Open Line

When you’re in prison, the state strips you of all of your agency and your dignity. You feel completely powerless. From what you eat to what you wear to when you wake up and when you sleep, to being forced to work for almost no pay — your life is no longer your own when you’re behind bars.

So it’s still a shock to me, now as an organizer with the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, that I’ve gone from feeling utterly powerless to accessing a seat of power in California and speaking directly with lawmakers about legislation that will impact incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people.

I felt out of place the first time I went to the State Capitol in Sacramento. My typical attire is hoodies, jeans, and Jordans, but I had to don what felt like a costume of “appropriate attire” to fit in. Now, I’m used to this code switch and show up excited and ready to go.

Walking into the State Capitol–surrounded by trees, open lawns, and often construction–you first have to go through metal detectors before walking to the lobby where you usually run into legislative staff, legislators, and policymakers heading to legislative hearings where legislators consider several bills. Getting there early is a must since the hearing rooms fill up quickly with advocates and witnesses. Once the hearing rooms are full, you have to wait in the hallway for your bill to be called before lining up to speak in support or opposition. Outside the hearing rooms, you can also hear classes of young students excited to tour the Capitol and learn about the legislative process.

For our most recent lobby days in Sacramento, we met a week ahead of time to assign our roles, run through the day, and prepare our talking points on the bills we were pushing for — the Racial Justice Act for All (AB 2065), Judicial Review of Old Sentences (SB 94), Voting Options for Incarcerated Californians Expanded (AB 544), and the Parole Hearing Language Accessibility Act (AB 2310), among others.

We arrived in Sacramento at 8:45 AM, checked in with our team, and then split up into small groups to talk to legislators and their staff.

Lobbying is dope because you get the chance to talk to the legislators who have the power to get your bills passed. For me, the most exciting part is talking to legislators who oppose our bills or are on the fence about it because that challenges me to influence them to be on our side. I have to be on top of my game, telling my own story of incarceration and connecting my story to the bill I’m lobbying for like SB 474, for instance — which was passed last year to limit canteen markups in California prisons to no more than 35% for basic necessities like toothpaste, food, deodorant, and medication.

My goal is always to build relationships with politicians to help them see the people trapped in prisons and encourage those in power to join us in imagining and creating just alternatives to confinement.

During our recent lobby day, we had breaks but we were pushing and attending meetings most of the day, engaging in as many impactful conversations with legislators as we could. Another powerful part of the day was sitting in legislative hearings. We showed our support and solidarity for bills our coalition allies were sponsoring, and when our bills were up for debate our allies also stood with us. This is a way for us to build our collective strength. There is always some opposition to bills from police who want to put more people in cages rather than help us tear down a system that locks up Black and Brown men, women, and children with no opportunities for transformation. But our stories are stronger because we speak truth to power and come from a place of hope and justice instead of prejudice and fear.

Advocating for #SmartSolutions with my brother in this movement, Phil (Philip Melendez), at a press conference at the State Capitol

I’ve been an organizer on the outside now for almost 2 years and I was organizing on the inside for over 5 years. But I learned to be an organizer while I was still incarcerated. I went into prison for the first time when I was 15 and was shuffled between facilities for decades. At San Quentin, I co-founded and organized the San Quentin Civil Engagement group and developed inside/outside organizing opportunities for incarcerated people to impact policy. At the same time, I was preparing to go before the parole board, mentoring other incarcerated folks, and trying to survive the day-to-day humiliations of incarceration. So, I wasn’t able to fully appreciate or celebrate how much we were accomplishing. Our inside organizing was instrumental in winning two bills — SB 483 and SB 136 — which repealed inhumane laws on the books that added 3-year and 1-year “enhancements” to sentencing.

In 2023, after returning home, I became an Outside Policy Fellow with the Ella Baker Center’s Inside Outside Policy Fellowship, a transformative program that normalizes working with currently incarcerated and formerly incarcerated organizers in movement spaces and paying these organizers for their labor. We know that those closest to the problem are closest to the solution.

In prison, there are so many different people from different backgrounds forced together under very stressful and dehumanizing conditions. I had to learn to meet people where they were instead of where I thought they should be. Being honest and authentic, I learned, is the best way to relate to people who come from different places and have different life experiences than you. I still use the skills I learned behind bars when I talk to legislators today.

