Author's Forward

I have wanted to tell this story ever since I experienced life in prison. After living through prison life I realized that my entire world view had changed. I was nothing close to the person I went in as and this was not a good thing. I struggled a lot when I got out because I couldn't understand the world I was in anymore than someone who hasn't been to prison will ever really understand the world behind bars. This is a big part of why I want to tell this story, people need to know what prison is like and how easy it is for good people to turn bad in there.

I accept the fact we need prisons. I don't think we need as many as we do though and I hope telling this story will help people understand this. We spend billions of dollars every year locking people up for non violent crimes. We use prisons to house the mentally ill and destitute at enormous expense and the problems are not getting better. Our justice system is broken and our prison system is even worse, if we don't start looking at this and work to change it we are going to collapse under the weight of the entire thing.

I know some readers are going to wonder how close to the truth I am in this story. All I have to say is I will be drawing a lot from personal experience and the experience of others I have known. This is a work of fiction, but it is a fiction based on real experiences and things that are happening in prisons all over the country every single day. If you think the things I talk about are unbelievable, I suggest you go spend some time in prison, you will find out real fast that if anything I understated things.

The reason I am using letters written by a single individual is because that is how I want to tell the story. Part of this project is to act as a way for me to finally say so many of the things I wanted to say to people when I was inside but never did. I also think using letters as a way to tell the story will help place readers in the mind of a convict much more intimately than an account told in the third person would.

Some of the letters are going to discuss criminal activity and other things that most inmates would never write about in a letter because they are aware their letters could get read and this could cause legal problems. I am doing this because again, I want to tell the story in a certain way and that means tweaking my fictional reality a bit. I don't see a problem with this, after all this is a work of fiction.

I am going to talk about some dark things, some painful things, the stuff of nightmares. This will not be a happy story nor should it be. Prison is a horrid place and I want to show people the truth about how a part of society lives. I want it in your face, naked, unforgiving and unrelenting. If you are disturbed by some of the things that happen in this story, good, you should be. If you want to be offended by the thoughts of my main character, feel free, but realize I am not going to pull punches here. This story needs to be told and I am going to tell it.