saves $4–$7 in reduced crime and criminal justice costs1—and we haven’t even gotten to exploring what investments in options like job training, housing, home detention, and expanded youth programs could do for our collective well-being.

No, instead we accept headlines like these:

“Alabama's new super-sized prison is costing over $1 billion to build”2

“Utah spent $1 billion to build a new prison. Now, lawmakers want $130 million more.”3

“ICE’s Largest Prison Contractors Hail ‘New Growth Opportunities’ as Revenue Reaches All-Time High”45

“MDOC tells appropriations subcommittee it faces more than $320 million in five‑year facilities needs”6

And why is MDOC hitting up Michiganders for more cash when their corrections budget is already $2.2 billion per year? Because it is an industry. Roughly 75–80% of MDOC correction spending goes to:

• Officer salaries

• Overtime

• Pensions

• Healthcare benefits

And here’s the real throat punch—

When prisons are understaffed and corrections officer overtime skyrockets, we are the ones paying time-and-a-half to keep it all running. In most states, corrections overtime has exploded into hundreds of millions each tax cycle.

Meanwhile, only 3% of the corrections budget addresses mental health or programming created to facilitate rehabilitation of the people we are incarcerating.

Shame on us.

Shame on every single one of us.

If you are a long-time reader, you may recall my two-part series on the real financials of American incarceration.

In Part One, Coffee is Life, I exposed the amount of money that my family pays out-of-pocket for things like coffee, deodorant, and shower shoes (none of those are included in a prison stay). Just this week, I overheard my son bartering for coffee during one of our phone calls (he had run out on Monday and his next store doesn't come until today). The other inmate didn't want or need his powdered milk product, so no deal. It crushed me to learn that he is trading his breakfast this week for a single shot of coffee every morning (this morning he gave away a tray of something that resembled biscuits and gravy).

In Part Two of my financial series called Eat the Rich, I exposed the opportunistic money grubbers (by name) who have created and enjoyed monopolies (and bought yachts and Lambos) at your tax dollar expense. According to Time Magazine this month, two of the largest prison profiteering corporations raked in over $4.8 BILLION in total revenue in 2025. And we paid them that money.7

Here’s what those folks are contributing to society:

• Alabama taxpayers are building a massive new prison, with costs ballooning to about $1 billion (plus) for multi-thousand-bed facilities.

• South Dakota taxpayers have earmarked funds that could total up to $2 billion over the next decade on new prison construction.

• Indiana taxpayers recently broke ground on a $1.2  billion replacement correctional facility.

• Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution (Phoenix) opened in 2018 after taxpayers laid out $400 million for it.

Seriously, what are we doing?

• A new medium-security prison costs $100,000–$150,000 per bed, more than building a classroom for 30 students.

• Annual inmate healthcare costs can exceed $10,000 per prisoner, more than what the average American spends on their own healthcare premiums.

• Lifetime cost of incarceration per person: a single 5-year prison term can cost taxpayers $250,000.

If we knew of the wasted time, money, and talents inside our prisons, we would demand something different.

Bad Boys

I haven't faithfully watched the NBA since the Bad Boys era in Detroit. What with all of the tanking going on these days, who really cares anymore?8

Another product of my middle age status: I only consider The Pistons anymore from the vantage point of it being a franchise. The team’s owner, Tom Gores, also owns a California-based private equity firm called Platinum Equity. In 2017, he spent 1.6 billion to buy Securus Technologies. Together with Global Tel Link (a company that I am forced to use nearly every day)—Tom Gore’s Securus, controls over 80% of the prison phone and video call services in the United States.

To the tune of about $700 million in revenue every year.

Well, you say, it's a free market and Gore assumed the risk that others didn't. He's creating jobs and income for investors. This is the backbone of American commerce.

Okay, but just know you're paying the mortgage on his $100 million Beverly Hills property this year because in most states, prison phone call subsidies are taxpayer-funded.

Here’s another tax consideration:

Why would the GEO Group (a private corporation) buy out Behavioral Interventions Inc. of Colorado for $415 million?