My focus now is on justice for incarcerated youth. You have kids going into the system like I did at 14 or 15 and spending the rest of their teen years and much of their adult lives behind bars. We always aim to get people out of prison because we know prison doesn’t work. So we formed a coalition to free our children from prison because, at the time I was incarcerated, nothing like that existed.

Transformation does work. Liberation and empowerment work.

Locking people up and beating down and oppressing people who are already beaten down and oppressed is never going to work. But transformation does work. Liberation and empowerment work. I’ve taken the horrible experience of being incarcerated and transformed into an organizer. I want others to have the same opportunity. I want to bring young folks into this work and share everything that’s been given to me. I’ve learned from those who came before me, and now it’s time for the next generation to step up and carry the torch. Young people will have to keep this movement going.

Just like incarcerated people should lead the movement to transform the system that puts us behind bars instead of giving us opportunities, young people should have the agency to lead the youth justice movement against juvenile incarceration.

If you’re reading this now, I hope you can join us in this fight for liberation for all our people.

Attributions: This article originally appeared in Medium on July 2, 2024.

Photo Courtesy of Medium

California Deactivates 46 Housing Units at 15 Prisons: Activists Celebrate, Prisoners’ Cringe

On April 20, I awake to a silent cell block… 800 men sleeping their prison sentences away. I’m a heavy sleeper and after 16 years of eating breakfast at dawn, I still have a hard time waking up on time. As I am wondering why I suddenly feel so awake at this hour a thudding of fists tumbles out of the darkness, punctuated by a harrumph and a clatter of belongings across concrete floor.

When a cell fight breaks out, nearby neighbors usually hear an argument or other preamble, but this outbreak has arrived without warning, and at such a dim hour I can’t help but wonder if it’s not a scuffle, but an attempted rape or a murder in the making.

Fistfall fades quickly, giving way to long moans, and my stomach turns at the thought of having to listen to yet another rape… but that thought is quickly brought into question by a gurgling, wheezing sound that might mean one of my downstairs neighbors is getting strangled by his cellmate.

No doubt this clamor is wakening the neighborhood, but it is not loud enough to reach the ears of the night guards who sit behind a desk at the other end of the cellblock. Listening neighbors will abide by the Code of Silence, unless one of the combatants calls for help. If someone calls for help, neighbors will immediately amplify the SOS by yelling, “Man down!” But until consent is given the rule is to allow the fight, rape, or murder to proceed.

However, what if someone is being strangled and can’t call for help? What then? Am I listening to exactly that situation right now? There is no way for me to be certain, and if I call for help without consent, and I misjudge the situation, I could easily make an enemy of the man I mean to help… As this thought crosses my mind sounds of struggle cease.

Was that the critical moment? Has every neighbor who hesitated, myself included, now participated by acquiescence in a midnight killing?

My ears strain for proof of continued struggle, the moments drag out, and finally a few hasty curses and thuds emanate, followed by a single, labored wheezy word.

“Emergency…” the voice struggles to say.

Another voice from a neighboring cell asks, “What cell are you in?” “276”, the man says.

“Consent given”, a host of voices fills the night. “Man down, 276”

“Man down, 276”

“Man down, 276”

Men in cells on the other side of the cell block join in, passing the alarm along. “Man down, 276”

“Man down, 276”

The faint jangle of keys on belts announces the approach of guards.

“He’s killing me…” the voice says quietly now. “Help… help… he’s killing me…” “Hey! Hurry the fuck up! This is serious!” someone yells at the guards.

My cell is a floor above the fight, so I can’t see the officers arriving, but as soon as they arrive the man under attack urges the officers to, “Get the knife.”

An officer starts bellowing, “Stop, get off of him! Hey, stop that!” but he can do nothing other than yell until the cell door is opened, and the door can’t be opened until another officer at the end of the tier finds the right key, unlocks a padlock, and then throws a lever.

“Hey, hurry the fuck up!” the officer at the cell front yells to the officer who’s working to throw the lever.

Hundreds of men now lay awake in bed, listening and waiting, wondering if this poor bastard will be able to hold out for another critical couple of minutes or if he will be murdered with help looking on only a few feet away unable to reach him through the bars of his cell.

