I've Been Incarcerated For 22 Years — And I've Never Seen Prisons This Out Of Control

When the wooden cane smacked the prisoner’s head, its curved end snapped off and slid 20 feet to my prison-issued sneakers. It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and I was writing a poem about my friend’s recent bachelor party in prison when it happened. I looked up and saw blood streaming down the victim’s face as he latched on to the cane in desperation.

Prisoners peeked out of their cell windows. After a tense two-minute standoff, two prisoners stepped in to break up the fight. One locked the assailant in a shared bathroom. The other accompanied the bleeding victim to the front of the block and banged on a Plexiglas window, trying to get the attention of one of the few correctional officers working the morning shift.

Like all prisons in North Carolina, Nash Correctional Institution — the medium-custody men’s prison where I’m housed — is short-staffed most days. This means that our safety is always in jeopardy. I’ve been incarcerated long enough to know that this isn’t how prison should be.

In 2002, I was convicted of murder and sentenced to life without parole. Although I’ve never been cited for violence while incarcerated, I’m as familiar with human brutality as a shellshocked combat veteran. Until recently, I had never considered understaffing a contributor to violence and recidivism. I do now.

When Derek Chauvin, the disgraced former police officer convicted in the 2020 killing of George Floyd, was stabbed 22 times in a federal prison last year, staffing was found to be an issue at the facility. The same was true at the correctional institutions where mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger was killed in 2018 and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide a year later. Such polarizing cases raised public