However, over time I have developed a reputation. “Joe’s straight,” the guys said with some mixture of mockery and grudging respect. The prison system assigned each of us guard status, based in part on our disciplinary records; after a period of good behavior I was transferred to a higher security prison near Amber. But soon I was transferred again, and I fell into a deep depression. I ended up in a mental hospital in San Luis Obispo. From my cell I could see the coastal valley and hear the trains whistling through the hills.
I saw psychologists and joined a support group for lifers. We sat in a circle on rickety chairs and talked about finding our “real” selves—the kids each of us had been before the terrible decisions landed us in prison. I didn't dare contact Amber; part of me hoped, for her sake, that she had found someone else. But I knew that I was actually the person who fell in love with her in 1995, when I was in my twenties. In my cell, I listened to Taylor Swift's “22” and thought about those days.
In 2014, our group learned that prisoners who had served twenty-five years and reached the age of sixty could be eligible for release. I could go before the parole board in 2029 instead of 2046. “There's a lot of talk within BPH right now about changing their philosophy,” a former parole board psychiatrist told us. “In the absence of any significant red flags, they should give you the benefit of the doubt and grant you parole.”
In 2015, my mother's carer arranged a phone call between my mother and I in the hope that a familiar voice would help her overcome her worsening dementia. She didn't seem to recognize me. Later that year, when I tried to send my mom a Christmas card, I learned that she had passed away. Because of me, both my parents died alone, in unfamiliar surroundings, without their only child to care for them.
After another transfer, I shared a cell with a seventy-year-old man who was going to die in prison. Every morning, while brushing his teeth and making coffee, I checked to see if he was still breathing. I knew that one day I could be like him.
Then I received a mysterious one-sentence postcard from Amber. We hadn't corresponded for many years, but now she seemed eager to reconnect. I dialed her old number from memory. Minutes passed when the automated system asked her to pay for the call. Finally I heard her warm voice on the other end of the line. She wanted to tell me about her new life. She seemed happy and healthy.
All this year I ate, slept, exercised and called Amber. Every day I spent three hours outdoors in a concrete-paved enclosure, where wild geese sometimes gathered together. I listened to Swift's early albums Fearless and Speak Now, which Amber thought were shallow and formulaic. “You used to listen to good music,” she teased. “What's happened?” We spoke as friends, but I knew she was here, and that gave me confidence that I would live until 2029.
One day in 2017, after being transferred to San Quentin State Prison, I noticed a group of guys hanging out near a bus stop in the backyard. They questioned each other about concepts that come up at parole hearings: causal factors, internal and external triggers, coping skills. “What is your business?” I said. “With all due respect, why are you all here if you’re not training?”
“What do you really care about?” one of them asked me. “Freedom? Or pull-ups?”
Before this, my parole strategy was to survive prison without any disciplinary infractions. However, everyone around me seemed to be striving for release by optimizing their prison work, studies and participation in self-help groups. I didn't like the idea of rehearsing what we thought the parole board wanted to hear. I began to realize that any path to freedom for me had to include a real sense of self-actualization. I wanted to try to be better than I was.
I started reporting stories for San Quentin. Newsa prison-approved newspaper covering what I consider to be a culture of rehabilitation. Prison made me cynical, but some of the people I wrote about touched me. I watched as a group of young criminals—men who had become adults in prison—tried to regain some of the innocence they had given up. At their Thursday meetings, they sometimes played charades or drew. They also encouraged people like me to donate our meager savings to good causes, such as shelters for at-risk youth and counseling for children with incarcerated parents.
One person kept popping up in my reporting: Heidi Rummel, a parole lawyer and reform advocate at the University of Southern California. When I called her, I clutched the phone to my shoulder so I could frantically write in my notepad. “You have to be able to fully respond and answer three simple questions,” Heidi said of the parole process. “What did I do? Why did I do it? And how have I changed? If you do not understand your crime and the internal factors that led you to make this choice, then the Council cannot trust you not to make the same bad choice again and again.”
III. Karma
The pandemic years have changed me. I survived the coronavirus infection, while many of my friends did not. After that, every human interaction seemed precious and potentially fleeting. Amber and I hadn't spoken in a couple of years, but we cared about each other and got back together. Meanwhile, California has tried to ease prison overcrowding by making a new group of people eligible for parole. Now I will have to serve twenty years and turn fifty, a threshold that I will pass in 2023. Alone in my cell, I listened to Folklore and Evermore, the albums Swift released in 2020. “Time, wonderful time / Gave me the blues and then purple and pink skies,” Swift sings on “Invisible String.”
And isn't it so nice to think
All this time there was some
Invisible line
Tie you to me?