Finally there is a sound of steel sliding on steel, a door swinging open, a clash of shouts, the spicy tang of pepper spray wafts through the cellblock, and the scene becomes too muddled to know what’s happening by ear. When the chaos subsides a nurse is heard speaking to the man who was attacked and from the sound of it he will survive his wounds.

Later in the day the details are sleuthed out, one piece at a time, as neighbors trade their respective snatches of the nightmare. Larry caught glimpses through a shaving mirror, which he shoved through the bars of his cell so he could peer down the tier to see the officers drag both men out of their cell – one clinging to the other, stabbing his cellmate in the face even while the guards beat him and pried them apart.

Others got a better look at the survivor as guards walked him by their cellfronts, handcuffed, missing an ear, covered in blood and caustic orange spray.

***

This may sound like a story about a kind of violence between cellmates that is just an unavoidable fact of prison life. But it’s actually a story about a kind of violence that only occurs in prisons that force incarcerated people to live in close quarters together – two people to a cell. Many prisons around the world do not force incarcerated people to “double-cell”. And when incarcerated people are each given their own cell, no one gets beaten, raped, or murdered by their cellmate in the middle of the night, because no one has a cellmate.

Prior to the era of mass incarceration many US prisons housed only one person per cell, but as the human warehousing industry grew, space efficiency spurred a shift toward housing multiple prisoners per cell. Biased research generated at that time suggested there were no harms associated with double- celling, but evidence has sense emerged exposing the truth. In 2020 some jails switched from a double- cell standard to a single-cell standard and found that rates of violence dropped dramatically. In Seattle, Washington, the King County jail witnessed a 67% drop in fights and assaults. This confirms what incarcerated people have always said: When you have a cell mate, the simple act of going to sleep is not always safe.

A campaign to ban double-celling in California should be a winnable fight. Not only is it a clear cut matter of human rights, it will also reduce prison capacity and exert a decarceral pressure on the entire prison system.

No state-wide ban has been proposed, but in the White Paper transforming San Quentin Governor Newsom’s advisory board states, “We strongly recommend eliminating mandatory double-celling.” The advisory board said they recommend San Quentin shift to a one person per cell housing standard because, “people cannot transform their lives when they are in survival mode.”

San Quentin residents overwhelmingly support the recommendations forwarded in the governor’s White Paper – from improved food quality to the retraining of officers into roles that are more social than correctional – but few of the paper’s recommendations are as popular as the call for a shift to single-celling. If this recommendation were implemented statewide no one would have to fight for their life in the middle of the night or be happy they only lost an ear.

Transitioning the entire prison system onto a one person per cell housing standard would need to occur in a staged process, because there are presently over 90,000 people in California prisons and only 15,000 empty beds. But the state’s prison population is projected to fall for years to come, so the transition to a single-cell standard could be achieved over time. Unfortunately, the loudest voices in

California’s justice movement presently refuse to prioritize reductions in population density. Instead they are rushing to close facilities, blocking the path to a single-cell standard, and at the cost of further overcrowding remaining prisons.

Specifically, the CURB Coalition has been pushing the state to close five prisons, on the grounds that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is operating 15,000 empty prison beds. While CURB sees these beds as nothing but institutional bloat, when incarcerated people look at 15,000 empty beds, we see peace of mind and safety. Many of us see the possibility of taking five prisons off of the double-cell standard.

Importantly, most of these empty bunks do not represent empty cells. They represent prisoners sharing a cell with no one but an empty bunk, who are grateful to live alone. Those empty beds are safety cushions and for many people the most prized possession they will have while they are incarcerated.

If activists want to reduce CDCR’s housing capacity these beds can be eliminated, without exposing incarcerated people to harm, simply by removing one bed per cell, leaving behind a single bed in each of 15,000 cells. This will feel anticlimactic to activists who long for the prison system to shrink in more symbolic ways. But the capacity of the prison system is reduced just as surely by pulling beds as by closing facilities, and this way rates of violence would be driven down, rather than up.

If, however, all those beds are to be converted into prison closures, thousands of prisoners will lose the safety of a cell to themselves and be forced into cells with others. This is exactly the direction the state is now moving, as a result of CURB’s closure campaign. While the state has rejected CURB’s request to slate five more facilities for closure, the campaign appears to have achieved the worst of both worlds, because the state has agreed to deactivate 46 housing units in 13 prisons. This means everyone living in cellblocks scheduled for deactivation will now get shoved into other cellblocks which are already over- full. In short, CURB got none of the actual closures they asked for but all of the prison overcrowding and harm of closures.

