Why Not?

Choices

You’re locked in a cage, packed tighter than sardines in a tin can and feeling lost and hopeless. You’re here. Life is out there. To get to the other side of the fence, all you really have to do is punch your prison time-card and, unless you’re serving a life or indeterminate sentence, you’ll eventually get out.

I understand. It’s easier to lie in your bunk and sleep away your time with your eyes wide-shut than to participate in programming that could have a positive impact. Doing nothing is easily justified, but I’d like to suggest a different approach to doing time. Everyone is given 24 hours every day, even while incarcerated. And every day we get the chance to make a choice with what to do with those hours. Remember, even if you made a bad choice last week, month, year, or decade… tomorrow you get another set of 24 hours with which you can make a different choice. Why not?

Just Start

Reading a book is a simple start. Whether it be a Vince Flynn adventure novel read purely for fun, or a book on Buddhist meditation or even a college accounting textbook, the act of reading helps develop and sharpen your cognitive abilities, reasoning skills and empathy. It also improves your vocabulary and introduces you to exciting new words. And you never know where reading might take you.

I always enjoyed reading, even as a kid. In prison I soon realized that “intake & orientation” really translated to being locked in cell 22 hours a day, so I asked my mom to order me some books. Walking from property with this big stack of new books caught the watchful eye of a Lieutenant I had never seen before. He casually commented on my being a reader and then, just like that, invited me to apply for the unposted chaplain assistant position in the spiritual library. I interviewed, got the job and loved it. When I was transferred to my next prison, that initial job experience in the spiritual library helped me get a job in the new prison’s regular library, where I worked very happily for three years. All because an officer I didn’t know happened to see a new guy walking down the hall with a stack of books!

Take a Class

Get out there and take an education class, any class. Just do it. It’ll not only make the time fly b, but you’ll also gain valuable experience and credits that can help you stay out once you get out.

My DOC facility offered some amazingly positive programming run by outside volunteers, including a Restorative Justice Council, the Redeeming Time Project that worked on teaching clients to perform Shakespeare, Alternative to Violence Program and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop (MPWW). Not only did these programs offer a unique opportunity to spend time out of our cells, they enriched and advanced the lives of the participants.

The Power of the Pen

Attending that first MPWW writing class back in 2015 literally changed my life. It was because of that one class that I discovered that I not only enjoyed writing, but I was actually pretty decent at it. I started spending more time writing different types of things, even poetry, and was eventually assigned an amazing MPWW writing mentor who provided me with much needed feedback and encouragement.

I was finally encouraged to submit the first and only story I had ever written to the real world for publication. Someone had provided me a hand-written list containing three addresses for submitting writings, so I thought, “Why Not? I have nothing to lost but the cost of postage.”

The first publication, the Journal of Prisoners on Prison rejected my piece entirely because they don’t accept fiction (oops, my bad!). But the second, The Beat Within , actually published my story. I was now officially a “published author.” That was so cool. But then I got blown away when, a few weeks later I was notified my submission to PEN America actually won 2nd place in fiction, which included a substantial cash prize. I was hooked.

Since my first nervous submissions in 2017, I’ve now had more than 350 individual works published around the world. Ironically, The Journal of Prisoners on Prison, the place that had rejected my first fiction story, published my entire 3,000 word essay entitled “MSOP’s COVID response was a Disaster,” which was subsequently cited in the Mitchell-Hamline Law School SOLPRC newsletter and quoted in the Minnesota Star Tribune newspaper. Last year, Spotlight on Recovery published my “Open Letter to Governor Walz” in full-color, and the Governor’s office actually responded by reaching out to me with a phone call. JSTOR accepted my essay about prison education to their prestigious archive and I’ve been asked to write for Prison Legal News (PLN). Instead of writing fiction, I’m learning I can write about real issues experienced by real people, and the outside world is reading and caring enough to respond.

Lest you think publication in outside magazines and periodicals is easy, please realize that as of 6/1/2026, I’ve submitted 7,301 works to 625 unique publications . That’s a lot of stamps.

Why spend all that time, energy and postage in sending my writings out? Why not? I’m doing something constructive with my time, honing a new passion, and working on usable skills that I hope might become a future vocation. Sometimes I even earn a few bucks in awards or publishing payments. I’ve found my voice. I’m not only writing about grave injustices and flaws in the criminal justice system, but publication allows me to shout about these issues from the mountaintops!

Exercise Your Grey Cells

Back at the beginning my brain was still hungry for more and I started exploring my education options. I discovered the DOC facility I was living at offered many exceptional opportunities, including in-person college classes, online degrees, and even specialized classes that provided certification for C-Tech computer network cabling that could lead to a well-paying job immediately upon release. I signed up for them all. Taking accredited college courses taught in-person by real professors was an amazing experience and compared to the usual zoom-zooms and wham-whams, the $10.00 course fee was the best investment I ever made in myself.

