Redux

John J. Lennon, a contributing writer at The Marshall Project, has written for Vice, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. He is currently in Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York. He will be eligible for parole in 2029.



Joe Cardo was out hunting for half-smoked cigarettes. From my perch at the white-boys’ table of the A Block yard, I watched his eyes scan the patched grass and cracked pavement. Shuffle, stoop, shuffle, stoop. It was evening rec period, May 2015. A warm front had settled over Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York, and prisoners were taking advantage. Days earlier, on the ground where Joe now stood, a Crip had been shanked in the heart and dropped dead like someone hit his off button.



I called out to Joe. He snapped up his head and lumbered over. I introduced myself and asked if he’d answer a few questions. “John thinks he’s a reporter,” said Dave (not his real name), pointing at me. I placed a pouch of tobacco on the concrete table. (Wood, corrections officers learned the hard way, too easily concealed weapons.) Joe’s eyes went wide. He was thirty-four, white and slight—five seven, 165 pounds—with a scraggly beard and a two-car-garage hairline. “Oh, man,” he said. “Is that for me?” “Yeah,” I said.

“Then I’ll answer whatever you want.”

Weather permitting, the yard was where we spent most of our free time: Hour-long sessions, three times a day, morning, afternoon, and evening. A CO observed from a cage at the yard’s center; a few more COs walked laps, watching us watch them; another, armed with an AR-15, stood guard in a thirty-foot watchtower. No more than six prisoners were allowed at any one of the tables that lined the perimeter. Each was claimed. There was ours—the white-boys’ table, populated by a gritty group of high school burnouts, old in age but not in maturity, covered in faded tattoos of skulls and empty phrases like death before dishonor. The Puerto Ricans sat next to us; the Dominicans and the Jamaicans were nearby. The Bloods, the Rat Hunters, and the Latin Kings had tables, too.

Joe Cardo was arrested in 2014 for attempted robbery and was sent to Attica. He has schizoaffective disorder. Christaan Felber

My first question for Joe was whether he was a sex offender. A prisoner’s place in the pecking order is calculated in part by the transgression that got him here. Those whose crimes are committed against others in the life—gangsters, murderers, drug dealers—tend to land highest. Those whose crimes affect innocent civilians—burglars, perverts, assaulters—are somewhere in the middle. Sex offenders, especially pedophiles, are at the very bottom; talking to them can destroy one’s reputation by association. If Joe was in for rape or child pornography, our conversation would need to end immediately.

He wasn’t. In clipped sentences, he described how, in October 2014, with a BB gun in his hand and a knitted ski mask pulled over his head, he tried to rob a Smokers Choice in Oneonta, New York. “I shouted to the girl behind the counter, ‘Give me the money, bitch!’ ” As he spoke, his eyes flickered between sadness and fear. “She looked me up and down and shouted back, ‘No!’ Out of nowhere, this three-hundred-pound guy tackled me.”

As Joe spoke, Dave, whose all-American good looks had been whittled by years of heroin use—bad teeth, track-mark scars snaking across weathered skin—was rolling his eyes. I figured he’d bounce to the next thing if I continued to ignore him; he had the attention span of an excited puppy. But when Joe said, “I was glad when the police came,” Dave burst into laughter, and I couldn’t stop from joining. In prison, even humor is corrupted.

Joe said he was sentenced to two years. Attempted robbery in the second degree carries a minimum of three and a half years; the judge must’ve allowed him to plea to a lesser charge and given a “skid bid”—a short sentence. For most, that would mean time served in one of the state’s thirty medium-security facilities. But Attica is maximum-security, arguably New York’s toughest. Its notoriety mostly stems from a 1971 uprising that erupted over long-simmering complaints by prisoners of mistreatment. They took control of the prison, killing one CO and three prisoners in the process; five days into the standoff, under Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s orders, state police stormed the fortress, killing thirty-nine, including ten hostages. The whiff of distrust between COs, mostly white, and prisoners, mostly not, still lingers. “Why’d they send you here?” I asked.

“Bro,” Dave cut in, “he’s a bugout.” Prisonspeak for someone with mental illness.

“What’s your diagnosis?” I asked.

“Schizoaffective disorder,” Joe said, a form of schizophrenia. He asked what I was in for. “Murder,” I replied. In 2001, when I was twenty-four and living in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, I’d shot a fellow drug dealer to defend my turf; six years into my sentence—twenty-eight-to-life—I was shanked six times by his friend in retaliation. Ambulanced to an outside hospital with a punctured lung, I didn’t snitch. In this upside-down kingdom, my backstory gave me cred.