In most cellblocks people who end up living on their own are the ones who refuse to live peacefully with others, or those who are unusually vulnerable. This means that violence does not just rise steadily as prisons fill up but rises more sharply the closer the system gets to being completely full. Due to CURB’s efforts we may soon start to reach thresholds that precipitate more serious violence.

It’s time that CURB, and other prison closure activists, start to remember that it is not empty prison beds that are the problem, but the ones that have people in them. It’s time to ask, are we fighting against buildings, or are we fighting for liberty? The answer to that question will dictate completely different policy strategies. The top priority should be to reduce prison populations, and to do so compassionately. Prison closure campaigns do neither of these things.

In CURB’s Prison Closure Roadmap a lot of ink is wasted on the argument that the process of transferring prisoners from one prison to another is so harmful that when prisons are closed

incarcerated people should not be transferred to another prison, but instead should be set free… without regard to completion of sentence. This proposal is not moveable. When COVID was killing scores of incarcerated people, and a judge was weeping openly on the bench, not a single person was released. So the idea that US courts would ever order mass releases simply to avoid exposing people to bus rides and changes of address is ridiculous.

Prison closures may provide activists with symbolic victories, but if they are not preceded by a shift to a single-cell housing standard and by adequate population reductions, their impact can only be measured in terms of beatings, rapes, and murders. So, for the time being, prison closure campaigns are harmful to incarcerated people. We must abandon the obsession with purely symbolic victories over infrastructure and adopt a clear cut focus on Compassionate Decarceration. This will require we prioritize the reduction of prison populations, and the reduction of population density, over all else.

If we win the fight for population reduction, prison closures will eventually follow. But if we lose the fight for population reduction recent facility closures and unit deactivations will mean nothing. The state will simply reactivate and reopen everything.

Kelton P. O’Connor is incarcerated at San Quentin

Attributions: This article originally appeared in The Davis Vanguard, on July 20, 2024.

Photo Courtesy of The Davis Vanguard

I never knew the understated yet entirely raw power of voting until Super Tuesday, 2024.

At 44 years old, it was the first time in my life I’d ever cast a ballot, the first time I’d had any say in the governance of my country. Afterward, as I went about the rest of my day with an I Voted! sticker beaming from my chest, I felt like a fraud. Like a liar, laying claim to something of immense value that wasn’t really mine.

Before I tell you how I got to this point, I might as well address the proverbial elephant.

I’ve been to prison. Multiple times, in fact, most recently for second-degree robbery. But I’ve served multiple terms of incarceration, starting when I was 15 years old. I’ve hurt a lot of people, and I’ve done a lot of damage that I wish to God I could take back.

I weave no pitiful tales of woe, I tell no half-truths or outright fabrications to shield me from my actions. Make no mistake, it was nobody else’s fault. I did terrible things, both on and off drugs, for which I had to be held accountable—until I could learn to hold myself accountable.

Now, today, I write to share some of what I’ve learned the hard way, through the onerous process of facing and overcoming some of my own inner shit, and from my experience transforming trauma into purpose.

I was a Cold War kid, growing up in the 1980s, being taught to duck-and-cover in the classroom, to hate Communists and fear the atom bomb. 

But in all the years since the Soviet Union crumbled, I’ve never been anything but a political spectator, the ubiquitous heckler in the stands. I knew who I liked and who I didn’t, and I parroted a lot of critical opinions built almost exclusively on ignorance. But I never read past the headlines, I had no real views of my own, and didn’t care enough to invest any energy in changing that status quo.

In truth, civic apathy was among the lesser of my character defects, as my godparents can attest. I’ve never known more honest, loving people. Some years ago, they took me in when I had nothing, when I had no home and no hope. They fed me, clothed me, loved me like their own. And in return, I lied to them, stole from them and my god-brother, and betrayed their love and trust on every level.

Somehow, although their trust was battered beyond recognition, their love for me remained undiminished. I never knew love like that before, and it sparked within me a motivation to change, to examine the ugliest parts of myself and start dealing with some of the unresolved bullshit I’ve been packing around all my life.

