I never meant to be a criminal, but I guess that’s what criminals say. We give all sorts of excuses as to our dark origin stories; trust me, in prison, I hear them day in and day out. We covet these excuses because to us, locked away for years, decades, lifetimes . . . these excuses represent vindication and the hope for rehabilitation—at least in the eyes of the parole board. We wax philosophical about why we did this thing or that—we beat up that woman because she was sleeping with another man, and our mother was a prostitute and our father an alcoholic. We robbed that convenience store because we lived in the projects and didn’t have money to feed our kid brothers and sisters. We turned into a drug baron because we came from a broken home.

​

There are all these pretexts behind our crimes—I mean, can you blame us? We fucked up and landed in jail, where we spend many hours of the day alone in a cell thinking about what we have done and wondering why—because, had we not done it, we wouldn’t be here. It takes humility and introspection to open yourself up to that sort of analysis. Like setting fire to a self-portrait, in the end you feel strangely satisfied, humbled, maybe even relieved.

​

But I’ll save you the trouble right now: I’m not going to hide behind excuses for my crimes. I’m not going to pretend I was a good person in doing what I did, because I wasn’t. And the one thing I will resolutely not do is feed you a bunch of lies to make me appear better than I am. When you’re sentenced to two decades behind bars, you get a lot of time for self-reflection.