Moments: How I Bonded with Lifers
Teaching creative writing to prisoners
Students don’t normally shake the teacher’s hand when they enter a classroom, but at this writer’s workshop that I’m teaching, that modicum of manners counts for a lot. These students don’t have a lot of contact with people, especially physical touch.
They are lifers at California State Prison Los Angeles County. Most are LWOPs, sentenced for murder to life without possibility of parole or such heavy time, sixty or seventy-year sentences, that it is equivalent to LWOP. . It’s not officially the death penalty but it has the same outcome. They will die in prison. The men call their sentences simply “life without,” or sometimes more wryly, “toe-tag parole.”
“The only way I’m leaving here is in a box,” one man says in a matter-of-fact tone.
They always thank me for making the ninety-mile trek from Los Angeles to Lancaster in Southern California’s wind-whipped high desert. As I drive up the freeway, the housing tracts and big-box stores give way to a jagged, dun-colored landscape of rocks and mountains. It seems to symbolize the harsh and barren isolation in which prisoners live.
For the majority of them, I am one of few people from the outside they see regularly. Most men have been incarcerated since adolescence or young adulthood, the high-risk age…