My godmother is a woman of kindness and compassion. Every fiber of her being is stitched and woven from love, pure and true. It’s the core of her existence, her most defining characteristic.

But my godfather’s brand of love is an amalgam, interwoven with other values like moderation, integrity, and responsibility. Head of his household, provider and protector, a linear thinker with a rational mind—when I consider the man I want to be, the man I strive to be, it’s his image I hope to see in my mirror one day.

My godfather takes voting very seriously, and with good reason. He and my godmom came from nothing, moving to California from New York after his discharge from the Army Reserves. He served as a Vietnam-era radio operator, following in the footsteps of his dad, a WWII veteran who helped retake the Philippines from Japan. 

My godfather went on to build a career as a field engineer for Kodak, Versatec, and Xerox. Now retired, he continues to serve his country as a poll worker, showing up at six in the morning to pull a 15-hour tour on election day. Voting, he says, is the quintessential expression of American freedom, and a fundamental, foundational American right. 

To drop a ballot and have your voice counted—there is no greater privilege or duty in a democratic republic like ours.

It took far too long, but in the painful process of personal change, I eventually learned two profound lessons which go hand-in-hand: how important it is to care about one’s community, and that caring means nothing in the absence of action.

My ballot came in the mail along with a voter’s guide that I perused and discarded. I didn’t want someone else’s summaries, I wanted to get my information straight from the horses’ mouths.

I don’t know how much time I spent online doing research. I checked out the candidates’ websites, YouTube’d speeches and interviews, and tried to get a feel for each one’s stance on the issues that are important to me. I called my godparents and got a feel for how their views and values shaped their preferences for one candidate over another.

Holding my ballot in my hand, I felt the weight and texture of the paper, and imagined the wealth and value contained in it when I picked up my pen and filled in my little bubbles. I wanted to treat my vote like it was something tangible, something made of gold: I wanted it to go to the candidate that had earned it.

On the morning of Super Tuesday, I looked up the nearest polling place and got my walking shoes laced up. But I felt a vague, unnamable discomfort at the thought of showing up in person. Reflecting on it later, I came to understand I still feel out of place in the world, like an unwelcome trespasser in the Land of the Free. As if maybe I shouldn’t have this powerful, profound instrument, as if holding the vote in my hand should burn.

Though still out of reach for those in prison, the right to vote was only recently restored to people on parole. It was a voter initiative that my godparents heartily supported. Running my fingers over the envelope, I knew that wasn’t something I was willing to let pass through my fingers.

I stepped out my front door and turned to walk up the street, but in the opposite direction from the polling place. In front of a grocery store in my neighborhood, I dropped my mail-in ballot in a big blue USPS mailbox. Then I pulled out my I Voted! sticker, stuck it to my chest, and took a selfie.

Down deep, I still felt like an imposter. Like a fraud. Nonetheless, I did it—I voted. 

Come November, I’m going to vote again. This time, in person. In fact, I’m going to follow my godfather’s suggestion and volunteer to be a poll worker. I don’t know if they’ll have me, but I’m going to try.

There have been times since my release that I have felt devastated and powerless. Not by anything that I have been experiencing personally, but by the stark contrast of the world before I went to prison, and the world that I have come back into.

It’s not the same world.

Being dependent on public transit, my bike, and these two feet for transportation, I have come across a number of heart-rending homeless encampments. Tent cities have sprung up like mushrooms in a rainforest. They are everywhere now, where once they seemed scarce and scattered. 

So many people are hungry and wanting, so much hope has been lost in America. I realize I have to be part of the solution now—starting with my vote.

The United States of America isn’t in Washington, DC, or some fabled “heartland.” It’s everywhere, right in front of and all around us. We seem to have forgotten that, or perhaps never learned. It’s something that I needed to be reminded of.

So I’ve gotten into the habit of taking action: Picking up trash in my neighborhood, volunteering at a food bank near my house. Come to find out, there is incredible strength in selflessness, in giving even when we ourselves are in need.

Down here at the ground level, this is where I’ve come to know my country best.

Andrew Hardy spent several years as senior layout designer for the award-winning San Quentin News, eventually becoming managing editor of Wall City Magazine, and reporting on issues of social and criminal justice. He is currently editor of the San Francisco International Arts Festival’s newsletter and is interning with California Lawyers for the Arts while continuing to write as a freelancer.

