From Life in Prison to the Eras Tour

Still, over time, I earned a reputation. “Joe’s straight,” guys would say, with some mix of mockery and begrudging respect. The prison system assigned each of us a security designation, based in part on our disciplinary records; after a period of good behavior, I was transferred to a lower-security prison near Ambere. But soon I was transferred again, and I fell into a deep depression. I wound up in a mental-health unit in San Luis Obispo. From my cell, I could see a coastal valley and hear 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 searching for our “true selves”—the kids we’d each been before terrible decisions led us to prison. I didn’t dare contact Ambere; part of me hoped, for her sake, that she’d found someone else. But I knew my true self was the person who’d fallen in love with her in 1995, when I was in my twenties. In my cell, I’d listen to “22,” by Taylor Swift, and think about those days.

In 2014, our group learned that prisoners who served twenty-five years and reached the age of sixty could become eligible for release. I might go before the parole board in 2029 instead of 2046. “There’s a lot of talk within the B.P.H. right now to change their philosophy,” a former parole-board psychiatrist told us. “Absent any substantial red flags, they’re supposed to give you the benefit of the doubt and grant you parole.”

In 2015, my mother’s caregiver set up a phone call between my mom and me, in the hope that a familiar voice might cut through her worsening dementia. She didn’t seem to recognize me. Later that year, when I tried to send my mom a Christmas card, I found out that she’d passed away. Because of me, both of my parents had died alone in unfamiliar facilities, without their only child to care for them.

After another transfer, I shared my cell with a septuagenarian who expected to die in prison. Each morning, while brushing my teeth and making coffee, I checked to see if he was still breathing. I knew I might be like him one day.

Then I received a cryptic, one-sentence postcard from Ambere. We hadn’t corresponded in years, but now she seemed eager to reconnect. I dialled her old number from memory. Minutes passed as an automated system asked her to pay for the call. Finally, I heard her warm voice on the other end. She wanted to tell me about her new life. She sounded happy and healthy.

I spent that year eating, sleeping, exercising, and calling Ambere. Each day, I had three hours outdoors in a concrete-and-asphalt enclosure where wild geese sometimes flocked nearby. I listened to Swift’s early albums, “Fearless” and “Speak Now,” which Ambere considered shallow and formulaic. “You used to listen to good music,” she teased. “What happened?” We spoke as friends, but I knew she was there, and that made me confident I could make it to 2029.

One day in 2017, after a transfer to San Quentin State Prison, I noticed a group of guys crowding around a pullup station in the rec yard. They were quizzing one another on the concepts that come up at parole hearings: causative factors, internal and external triggers, coping skills. “What is your deal?” I said. “All due respect, but why are y’all in this area if you’re not working out?”

“What do you really care about?” one of them asked me. “Freedom? Or doing pullups?”

Until then, my strategy for earning parole had been to survive prison without any disciplinary infractions. Yet everyone around me seemed to be chasing release by optimizing their prison jobs, their studies, their participation in self-help groups. I didn’t like the idea of rehearsing whatever we thought the parole board wanted to hear. I was beginning to understand that any path toward freedom, for me, would need to include a real sense of self-actualization. I wanted to try to be better than I was.

I began to report stories for the San Quentin News, a prison-approved newspaper, covering what I viewed as the culture of rehabilitation. Prison had made me cynical, yet I was moved by some of the people I wrote about. I watched a group of youth offenders—men who’d become adults inside prison—try to reclaim some of the innocence they’d surrendered. At their meetings, on Thursdays, they’d sometimes play charades or Pictionary. They also encouraged men like me to donate our meagre savings to good causes, such as shelters for at-risk youth and counselling for kids with incarcerated parents.

One person kept coming up in my reporting: Heidi Rummel, a parole attorney and reform advocate at the University of Southern California. When I called her, I’d wedge the phone against my shoulder so that I could write frantically in a notepad. “You need to be able to fully answer and address 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 don’t understand your crime and the internal factors that caused you to make those choices, then the Board can’t trust you to not make those same bad choices all over again.”

III. Karma

The pandemic years changed me. I survived a coronavirus infection when many guys I knew did not. After that, every human interaction felt precious and potentially fleeting. Ambere and I hadn’t been in touch for a couple of years, but we were worried about each other and reconnected again. Meanwhile, California tried to reduce prison overcrowding by making a new group of people eligible for parole. Now I would need to serve twenty years and turn fifty—a threshold I’d clear in 2023. Alone in my cell, I listened to “Folklore” and “Evermore,” albums that Swift released in 2020. “Time, wondrous time / Gave me the blues and then purple-pink skies,” Swift sings on “Invisible String.”

And isn’t it just so pretty to think
All along there was some
Invisible string
Tying you to me?