“Oh, man—you don’t look like a murderer,” Joe said as if this were the first time he noticed the hard cases who surrounded him. “Bugout” was the label Joe carried, just as “murderer” was mine. Here, where bugs were considered bottom-feeders, I wouldn’t want to switch places.

Nearly 20 percent of the fifty-two thousand prisoners in New York’s prison system—ten thousand in all—have mental illness. The Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS), which runs the state’s correctional facilities and supervises its parolees, is not alone: Nearly four hundred thousand of 2.2 million prisoners nationwide have a psychiatric diagnosis. Compare that with the thirty-eight thousand patients that the country’s state-run psych hospitals can accommodate. The math is as easy as it is shocking: Ten out of every eleven psychiatric patients housed by the government are behind bars.

The financial toll is enormous: Treating prisoners with mental illness costs twice as much as providing community-based care. State prisons spend an estimated $5 billion each year to imprison nonviolent offenders with a disorder. As the National Alliance on Mental Illness says, “In a mental-health crisis, people are more likely to encounter police than get medical help.” Jails and prisons have become our de facto asylums.

I didn’t need such figures and reports. In 1998, my brother Eugene, thirty-two and ten years older than me, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Though our family had known for a while something was wrong, we’d chalked it up to his crack addiction. But it was the other way around: He used drugs to mask an unraveling mind. He’d lost his job as an electrician at a hospital in the Bronx; he’d been evicted from one apartment after the next; friends spotted him wandering the streets, shoeless, strumming a guitar and ranting Bible verses. He was at the mercy of psych wards, shelters, and jail. If there was a safety net, he’d slipped through it.

Eugene was actually my half brother, fathered—along with his brother and sister—by a strict, old-school Italian on Long Island our mother married when she was eighteen. They divorced a decade later, and he got custody. Mom moved to Manhattan in 1976 and married an Irish bartender; a year after I came along, he split. (I never met him, and later learned he’d committed suicide.) She landed a four-bedroom apartment in the Sheepshead Bay Houses, a housing project in South Brooklyn, where my siblings visited us on the weekends. My first memories of Eugene are of him arguing with Mom. The issue was always the same: He resented her for leaving them behind.

Eugene, the author, and their older brother in the late 1970s. Courtesy of the Lennon family.

Though he drifted in and out of my childhood, we remained close. When I was ten, Mom married a third time, to a longshoreman with an apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. As a teen, I started hanging out with the neighborhood’s street-corner gangsters. I became one, doing time in juvenile halls and the adolescent unit at Rikers Island.

When I was eighteen, Eugene and I briefly lived together in an SRO. I was selling crack, and Eugene was smoking it. By then, his mental illness had started to breach. He’d been to Rikers a couple times himself—drug possession, shoplifting—serving the occasional ninety-day stint. There, he didn’t receive psychiatric care, despite his diagnoses. He was just another bugout thrown in with the general population, left to fend for himself.

In 2015, after Joe was sentenced, he was sent to one of the state’s four prisoner-distribution warehouses, or “reception centers,” as they’re known. Like everyone else entering the system, he received a mental-health exam. On a scale of six through one—six meaning no psychosis and one indicating a serious diagnosis—Joe was level one. That meant he would be placed at one of the state’s fifteen prisons supposedly equipped to treat mental illness, all but three of which are maximum-security. The medium-security spots Joe might’ve been placed if he didn’t require special care resemble grassy, dorm-dotted college campuses, except fenced. Instead, he ended up behind the wall at Attica.

Seeing Joe searching for butts brought up the same question that bothered me about Eugene: How could a guy like him end up not in treatment but behind bars? Over the next several months, I spoke with prison-reform advocates and read reports. What I learned is as tragic as it is absurd: By locking up those with psychiatric diagnoses, we’ve boomeranged back to the way things were done in antebellum America. In 1843, during a presentation to Massachusetts legislators on the deplorable conditions she’d seen in penitentiaries across the state, reformer Dorothea Dix called out the problem the government faced. “Prisons are not constructed in view of being converted into county hospitals,” she wrote, “and almshouses are not founded as receptacles for the insane. And yet, in the face of justice and common sense, wardens are by law compelled to receive, and masters of almshouses not to refuse, insane and idiotic subjects in all stages of mental disease and privation.”

Joe Cardo, his sister Maria, and their mother in the early 1980s. Courtesy of the Cardo family.

The aim of the modern penitentiary, the first of which had opened in Philadelphia a little over a decade before, was penitence, not caretaking. Dix’s solution—institutions dedicated to the treatment of mental disorders—revolutionized psychiatric care. By 1880, when the U. S. released its first demographic study of mental illness, forty thousand patients had been moved out of jails and prisons; only four hundred people with a disorder remained locked up.