Attributions: This article originally appeared in Street Spirit. April 2, 2024.

The first time I heard about Taylor Swift, I was in a Los Angeles County jail, waiting to be sent to prison for murder. Sheriffs would hand out precious copies of the Los Angeles Times, and they would be passed from one reader to the next. Back then, I swore that Prince was the best songwriter of my lifetime, and I thought Swift’s rise to teen-age stardom was an injustice. I’d look up from her wide-eyed face in the Calendar section to see gang fights and race riots. The jail was full of young men of color who wrote and performed their own raps, often about chasing money and fame, while Swift was out there, actually getting rich and famous. How fearless could any little blond fluff like that really be?

In 2009, I was sentenced to life in prison. Early one morning, I boarded a bus in shackles and a disposable jumpsuit, and rode to Calipatria State Prison, a cement fortress on the southern fringes of California. Triple- digit temperatures, cracked orange soil, and pungent whiffs of the nearby Salton Sea made me feel as though I’d been exiled to Mars. After six years in the chaos of the county jail, however, I could finally own small luxuries, like a television. The thick walls of Calipat, as we called the place, stifled our radio reception, but an institutional antenna delivered shows like “Access Hollywood,” “Entertainment Tonight,” and “TMZ.” I was irritated by the celebrity gossip, but it was a connection to the outside world, and it introduced me to snippets of Swift’s performances for the first time. Here and there, I’d catch her on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” or “Fallon,” and was surprised by how intently she discussed her songwriting. I didn’t tell anyone that I thought she was talented.

In 2013, when my security level was lowered owing to good behavior, I requested a transfer to Solano state prison, the facility with a Level 3 yard which was closest to my family in the Bay Area. I got the transfer, but my property—a TV, CD player, soap, toothpaste, lotion, food—was lost in transit. I shared a cell with someone in the same situation, so, for months, we relied on the kindness of our neighbors to get by. Our only source of music was a borrowed pocket radio, hooked up to earbuds that cost three dollars at the commissary. At night, we’d crank up the volume and lay the earbuds on the desk in our cell. Those tiny speakers radiated crickety renditions of Top Forty hits.

During that time, I heard tracks from “Red,” Swift’s fourth studio album, virtually every hour. I was starting to enjoy them. Laying on the top bunk, I would listen to my cellmate’s snores and wait for “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” to come around again. When it did, I would think about the woman I had lived with for seven years, before prison. I remembered bittersweet times when my sweetheart had visited me in county jail. We’d look at each other through security glass that was reinforced by wire. It didn’t seem fair to expect her to wait for me, and I told her that she deserved a partner who could be with her. But we didn’t use the word “never,” and deep down I always hoped that we’d get back together. When I heard “Everything Has Changed,” I had to fight back tears of exaltation and grief. Swift sings, “All I knew this morning when I woke / Is I know something now / Know something now I didn’t before.” I thought back to our first date, and how we had talked and laughed late into the night. We had to force ourselves to get a few hours of sleep before sunrise.

After several months, my belongings, including my CD player, finally caught up with me. I was getting ready to buy “Red” from a catalogue of approved CDs when I learned that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or C.D.C.R., had placed me on another transfer list. I didn’t want the album to get stuck at the prison after I had been transferred, so I resorted to a country station that regularly featured Swift.

Sometimes, hearing Southern drawls and honky-tonk medleys, I’d laugh out loud at myself. But that was the station that played the widest variety of her music, from “Tim McGraw” to “I Knew You Were Trouble.” There was, in her voice, something intuitively pleasant and genuine and good, something that implies happiness or at least the possibility of happiness. When I listened to her music, I felt that I was still part of the world I had left behind.

Hitting a new yard—in this case, the prison known as the California Men’s Colony (C.M.C.)—means finding new friends and allies. Each table and workout area was claimed by a different gang or ethnic group. I’m Asian and Hispanic, and I chose to join the Asians in a cement workout area. When they asked me what kind of music I liked, I confessed that I was anxiously waiting for a Taylor Swift album. Everyone laughed. “Oh, my God, we’ve got a Swiftie on the yard!” Lam, a muscular guy, told me. “You in touch with your sensitive side? Are you gay?” He especially loved to heckle me in front of his buddy Hung, who spoke little and laughed almost silently.