Because BI Inc. (once a polygraph maker) manufactures electronic ankle monitors, GPS ping devices, and voice recognition devices. GEO oversees approximately 60,000 people on parole across all 50 states. Not satisfied with their current monopoly on prison operations, the GEO Group saw releases from prison to be a major cut in their profits so they grabbed up the parole supervision market as well. They are lovingly calling this the ‘alternatives to detention’ project.

Just imagine the money to be made in governmental ICE contracts right now— they must be frothing at the mouth.

So this is middle age—

I am actively working to find an investment firm that can handle my 401k portfolio without supporting prison profit. My current provider has told me No-can-do. If you invest in any funds at all, you're funding prison profiteers.

Why?

Because the hooks of American commerce are in nearly every aspect of the American Prison Machine. It is almost impossible to untangle your investments and retirement funds from the prison industry.

And I get it.

We work hard. We want to make the most return on our investments, and so be it if we keep ‘bad’ people locked up in order to do so. But—whether you care about prison reform or not, it is silly for investors (aka taxpayers) to put their fingers in their ears and turn a blind eye right now. Even if we are invested and enjoying a tiny little return on our money each year, the exchange of our peak employment years for the mess of recidivism that we get is an insult.

And please, my beautiful friends, don’t knee-jerk into blaming the Republicans. That’s a wear out. The 1994 Crime Bill, which guaranteed longer sentences (and therefore more prison profit), was championed by a democratic-controlled Congress and Clinton’s White House. You should also know that ICE and immigration detention skyrocketed under Obama’s leadership through his no-bid/closed-door contracts with Civic Core and GEO Group. Obama’s tenure saw over 3 million individuals detained and deported—more than any other administration to date, including Trump’s two terms.

The truth is that there isn’t a clean political party here—even when Biden pledged to end federal private prison use in 2021, his order left out immigration detention (which is a huge share of private contracts). He practically laid out a red-carpet for Trump to build more detention centers this year, and build he has.

No one is coming to save us.

My goal is for us to be informed enough that we are willingly lining the Gucci pockets of billionaires. If you don’t care that the taxpayer price tag for American Corrections currently rings up at $270 billion a year, you can close this tab and move along.

For the rest of us thinkers and feelers and helpers, we either start to understand why prison populations have exploded in recent decades or we don't. We either wonder why we are building prisons at a break-neck pace in rural America or we don't.

And, good people, here are some concrete things that you can do today to scale the steps of your Capitol and stay informed or flip someone off:

1. Check Your State Legislature’s Budget or Committee Pages

   Every state has an official legislative website with:

   • Hearing schedules

   • Committee agendas

   • Links to livestreams or archived broadcasts

   For example, some states publish annual joint budget hearing calendars that list topics, times, and how to submit testimony. These are often under their Senate/Assembly Finance or Appropriations committee sections. In New York, for instance, the 2026 budget hearing schedule was announced publicly and includes dates and subject areas.

   How to find yours:

   1. Search for your state’s legislature website (e.g., “Texas Legislature hearings schedule” or “California state budget committee schedule”).

   2. Look for pages labeled: Budget, Appropriations, Finance, or Corrections.

   3. Most sites let you filter by topic (e.g., “Corrections”).

2. Look for Appropriations / Corrections Budget Hearings

   Budget hearings that affect corrections spending are usually held by:

   • Appropriations Committees

   • Finance or Budget Subcommittees

   • Judicial & Public Safety Subcommittees

   Some states have schedules posted in advance showing when these committees will take public testimony — including an item for the Department of Corrections or Judiciary budgets.

3. Sign Up for Alerts and Testimony Notices

   Most state legislatures let you:

   • Subscribe to committee calendars

   • Receive email alerts when hearings are scheduled

   • Register to submit written testimony or testify in person

4. Contact Your Legislators or Legislative Staff Directly

   If you’re having trouble locating a schedule:

   • Call or email your state senator/rep’s office

   • Ask for the corrections or prison budget hearing dates

   • Ask how to register to testify or submit written comments

   Legislative staff are generally responsible for managing hearing schedules and can point you to the right calendar.