But by the mid-twentieth century, most of these institutions were rotten with abuse. Thanks to a growing public awareness of such conditions and the release of the first antipsychotic drugs, the government concluded that Dix’s model no longer worked. Mental illness, it was decided, should be treated through community-based services aimed toward rehabilitation.

Thus kicked off the era of deinstitutionalization. Asylums closed. In 1955, government-run mental hospitals housed 560,000 patients; by 1980, that number had dropped by nearly 80 percent. That year, Mark David Chapman, whose schizophrenia went largely untreated, shot the musician whose name I share. He spent three decades of his life sentence at Attica, where we lived under the same roof until his recent transfer.

In 1981, Ronald Reagan—who also was shot by a man with an undertreated psychotic disorder—called for the repeal of a massive bill signed by Jimmy Carter that would have expanded federal community mental-health programs. As psych-hospital beds disappeared and the support systems that were meant to replace them lost funding, hundreds of thousands of people with mental illness were caught in a cycle of homelessness, emergency hospitalizations, and lockup.

At the same time, mass incarceration was under way. In 1950, there were 265,000 prisoners in the U. S.; today, that number has shot up by nearly a factor of ten. A 2006 Department of Justice report stated that 24 percent of those in jail and 15 percent of those in state prisons “had at least one symptom of a psychotic disorder,” numbers that rival estimates at the time Dix began her crusade. Even Donald Trump has expressed concern. In the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, this past February, the president told state and local officials, “We’re going to be talking seriously about opening mental-health institutions again.”

“I wasn't always like this, you know,” Joe said one late-summer evening in the A Block yard. He grew up in Oneonta, a dead-end city four hours northwest of New York City. While his mother worked a string of clerical jobs, her parents helped raise Joe and his older sister, Maria. Their father lived nearby, but they weren’t allowed to see him.

In its early stages, schizoaffective disorder can seem like the behavior of a troublemaker. Joe dropped out of school in ninth grade and never got his GED. He began living a sort of low-fat criminal lifestyle—shoplifting and selling weed, mostly to friends—and notched a few misdemeanors along the way. Maria was the first family member who suspected Joe’s quirks were symptoms of something more than the antics of a bad egg. But her mother dismissed her concern, Maria told me. Around the time of his mother’s death, from lung cancer in 2005, Joe’s mind began unraveling.

Joe Cardo in the early 1980s. Courtesy of the Cardo family.

One morning, he woke up believing that a creature had caused him to lose nearly fifty pounds overnight. It was his first full-fledged psychotic episode. In the months and years that followed, his symptoms worsened: A mole on his arm contained a hidden message; he thought he could shoot white energy orbs out of his palms; he showed anyone who’d listen a grainy video on his flip phone, footage, he claimed, of UFOs, angels, and demons.

Nevertheless, he scraped by. Around 2009, at Maria’s prompting, he saw a county psychiatrist. He was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and began taking a motley regimen of medications. He also began receiving a monthly disability check.

Then, in 2014, broke, evicted, and nearly blacked out on Klonopin, he pulled a ski mask over his face, palmed a BB gun, and entered a Smokers Choice. Seven months and one plea bargain later, Joe was just another Attica bugout.

Built in 1931 on a thousand-acre plot forty miles east of Niagara Falls, Attica houses twenty-two hundred prisoners behind its thirty-foot walls. I spent time on each of its five cellblocks, and A Block was without question the worst. Its residents were considered true degenerates; its yard was nicknamed “Afghanistan” for the near-daily violence that broke out on its dusty ground. It tended to be where guys were placed after getting out of the Special Housing Unit, otherwise known as the Box, otherwise known as solitary. After a verbal altercation with a CO on the honor block where I’d lived for about two years, I was sent here, too. By some sadistic luck of the draw, so was Joe.

One afternoon in the A Block yard, I asked him about his treatment. He said his pharma plan was similar to the one he had on the outside: Risperdal, an antipsychotic; Depakote, a mood stabilizer; and Buspar, an antianxiety pill he’d sometimes store in his cheek when the nurse checked his mouth and, once back in his cell, crush and sniff. That way, it hit harder. He also saw a counselor. This was not talk therapy with a Freudian shrink; it was a once-a-month check-in to make sure he wasn’t going off the rails. The therapist was employed by the Office of Mental Health. OMH was created to run the state’s handful of remaining psychiatric hospitals; since 1976, it has also overseen mental-health care in all of New York’s correctional facilities. Its in-prison employees are literal guests in DOCCS’s home, resulting in an unfortunate, if predictable, power dynamic. “There’s inherent conflict between what the mental-health staff should be doing, which is engaging and empowering patients,” says Jack Beck, a director of the Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit that monitors the state’s prisons, “and that which Corrections does: disempowerment and control, and in a very punitive way.”