I was waiting for “Red” to arrive when I saw Swift perform “All Too Well” at the 2014 Grammys. That became the song that I played first when I peeled the plastic wrap off the disc, and the song I’d stop at and repeat whenever I spun the album. (Her ten-minute version is even better.) As Swift sang about love’s magical moments, how they are found and lost again, I thought about a time before my incarceration, when I briefly broke up with the woman I loved. She came to my house to return one of my T-shirts. When she hung it on the doorknob and walked away, I was on the other side. I sensed that someone was there, but, by the time I opened the door, she was gone.

When “Red” arrived, I finally found out why Lam had been clowning me in front of Hung. “Red” was the only Swift CD that Hung didn’t own—because he considered it a misguided pop departure from the country greatness of “Fearless” and “Speak Now.” Eventually, Lam outed himself as a Swiftie, too. For six months, the three of us would work out and debate which album was best. Then Hung transferred out of the prison, taking his CDs with him.

Around the time Swift dropped “1989,” I acquired an old-school boom box. Technically, exchanging property and altering devices is against C.D.C.R. rules, but every prison has guys who fill their cells with radios, TVs, and speakers to repair and resell. I looked out for one guy, G.L., when he first hit the yard, and he became one of the best electronic fix-it guys I’ve ever met. He loved reconfiguring different speakers to get the best sound. He rewired the boom box for auxiliary cables and gave it to me. At C.M.C., I had a cell to myself, so I’d turn up the music enough to drown out obnoxious sounds outside my cell. Of course, some people always think that Swift is the obnoxious sound. “What’s up with the damn Taylor Swift?” a neighbor yells out. Another voice chimes in with requests: “Play ‘Style.’ That song’s tight right there.” By the time the song ends, someone new will admit, “That girl’s got jams.”

When you transfer between prisons, you can’t take any undocumented property with you. At the end of 2015, I gave that boom box back to G.L. and left C.M.C. for Folsom prison. After a year, I landed at San Quentin. I started working at the San Quentin News, the in-house newspaper, for a quarter an hour. Around that time, C.D.C.R. started allowing a vender to sell us MP3 players for a hundred dollars. They charged $1.75 per song and ten dollars for a memory card. Eventually, I asked my family to order one and would call my cousin Roxan with requests. “What’s up with all the damn Taylor Swift?” she’d say during phone calls. By the time Swift released her album “Lover,” in 2019, I had almost every song she’d ever released. And, when the MP3 players were restricted because crafty folks were using the memory cards in illegal cell phones, mine was grandfathered in.

One of my homies at San Quentin had a pristine radio that played CDs and cassette tapes. When he earned parole, everybody hounded him for it. He knew how much I’d appreciate such a luxury, but I didn’t join the herd of pesterers making offers, and I think he appreciated that. He gave it to me as a parting gift. I was even able to have it officially documented on my property card. The MP3 player clipped neatly into the cassette door, so now I could see my playlists while I listened. My neighbor, Rasta, was the weed man for the building, so I played Swift to drown out the guys who were lighting up outside. Rasta made fun of me, but the crowd always liked her “Bad Blood” remix, featuring Kendrick Lamar. “That’s the shit right there,” they’d say. “Who would’ve thought?”

Seven months after “Lover” came out, C.D.C.R. shut down all programming because of the COVID pandemic—no indoor group interactions, no volunteers from outside the prison, no visitors. C.D.C.R. brought the coronavirus into San Quentin when it moved some sick guys from another prison in. By the end of June, 2020, hundreds of us were testing positive and getting sick, including me. I lugged all my property to an isolation cell in a quarantine unit, where I shivered and sweated through a brain fog for two weeks. My only human contact came from nurses in full-body P.P.E., who checked my vitals, and skeleton crews of officers—the ones who weren’t sick themselves—who brought us intermittent meals. I followed San Quentin’s death tallies on the local news. Would I die alone in this cell, suddenly and violently breathless? I made a playlist of Swift’s most uplifting songs, listening for the happiness in her voice.

Alone in a prison cell, it’s virtually impossible to avoid oneself. As my body and mind began to recover, I started to question everything. What really matters? Who am I? What if I die tomorrow? I hadn’t been in touch with my sweetheart in more than two years, because she had told me that she was trying a relationship with someone who cared about her. Now, though, I wrote her a letter to see if she was O.K.