5. Request a full holdings report from your 401(k)/IRA provider and screen it for exposure to private prison companies (e.g., CoreCivic, GEO Group) or public safety/corrections ETFs, then shift those allocations into ESG or custom-index funds that explicitly exclude private prisons and detention operators.

   ---

Can you imagine what we could do if we all did these things together? Have other ideas for us? Please drop us a note in the comments!

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Cheers, Gen X—we have finally arrived.

The eye appointment rendered me near-blind for about five hours and, honestly, I didn't handle it well. I got panicky and ridiculously frustrated. If I am blessed to live a long life, it is a certainty that my children will have their hands full. My son in prison often tells me that he intends to repay me for the support I've given him during these years.

He has no idea what he's saying. 😎

By the late afternoon iron infusion, I was able to see again and subsequently opted to immerse myself in Resurrection over the beeping IVs in the bays next to me. Prison stories mixed with medical interventions (fun on top of fun).

In a moment of solidarity, I thought of each of you reading along with me—wherever you are. By the end of the day, I had a profound moment of gratitude that you are here.

Thank you for your presence.

Our Misfit Lit Book Club is inching toward the half-way point of Resurrection (if you're following the reading guide posted HERE). If not, I hope you've dipped your toes in and waded through some juicy morsels of wisdom like this one at the start of Part 1, Chapter 54:

“Another corner was hung with a large icon of Jesus Christ, an essential feature of all places where people come to be tortured, and a mockery of his teaching.”

Tolstoy didn't play.

He researched actual prisoner cases for this book, which he wrote at the height of his critique of the both Russian government and the Orthodox church. Even with heavy censorship, he managed to openly question the Siberian penal transport and expose the condition of the overcrowded prisons of his day.

He also (not subtly) accused the Church of leaving the teachings of Jesus behind to serve themselves.

Not impressed, the Church ex-communicated him in 1901 (two years after Resurrection was published) and the government placed him under close surveillance—his mail was monitored, his visitors were watched, his estate constantly scouted.

The only reason he was not arrested was owning to his social status (yep, that's always been a thing). A famous writer and a war hero, not to mention a wealthy aristocrat, arresting Tolstoy would have caused major backlash.

Like his character Nekhlyudov in Resurrection, Tolstoy confronted what he saw as gross hypocrisy and injustice in human systems—and in case there's any doubt, I'm here for it.

Witnessing Dmitri morph from an uninvolved, unaffected citizen of the world to a man who is appalled by (and determined to change) the realities of incarceration is like seeing my reflection in a mirror. Once we've seen behind the curtain, the Powerful Oz looks rather silly.

What to Watch for in the Middle Sections:

• Prisoner interactions, including a familiar advocacy for one another and acts of supporting themselves in other ways (e.g., selling alcohol inside).

• Prison officials rerouting concerns and complaints about the system to other officials without addressing them (the run-around for prisoners and their families has always existed).

• Notice the nature of so many of the “crimes" Tolstoy details (poverty, addiction, dissent, not having a valid passport).

Here are some additional questions to ponder:

• If you had power inside this system, what would you change first—the laws or the people?

• Is Dmitri's moral awakening redemptive or self-centered?

• Is personal repentance meaningful if systemic harm continues?

• Who in this section feels most alive to you? Who feels mechanical?

• Where do you see modern parallels?

  ---

COMING UP—

Our second Zoom call will be on Friday, March 27 at 1pm to discuss the book in its entirety (or to just show up and chat about whatever). I will make sure that you have the link in advance of the meeting.

ICYMI—

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I can’t answer that.

I don’t have a date, nor a season, and I would never tempt fate by taking a guess. Someday—that’s all I can say.

A former Navy Seal named Dustin Turner was recently granted parole after 30 years in a Virginia prison.

Most people don’t have any idea what this means, but for those of us following sentencing laws, parole guidelines, and the purpose of justice in the United States—it was huge. Now 50-years-old, Dustin has been incarcerated since 1995 for the murder of a woman that his Seal training buddy committed.

