Ezra’s Story: Being Love
By Ezra Bozeman
Ezra Bozeman served 49 years in the Pennsylvania state prison system before he was granted compassionate release in May 2024. Severely ill, he lived only 12 days in a hospital before he passed away at the age of 68. His fiancée, Christine Roess, was by his side. Deeply philosophical and spiritual, Ezra wrote many essays like this one through the years. He was a source of comfort, wisdom, and love to everyone who knew him. This essay tells how that path began.
In 1982, I was 26 and I was transferred to SCI Huntington and put in solitary confinement. I spent my days working out, reading, writing, studying law, getting ready for court. This was the longest time I’d spent in solitary, and the most introspective time ever. My story to myself was that I’d been sent there to be broken, much the way my enslaved ancestors had been broken under the whip. I’d learned, “He who is whipped the easiest, is whipped the most.” So, I readied myself for war.
One summer day I was working out in the solitary cell. It was so hot the walls of the cell were streaked with lines of perspiration running down in decades old dirty white paint. The paint was so old the wall seemed yellow, and the sweat looked brown. I was getting my workout in, though. I wanted it to be clear to any foes that I won’t be whipped easily.
For a moment I lost focus during the workout and started listening to two guys talking to one another through the doors of the cells below mine. I didn’t know them, don’t remember their names, when they came or left solitary. I do remember this part of their conversation because it changed my life.
The conversation was being carried on by two Black guys, an Oldhead and the other a Youngbuck. These names are affectionately used amongst young and older folks in prison. It appeared to me that the Oldhead had been sharing stories about his daughter’s failures in her love life, and I recall the conversation like this:
Youngbuck: Oldhead, why don’t you let me write to your daughter? I could love her better than those dudes out there.
Oldhead: Youngbuck, you have brought yourself to ruin. You are in prison, “in prison.” You poison your body with drugs. You let your mind go, and don’t even read. You don’t even love yourself! This is how you love yourself. How am I to believe that you would love my daughter any more than you love yourself?
I wanted love in my life, and believed, like the Youngbuck, I could love because I said I could. But many of the things I’d been doing didn’t show that I loved myself. And, if I wanted to love and be loved everything that I do should demonstratively show it. I should be working not toward war, but toward love.
From that day forward, I made a promise to myself — to love myself, to want for others what I want for myself, and to treat others with the same love and respect that I sought for myself.
Through the years, that revelation has guided my actions and decisions. I’ve come to understand that love, whether for ourselves or others, is a profound force that starts from within. By loving ourselves and striving for the best in our lives, we can extend that love to others, making the world a better place, one small act of kindness at a time.
What matters is not things, but being in the moment sourcing love — not looking for love, but BEING LOVE. I discovered that these ways of being were fully available to me where I was as they were to anyone, anywhere. Love won.
Do you agree with FAMM that the world needs to know that our prisons are filled with people like Ezra? Not monsters, not animals — but people who need a second chance before it’s too late — as, tragically, it was for him. Please share his story and help FAMM keep fighting for second chances.
