During my stay in Sheridan Federal Prison, I had the honor of walking through fire with some of the most genuinely amazing men I’ve ever known. This drawing, one of the first I started and the last I finished, is a collection of their faces. It started as a study of three of them and then I’d meet another, and then another. One by one, through my entire sentence, they’d get their face scribbled on the wall. It would end up being my favorite piece, a pay of homage to the comrades that got me through…

Artist Note: 2 of the men pictured are dead.

Be good to each other,

- Me

I took my place within a Los Angeles halfway house five days ago. While I can’t exactly call it home, it is the closest I’ve come in 2 years.

I’m not allowed access to a computer or the Internet (yet)… but I am allowed a real pillow, a little DVD player and some music. More importantly, I’m close enough to see my family now… and eventually I’ll be able to see my son. Life is good.

One of our requirements of residency is that all inmates must have or be actively looking for a job. And so a week after intake, having completed a remedial transition class taught from coloring book, we are granted 4-6 hour passes to venture forth, hopelessly underequipped, in search of the holy grail of life as a convicted felon: Employment.

What I’ve seen of the cavalry forging ahead of me makes my heart hurt. They don’t stand a chance.

They embark on their crusades with their shirts pressed crisp and their heads held high only to return with their spirits completely beat to shit. It is more than the brutal rejection of an anemic job market felt by those that have never broken a law. For those whose applications are automatically trashed for truthfully answering one question – “have you ever been convicted of a felony” – Their dejection is deeper.

They have been isolated for five, or ten, or twenty years and then told to compete in a world that has grown faster in that time than at any previous point in human history. Yesterday, I heard a fella explain a failed interview to his case manager by confessing that he didn’t know the difference between a smartphone and a cell phone.

Getting a job is about more than earning an income or satisfying a requirement to go home for them. It’s about persisting in a world that couldn’t care less.

Be good to each other,

- Me

In less than a week, I’ll walk out the door of Sheridan Federal Prison and begin serving the tail end of my time at a halfway house in Los Angeles, California.

My grasp of the English language is not adequate enough to properly describe the range of emotion that comes with the thought of me finally finishing the last leg of this journey I’m on. But it’s like I’ve been lost at sea, and finally see a hairline of land creeping over the horizon.

I’m almost home.

Be good to each other,

- D

The Holidays have come. They bring with them the familiar quilt of depression that lays itself atop the entire prison – patches of men, stitched together by an intense yearning for those we love. These times are usually accompanied by an eerie silence. It’s as if our collective voice is stuck in our collective throat, perhaps constricted by low hung heads, lost deep in thought.

Amidst that gloom, something to be proud of:

The inmates of Sheridan Federal Prison take up a collection every Christmas. We buy presents for the children without parents to buy for them, and for those children whose families are too poor to provide. We collected over thirty one hundred dollars this year. Not bad, especially for a bunch of low-lifes making 5 dollars a month. Not bad at all.

Also of uplifting relevance (depending on which side of the fence you sit)… I FOUND SANTA! He’s here serving a 2 year bid for violating child labor laws, with an additional year, non-consecutive, tacked at the end for breaking & entering.

Happy Holidays everyone,

- Me

Editor’s note:

Corrlinks (the prison email system) has been down for four days, so including me, dear reader, you are the third (figuratively) person to hear.

Walking amongst us common criminals are fellas I like to call “The Superfelons”. There are Superfelons with uncanny abilities of strength: one can lift three times his own body weight without flinching. Another can blow wind out of his ass so forcefully that the vibrations of its gust can be felt on the opposite side of the unit. Some Superfelons are in possession of supernatural powers, like the ability to make things vanish in thin air: money, evidence… people.

And then there are the mutant Superfelons, blessed with physical attributes that defy the limitations of anatomical men. There is a giant that towers over anything less than 7ft. tall and another whose head is as wide as my chest. One Superfelon’s gift outweighs all others: the one my homie Kioni nicknamed “Six”.

His superpower? He commands a fully dexterous sixth finger… and it is fucking awesome.

He plays guitar with it (six note chords!), he leverages pool cues with it, he firmly shakes hands with it. In fact, everything he does with his left hand is, by simple logic, 20% better than anything I could possibly do with my left hand. Think about how drastically the course of our evolution was affected simply by adjusting the angle of our thumb 90 degrees, then imagine that opposable digit… GETTING AN OPPOSABLE DIGIT! Now you understand why Six is my favorite Superfelon of all time.

Be good to each other,

- D

ARTISTS NOTE: This is not a still frame from Fringe. This is Six’s hand discreetly placed on the glass of the Xerox machine in the law library. Special Thanks to the clerks for assistance.

You have a lot of time to think in prison. Lord knows I do my best to stay positive and to keep my head focused on the future. But it is becoming harder and harder to not let my thoughts stray into the past to fester, copulate with pity and breed regret. Not so much regret for what I’ve done – which is a given – but regret for what I didn’t do. Regret for what I could have done. Regret for what I could have been.

I could have been a better father.

I could have been a better son. I could have been a better friend. A better lover. A better student. A better teacher. I could have been a better man. The ‘could have’ that has grown louder since I’ve been here, the one that makes me shudder with shame, is “I could have been a better brother.”

