Citizens for Criminal Justice Reform – New Hampshire

Billy was a big lump of a man. I met him when he got transferred to the sex offender program in the New Hampshire State Prison. By then he was twenty-nine.

It takes fifty minutes to drive from Dover to Concord. I wished it would take longer even though handcuffs chaffed my wrists.

He shuffles across the prison yard, hands in the pockets of a coat he’s worn for the past eight winters. When it was new, it more or less fit. Now it hangs from his frame like a shroud.

"The incomprehensible order or rule is a basic feature of life in prison." - Gresham Sykes, The Society of Captives, Princeton Univeristy Press. 1958.

It was mail call a couple of weeks before my birthday. I got a five-day notice from the property room.  A five-day notice is the prison’s way of telling you it has some piece of your property that you can’t have.