This month, he has finally been given a chance to go home to his mom. But it is only that—a chance—and not a guarantee. He has more rounds of the Hunger Games to complete before he will be released home.

The decision for parole was made during a public hearing between the Virginia parole board and Dustin, who was cast on a screen via Zoom. His was the second decision of the day and for those tuning in, we got to hear the parole board pardon a 76-year-old black man who had also been incarcerated 31 years. As the man thanked the board and wished Almighty God to bless them for their mercy, a female member of the board repeated three times, loudly:

“I hope you learned your lesson.”

Like he was a toddler in time-out.

It’s not that I don’t understand that our citizens in prison have behaved in ways that harmed others and their communities, it’s just that I see them to be a few evolutionary spirals above dirt. The truth: that man learned harder lessons before breakfast than that condescending board member has in all three decades of his sentence. He could teach her a thing or two if only she could be bothered to get down from that big, sweaty horse she rode in on and look him in the face at eye level.

Lord willing, my son is also in the final stretch of his prison ride and I, too, will get to hear someone say something condescending to him this year. At that time, they will grant him permission to move his seat closer to the door—but he will not be permitted to leave.

A parole notice is only the beginning of another long journey.

In our case, my son is already on a deferment, which is purgatory. He is not paroled and he is not denied—he is in between. He could be denied at any minute and making it to those gates is a run across a field with shots being fired at you from all sides.

As I type, my son is working every day to complete a 90-day course mandated by the state parole board. Each week, I get an update—“four more classes down” or “hoping to get my certificate in late February.” Recently during a visit, he reminded me how tentative this whole thing really is:

“We lost two more classmates this week.” He said, shaking his head.

About half of the men who began the class with him in October have been disqualified. Nevermind they had waited over a year to get a seat in the class, they have now been remanded to the back of the line with no credit for any of the work that they did. Oh—and another year has been tacked to their sentence.

Sure, some of them “earned” their dismissal.

Like the guy who stood up and said, “Fuck this” after being told that his morning coffee would not be allowed in class. That man walked out on his own volition but one single ‘misconduct’ can erase someone’s seat immediately.

My son came close to being excused following a ticket in December for having a bedsheet hung around his bunk to keep his pacing cellmate from waking him (his cellmate paces night and day). During count time, an officer pulled the sheet down and ticketed him for causing an impairment of surveillance. He just wanted to sleep.

This is why every day is another run across the culling field and every day, I am out here listening to the Hunger Games on the radio from my District.

The next time someone says, “ALL we dO is LeT pEoPLe Out of PrISon!” please point them to my inbox. I would love to have a chat about how difficult it is to get a non-violent, first-time offender out of prison. We're already two years past his estimated release date.

I asked my son to tell me in his own words what it has been like to stay on the path toward parole. He messaged me: Become invisible.

“Stay out the way.

The hardest part is watching what comes out of your mouth. You have to learn to keep to yourself. Whatever is going on in the unit—let it be. People talking about so and so will be talking about so and so 50 years from now in here. It’s irrelevant.

go directly to and from callouts
do not talk back
do not be intimidating
do not skate on lop
finish your class
finish your homework

stay away from certain people
don’t owe money
don’t gamble
don’t use drugs or drink

find the littlest thing to stay positive—‘chow good this morning’

be grateful.”

He also told me about the things that keep inspiring him to make it to a life beyond his bunk:

“Getting married,

becoming a dad

seeing the world
getting a job

driving
eating good food, real food

fresh meat and eggs

watching my own shows
going to the city, going to the woods
camping, fishing

being home on the holidays
a fresh cup of brewed coffee
toilet paper and real soap

There is an infinite amount of things to do that haven’t been done yet—thank God I’m not doing ‘all day’ like some of these guys. I want to do all of the things that I failed to do or haven’t done well yet.

thank God for second chances.”