I was the eldest of three boys, and I could have run better blocks. That’s what big brothers do, they protect the younger ones. They teach them lessons from their own mistakes so that their younger brothers don’t have to make them. I don’t think I did as good a job with that as I could have. In fact, I know that more often than not, I was a complete dick. I’m thinking that part of it was the fact that I had a different dad then them. There were times growing up where I’d catch “Odd Man Out” syndrome. I was the self-proclaimed “black sheep” and used the resulting fear of being different to justify being an asshole to two dudes who looked to me to be more.

There is no excuse. They deserved better. And so, to Jovi & Camillo, I extend a humble apology. I could have been a better big brother. I should have been a better big brother.

Camillo, the youngest, has been sending me these drawings of circles since I’ve been in. Sometimes, no letter, no words… just pages and pages of circles. Camillo views the world through a different set of goggles, and I now realize that his art, these circles, may be his way of trying to communicate with me. The art of this post – our first ever collab – is my reply. I hope it makes sense.

Be Good to each other,

- D

Until last week, our prison living arrangement was as follows: Four inmates – and their bunks, and their foot lockers, which contain every possession they’ve accumulated in however many years they’ve been down – were stuffed into a two-man cell measuring approximately 14 feet wide by 9 feet long.

Then powers that be, in one of their trademark flashes of brilliance, decided that our over-crowded prisons weren’t crowded enough. They decided to remove the storage lockers and fill that newly vacated space with another couple inmates.

We’ve done the incredibly crude math to determine how much room that leaves us. It works out to about nine square feet. How much wiggle room is that? Go to a really big warehouse store with square floor tiles, like a Walmart. Stand one one of those floor tiles. Now count one floor tile over in any direction – that’s how much space you’d have (as an inmate) to move around before bumping into someone during our thrice-daily stand-up counts.

I understand budgets are tight. I understand drastic times call for drastic measures. Do the powers that be understand the implications of confining six alpha males in such a comically small territory?

Perhaps they do. Perhaps this is all a government-funded science experiment, designed to determine how close to the edge we can be pushed before one of us… or all of us… fall.

Be good to each other, especially your neighbors…

- D

Those that know me know that I was the definitive news junkie before I got locked up. Some would say that my thirst for accurate information on world happenings bordered on neurosis. Consequently, a lack of real news has been one of the most frustrating aspects of being incarcerated. The few papers that still deliver to prisons arrive about two days late. Of the 5 televisions that divide the unit, only one airs “news” – and only from 6 until 7 AM (when all TVs are cut off) and almost always Fox “News”.

I swear to God, sometimes I feel like I’m being Punk’d.

For the most part, I’ve been good at adhering to the most valuable piece of advice I received about doing time: “Keep problems out of the TV rooms”. Almost every beating since I’ve been here has happened in one of them. But as I was walking by a couple days ago, a headline caught my eye that pushed my patience past the point of reason: “Occupy Violently”.

I walked in while an “Expert” explained how the Occupy Movement and its demonstrators were mostly George Soros-funded hooligans, homeless and mentally-challenged people that had nowhere else to go.

I have friends out there. I know that not to be the case.

And so, in a fit of courage fueled equally by frustration, anger and a desire to retain a piece of my former self, I decided to stage my own one-man demonstration by Occupying the Range 2 TV Room. That morning, In an almost unheard of act of defiance, I changed. The fucking. Channel.

There were huffs, puffs and pigeon chests from the regulars, including Mr. Lyon (a 1%’er serving 18 months for not paying taxes, caricatured here in pencil and coffee), who waved his cane and delivered a brief, spittle-laden fit of hoots and hollers regarding Liberal Media… but in the end, those that didn’t want to watch local news simply grabbed their coffees and left. It felt good, and while the repercussions of that act have directed mean-mugs and mumbles at my face, I remind myself that Occupy Oakland is getting tear gas directed at theirs, and, for the briefest of instants I feel like I’m a part of something again.

Special thanks to Dev, Isis, Ean, J.F., and everyone else trying to keep me informed as to what’s really going on out there. I respect the Hell out of what you are doing.

Be Safe. Be Smart… be good to each other,

- D

There are as many different flavors of depression in here as there are flavors of ice cream out there. Every man, no matter how strong their spirit, will eventually get a taste.

There is a dark kind of depression that floats around in abundance. It consumes its host like a sickness. The men who feast on this variety are easy to spot: there’s a certain hollowness to them, a big vacancy in the deepest part of their eyes. A place in their soul where once lived a will. You can usually find these diners in fetal position atop their racks, not giving a fuck about anything or anyone. Theirs is the most dangerous flavor because it is silent… and highly contagious.

There is a flamboyant kind of depression worn on the sleeve for all to see. It’s an odd flavor – it requires attention to survive, attention received from other fans of the taste. Connoisseurs enjoy and hate each others’ company simultaneously. Like I said, an odd flavor.

There is even a conflicted kind of depression whose presence is denied by its consumers – “I can stop whenever I want.” The optimistic few make attempts to counter its bitter taste with laughter, visions of the future and an belief that just as misery loves company, so does joy. Yet every once in a while we taste it, bitter on our tongues.

I was staring out the window the other day, past the razor wire that separates us from the civilized world. One of the old timers walked up behind me and said

“You look like a 90-year-old man, staring out the rear view mirror to try and figure out where you made a wrong turn.”

I laughed. We usually do, him and I. But when he’d gone, I wondered if he’d chuckle if he knew how close to the truth he was.

I stared a little longer, then got up to make an extra strong cup of coffee to get that taste out of my mouth.

Be good to each other,

- D