Make What’s Missing

Of course not every facility is as supportive of its clients’ futures. The facility I was transferred to in 2020 had a written policy that actually prohibited staff from helping to facilitate any educational opportunities beyond a GED. Deeply convinced of the importance of continuing these educational opportunities, I asked questions, wrote kites and applied my newly honed writing skills to file an official grievance on this issue. Lo and behold, two months later, the facility changed their policy! Later that summer I became their very first client to be approved to take an accredited college class through Rio Salada college.

The assessor for my Special Release Board (SRB) suggested working on my financial awareness would be a protective factor that would increase chances of success after release. Nervous because I was a writer who was loves words, I took his advice and stretched outside of my comfort zone by making my first new college correspondence class Financial & Tax Management for Small Businesses. As luck would have it, I received my textbook and course work the week before our facility went on a COVID-19 lock-down where we were restricted to our rooms 23 ½ hours a day. I got four weeks of homework done in four days and stayed ahead even after the facility lifted the lockdown. This wordsmith’s numbers must of added up alright because somehow I passed with an A.

By the end of that year, two other clients had signed up for college classes. John Pail M. said “I was incarcerated in the middle of my first semester of Technical college – now twenty years later I finally have the opportunity to take another class!” Today, there are nearly half-a-dozen people taking higher educational classes at our facility.

Exploration and Discovery

I’ve been taking a Buddhist Correspondence course via U.S. mail for the last few years because I enjoy learning completely new worldviews and concepts. I requested the address for every Buddhist organization in Minnesota and spent all 27 a postcard seeking volunteers willing to volunteer to lead a Buddhist spiritual group at our facility. One of them actually responded by contacting our facility and she’s been leading monthly Buddhist Meditation meetings for the last two years.

I read in the Minnesota Star Tribune newspaper about a new “Prison to Law Pipeline” program. Maureen Onyelobi is the first inmate in the country to get admitted to an accredited law school where she’s pursuing a bona fide law degree to become a licensed attorney. She is a great example of someone shaping their own future, making the most of our time behind bars, and not being deterred simply because something hasn’t been done before. Unfortunately my facility didn’t qualify for that program, so I kept looking for other options.

Masters of Humanities

After reading that recidivism rate drops to 0% for those who earn a Master’s degree while incarcerated , I realized that education may literally be the key to my release. It look several years to find the right program, but as of January 2026, I earned my Master’s in Humanities from California State University’s Special HUX program designed for incarcerated people.

Through my voluminous graduate reading, I learned about the historical roots of incarceration and the Prison Industrial Complex. I was shocked that California spends more on prisons than it does on higher education. I was inspired by the shared experiences of people like Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier and Nelson Mandela. I discovered there is no hierarchy of oppression and I can articulate the differences between abolition and reformation. More than a few of my graduate school papers on these topics have been published on-line by the American Prison Writing Archive at John Hopkins University.

Mandela astutely noted, “Prison is designed to break one’s spirit and destroy one’s resolve. To do this, the authorities attempted to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individuality – all with the idea of stamping out that spark that makes each of us human, each of us who we are.”

The Spirit-Spark that Makes Us Human

That brings us to the most difficult cases: people serving life without the possibility of parole (LWOP) or “indeterminate” sentence of civilly committed individuals. Why waste time improving yourself if you’re never going to get a chance to see the light of freedom? Why educate yourself if you’ll never be able to apply for a job in the real world or have a chance to work for a company that might care about your credentials? Why prance around like a fool and bother memorizing lines from some long-dead bard who didn’t even have the courtesy to speak normal English? Why study about corporate accounting if you can’t run a company from prison? Why read a book about a place you may never be able to visit? Why do anything?

To that I say, what’s the alternative? Your life is important and you can make a difference in the world, even if it’s from behind bars. Just ask Onyelobi. According to the article, she’s serving a life sentence in Shakopee, Minnesota. She didn’t give up. In fact, she had to work extra hard to earn her bachelor’s and master’s degrees while in prison before she could even apply to law school. She mad a difference in my life without us ever meeting.

I’m also serving an indeterminate (de facto life) sentence. After I completed the maximum prison sentence allowed under Minnesota state law, I was civilly committed to the notoriously draconian Minnesota Sex Offender Program (MSOP), where I’ve lived since January 2020. MSOP has been in the news and the courts over questions of whether it’s constitutional to keep people locked up indefinitely to prevent future crimes they might commit. Ever see Minority Report? But here I am, stuck I a place that would give Dante nightmares and realizing there’s a chance I may never get out. But now I know I’m not alone and that many others have suffered far more than me without giving up.

Do that leaves us with a lot of WHY questions. Why do I care? Why do I get up in the morning? Why do I continue to educate myself? Why do I participate in treatment? Why do I take classes? Why do I write essays like this? Why do I do any of these things if there’s no possibility I’m ever getting out?

The answer is simple. Why not?