And while I dream alongside him, the hard truth is that I’m certain he has little idea what he will step back into out here. My son has been mummified, preserved in time. He has no clue how to live in the world as a sober adult. Prison has completely erased any real responsibility or accountability in his life. He has forgotten what it is like to get up on his own or what a 40-hour work week feels like in his body. Prison has reduced him to being property, a mere object moved around by outside forces. We put people in a cage and then irrationally expect that they will be fully self-starting and independent on the other side of toddler-life in there.

He hasn’t driven in five years.

He hasn’t even opened a door for himself in that time either.

This week, he called to tell me that he is preparing to put himself into segregation. “I'll have my books, I'll have paper, and I can call you twice a week.” He said.

This was news I didn’t need during a difficult, busy week. I started crying in the middle of a grocery store on the phone.

“Why?” I asked him.

“My cellie is a junkie. I can't risk my chance at parole. I'm doing this so I can come home.”

I was angry, and the people in the produce section heard all about it. I cried some more and then, I exhaled loudly. I had to let it go. He has to do what he knows is best for him, and I have to admit that I've no idea what it’s like to live in prison with wolves and arrows flying and the Capitol always surveilling.

Parole is French, meaning ‘word, speech, or vow.’

In medieval and early modern warfare, a captured soldier was released ‘on parole’ when he promised to return home and disengage in fighting. In military terms, parole was granted when someone gave their “word of honor.” This act placed the onus on the person who needed to change his ways. It did not result in more state supervision.

Today, parole is far more complicated and, of course, monetized.

In spite of public scorn, parole is the practical and legal product of incarceration. When a person is sentenced to anything less than Life Without Parole (or Death), they are expected to begin day one in prison working toward being let back out.

That isn’t leniency, this is the purpose of our justice system.

When we say things like, “I hope they rot in prison” and “That’s where he belongs,” we choose to ignore the fact that most people who are incarcerated will eventually leave prison—95% of all prisoners are slated to be released.1

We should expect their return.

We should prepare for it.

We absolutely do not.

My son is supposed to come live in my home when he is released, and I have no idea if I should make up a bed for him this spring or stop hoping that he'll be home this year. Why? Because: Red Tape and leadership failure and wasted tax money, that's why.

In our state, there are ten individuals who hold the power to let someone out of prison. Only ten. All ten have been appointed by the Director of the Department of Corrections to oversee every parole action in every calendar year. The Director is appointed by the Governor.

In 2023 (the latest year data is available), those ten people were charged with handling over 15,700 parole decisions. They chose to parole 6,132 of them. That is a release rate of about 39% for those men and women who petitioned for parole—people who have served their debt to society because since 1998, our state has not had so-called ‘good time’ credits. No one is considered for parole here until they've completed the sentence a judge ordered them to serve.

No one here is being let out ‘early.’

While parole happens as a result of a complicated matrix of supposed considerations, it mostly comes down to human opinion. It comes down to split-second impressions and money and space constraints and oversight considerations. They look at covering their own asses (i.e., “risk mitigation”) and good luck if it is an election year. A parole hearing can be swayed by a response to a single question, the way a man looks on the day of his interview (after no sleep the night before), if he has a shiner from getting attacked in the yard for being close to his out-date. Add to the mix one’s skin color, family support, age, and mental health status and well, we’re throwing darts.

Judgements of men are superficial—parole decisions are based on feelings. If the board isn't emotionally ready that day, my son might not be coming home.

“I hope your learned your lesson.”

What lesson? I might ask.

For a person who has spent decades of their one precious life in a cage, completed years of programming, reflected deeply on the harm they've caused—and especially for a person who has aged out of high-risk behavior (like that 76-year-old man in Virginia), our system infantilizes grown adults and remains in the business of making our communities weaker.

Here, let me fix it for you lady: “What is different about you today that makes you safer to return to the community?”

Because frankly, people change. Here's a hot take: Don't be in the corrections or parole business if you feel otherwise. And should any of us doubt that humans can change, we should start a comment thread below wherein we all type out the worst thing we've ever done and let everyone else judge how far we’ve come.

I'll let you go first:

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