The walls of Attica, built in 1931, are thirty feet high, two feet thick and studded with more than a dozen guard towers. Redux

OMH oversees several programs, but its flagship is known as the Intermediate Care Program, in which prisoners live together and receive twenty hours of therapeutic programming each week. According to the latest available data, OMH has beds for around twelve hundred prisoners, less than a quarter of the fifty-six hundred statewide who test on the mental-health exam as levels one or two—the most serious cases.

Joe wasn’t one of them, not at first. He was part of the general population, just like me. When I asked him why, he wasn’t sure. His clinical records, which Joe provided to Esquire, don’t clear things up. Special programming was first floated to him as an option three weeks after arriving at Attica. Then, and throughout his incarceration, despite clinicians’ assurances otherwise, he voiced concern that receiving mental-health care would lengthen his sentence. Regardless, as the note from his first therapy session states, “He reports being very interested” in such programming, and that a referral would be made. But in the notes from a session nearly two months later, Joe’s therapist wrote, “ He reports he has not been met with” by “ICP or TRICP staff yet and would like programming.” The therapist’s response: “He was encouraged to be patient.”

Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, New York, circa 2007. Getty Images

Meanwhile, Joe struggled to adjust to prison etiquette. His daily slew of medications exhausted him, making it a challenge to follow the simplest procedures. To go to the mess hall for meals or the yard for recreation, you had to be “on your bars”—standing by your cell door—at a certain time each morning and make the request with a CO breezing by. Joe often overslept and missed his opportunity.

Small amenities made the day-to-day tolerable, if you could afford them. Personal clothing was allowed in and around your cell—a few T-shirts, sweatshirts, sweaters, sweats, a couple pairs of shoes. Each cell connected to basic cable. Televisions were available for purchase at the commissary, which we were allowed to visit biweekly. Electronics were made with clear plastic to minimize hiding spaces. My radio, television, and typewriter: all clear.

The commissary also sold food. I’d buy tins of oysters, clams, tuna; oatmeal, instant rice, black beans, spaghetti, tomato sauce, onions, garlic, and herbs. I built a makeshift stove by removing the coil from a hot pot and placing it on top of an empty, turned-over tin can; I bought a metal sauce pot from a prisoner for five packs of Newports. We weren’t supposed to have this mini-kitchen setup, but it was tolerated if you were on good terms with the COs. I cooked my own meals, wore my own clothes—Ralph Lauren shirts, Calvin Klein underwear, Timberland chukka boots—and watched my favorite shows on the television in my cell. In one corner, I kept a stack of magazines, including this one, and some books on writing—Lopate, Zinsser, Pinker, Strunk and White. Pictures were taped to the wall: my then-lady blowing kisses at the camera; my mother, smiling, on a Florida beach, her windblown hair framing her face, her hand curled by Parkinson’s.

Joe couldn’t afford his own TV, and his only clothes were the standard-issue state greens. He ate in the mess hall, a cavernous, chaotic space where the risk of being picked on left him exposed. Getting there was a tense journey, mostly spent waiting for gates to open and shut and for other prisoners to shuffle by, no talking allowed. And the food—beef goulash, say, or chicken tetrazzini, delivered to the kitchen in industrial plastic bags—was awful. (The meals prepped for guys with dietary restrictions—vegetarian, kosher—were often better; you’ll never find as many black Jews as you will in prison, so the joke goes.) Joe had no books or magazine subscriptions, no pictures on his wall, no mother.

In September 2015, three and a half months after arriving at Attica and a full ten weeks after he expressed interest, Joe was enrolled in ICP. But the program meant to improve his life behind bars didn’t work out that way.

My brother Eugene was capable enough to live on his own but never for very long. One evening in 1998, during a manic episode, he trashed his Sheepshead Bay apartment. By the time my mother and I arrived, the police thought he might jump off the fifth-floor balcony. I convinced them to stay put and let me go inside instead.

I found Eugene in the kitchen, shirtless, bald, his eyebrows gone, with a cross shaved into his chest. I pleaded with him to surrender. “Balombo,” he said—his nickname for me since childhood—“I bless you, my son,” then threw water in my face. As he turned to set down the glass, I tackled him. Police forced him into a straitjacket and took him to the psychiatric ward at Coney Island Hospital, where he’d become a regular.

