Prison Vitality

“Man’s inner strength may raise him above his outward fate.” - Viktor Frankl

Introduction

“What am I in the eyes of most people? A good for nothing, an eccentric and disagreeable man, somebody who has no position in society and never will have. Very well, even if that were true, I should want to show by my work what there is in the heart of such an eccentric man, of such a nobody.” - Vincent Van Gogh

For the sake of this blog, I’ll call myself Johnny Quismada. I’ve been buried 2 decades in a maximum security prison, Southern style. I didn’t come here expecting a comfortable or pleasant experience and I wasn’t wrong. Unpleasantness supreme. But prison is a human story and even in the darkest of societies there can be warm moments, all the more luminous because of their rarity.

The goal of this blog is to give you, the reader, a taste of what living in prison is really like. I definitely want to be accurate, but I’m living this rather than observing it through the eyes of a trained journalist. So, I’ll tell it like it is and hope you’ll forgive the personal nature of the narrative.

I’ll try to post a new essay regularly, though it will be less frequent than the blog norm because I have no access to the internet and will rely on friends and volunteers to maintain the blog and they, in turn, will be at the mercy of a tired postal service.

If you like the writing, please share it with someone. Political ambitions and Hollywood imaginations have contributed to a lot of misconceptions about the reality of incarceration. I’m not unaware that most people simply don’t care what happens to men and women once they go to prison, but you never know when a random story might break through indifference to touch someone new.

Prison Vitality

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August 14, 2022

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