A week after I mailed my letter, I received one from her. Prison mail is slow enough that I knew it wasn’t a response—we had decided to write to each other at the same time. “The lockdown has afforded me plenty of time to reflect on all sorts of things,” her letter said. “I’ve been carrying you with me everywhere.” Reading it brought to mind Swift’s lyrics in “Daylight”: “I don’t wanna think of anything else now that I thought of you.” She was single again, and we started talking every week. In lockdown, between paltry dinner trays, I did pushups, lunges, squats, and planks in the twenty-two-inch-wide floor space in my cell. The twentieth year of my incarceration was approaching.

In 2020, the California legislature passed a law that made anyone who served twenty continuous years, and who was at least fifty years of age, eligible for parole. I’m fifty-three, and I’ll get my first chance at release in 2024. I couldn’t help but think of “Daylight” again. “I’ve been sleeping so long in a twenty-year dark night,” Swift sings. “And now I see daylight.”

These days, I call my sweetheart as often as I can. Officers can shut down the phones with the flick of a switch, and technical glitches often take the system offline, so I treat each call as if it were my last. It often feels like she’s waiting to hear from me. She tells me that it’s complicated and confusing for her, speaking to the ghost who disappeared twenty years ago. But, leaning against a wall, next to all the other guys talking with loved ones on the phone, I don’t feel like a ghost. I feel alive. Just recently, she told me, “Talking like this over the phone so much, I think we’ve gotten to know each other way better than before.” We talk about how much we have changed. “You might not even find me attractive anymore,” she tells me. “I’m not the same person I was back then.”

One morning in October, 2022, I had breakfast in the chow hall and made it back to my cell in time for “Good Morning America.” My TV doesn’t have any speakers, so I plugged it into my boom box. Suddenly, I heard a familiar voice singing an unfamiliar chorus: “It’s me, hi / I’m the problem, it’s me.” The anchors on the broadcast were giddy to announce Swift’s new album “Midnights,” and play clips from the music video of “Anti-Hero.” Swift appeared as a larger-than-life figure, arguing with different versions of herself. I laughed to myself. Here we go again.

Our MP3 distributor was always slow to release new music, so I spent a couple of weeks hearing about the album on the news, waiting for my chance to listen. Then, out on the prison grounds, I bumped into a volunteer whom I’d known and worked with for years. We were walking through the yard together when they started looking around to make sure no one was watching. After confirming that the coast was clear, they slipped me a brand-new copy of “Midnights” and wished me a happy birthday. The gesture nearly brought me to tears. That evening, after dinner, I peeled off the plastic and brushed a bit of dust out of the boom box’s CD player. “Lavender Haze” played as I read the liner notes. “What keeps you up at night?” Swift writes.

For the past two decades, sleep has not come easily to me. Often, when I get into bed, I think about the day I was arrested at the scene of my crime. Some neighbors called 911 and reported gunshots. I can still see the grieving family members of the man I killed, staring at me in the courtroom at my trial. I’m guilty of more than murder. I abandoned my parents and my sweetheart, too. There’s no way to fix this stuff.

Taylor Swift is currently the same age, thirty-three, that I was when I was arrested. I wonder whether her music would have resonated with me when I was her age. I wonder whether I would have reacted to the words “I’m the problem, it’s me.” Hers must be champagne problems compared with mine, but I still see myself in them. “I’ll stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror,” Swift sings, and I think of the three-by-five-inch plastic mirrors that are available inside. For years out there, I viewed myself as the antihero in my own warped self-narrative. Do I want to see myself clearly?

In “Karma,” Swift sings, “Ask me what I learned from all those years / Ask me what I earned from all those tears.” A few months from now, California’s Board of Parole Hearings will ask me questions like that. What have I learned? What do I have to show for my twenty years of incarceration? In the months ahead, when these questions keep me up at night, I will listen to “Midnights.” The woman I love says she’s ready to meet me
on the other side of the prison wall, on the day that I walk into the daylight. Recently, she asked me, “If you could go anywhere, do anything, that first day out, what would you want us to go do?” That question keeps me up at night, too.

Attributions: This article originally appeared in The New Yorker on September 2, 2023.