Around that time, he bought a bag of heroin from one of my foot soldiers. When I found out, I was livid, and Eugene was already hooked. Soon after, he was arrested for possession and sent to Rikers. He begged Mom to bail him out. She called me and, through choked sobs, said she couldn’t. She thought he was safer locked up than on the street.

Eugene called me. He said he’d been beaten up by a few guys inside who’d recognized him as my brother. In an instant, I connected the dots: I’d been selling to a woman who smuggled the gear to her husband, a prisoner at Rikers. A couple of weeks earlier, I’d been making a delivery when a stranger walked through her front door, and I pulled out my 9mm. It turned out to be her father. Shaken, I refused to continue selling to her. I gathered that her husband had attacked my brother to retaliate. “I don’t know what happened, but you did something to these people,” Eugene said over the jailhouse phone. “You gotta get me out of here.” I bailed him out that night.

Once enrolled in Attica’s Intermediate Care Program, Joe continued to decline. He replaced regular showers with “bird baths,” splashing water on himself from the sink in his cell. He didn’t go to the prison barber, nor did he shave. His stringy hair grew long and matted. He still saw UFOs and shot light orbs at will.

He was assigned a new therapist and, after just four sessions, a third. According to clinical records, Joe rarely went to ICP’s programs. He chalked up his poor attendance to exhaustion, wrote one therapist. But notes from the same session suggest another explanation: “Mr. Cardo . . . is concerned about his programming and how this may affect his CR”—conditional release, the date he would, with good behavior, be set free. He was never able to shake the fear that his psychosis would keep him behind bars. Or perhaps he didn’t go because he feared other ICP residents. “He indicated that he . . . is being teased by other inmates,” reads a note from March 2016. “One inmate, he said, choked him in the ICP bullpen.” There’s no indication in his OMH records that the alleged attack was investigated.

Joe spent most of his time alone in his cell, listening to the radio. Meals were brought to the cells of ICP residents, so he no longer had to make the journey to the mess hall. The CO who took down the names of prisoners heading out for recreation walked the floor slowly, and Joe was able to be on his bars in time. This small gesture, this simple decency, was the thing he liked best about being on the unit.

The author in 1998, during his drug-dealing days, on the hood of his Cadillac Seville STS. Courtesy of the Lennon family.

I’d catch up with him during rec period. One day, as Joe searched the ground for butts, the Puerto Ricans at the next table gave me a signal: a raised brow, a lift of the chin in the direction of a mounting beef.

It was silence, then action. Just as a dozen prisoners broke out into a brawl—a blur of fists, feet, and weapons dug out of the ground just moments before—I called Joe to our table. Guys with shanks thrust forward and back; guys with razor blades made circular whips at others’ faces. A CO shouted over the loudspeaker, “Fighters, drop your weapons! Get on the ground!” The tower guard trained his AR-15 on the crowd. “Everyone else: Get on the wall!” Dozens of COs spilled into the yard with batons drawn, barking orders. The fighters dropped to their stomachs. The rest of us scrambled to the perimeter, zigzagging in case bullets began to fly.

Joe ended up next to me on the wall as we waited. We eventually saw a bright light approaching in the sky, bringing with it a familiar sound: A helicopter descended behind the outside wall of the cellblock. One of the fighters needed to be airlifted. Joe hung his head between his outstretched arms, his palms fanned out against the wall. He turned to me, tears welling in his eyes. “Oh, man,” he said. “This place is crazy.”

By 2001, my drug operation was coming to an end. At its peak, I’d netted $7,500 in a good week. I had a fancy car with a customized stash compartment in place of the passenger-side airbag. I sported a Cartier watch with diamonds ringing the bezel. But I’d been arrested on a gun charge and jumped bail, and a warrant was out. Plus, I’d done something much worse.

The man I murdered was a dealer, too, who I knew from the projects. Then twenty-five, a year older than me, he’d already beaten a murder rap. He’d been shaking down one of my street dealers, which I couldn’t let stand. One night, I invited him to join me on my rounds. I’d rented a car and had placed an assault rifle in the trunk. In East Williamsburg, noticing that he was distracted by his phone, I pulled over on a deserted street, grabbed the gun, and shot him. It was over in three seconds. I put his body in the trunk and sped home on side streets. A couple days later, an associate and I put the body in a laundry bag affixed to cinder blocks and threw him off a pier into Sheepshead Bay. Two and a half months later, he washed ashore. By then, I was already in Rikers, picked up on the outstanding warrant, and found out via a New York Daily News clip that another prisoner passed along. I later learned from a Gambino capo that weighing the body down wasn’t enough, that to keep him under I would’ve had to puncture his lungs, let the air out.

At first, I felt a selfish sort of regret: Facing a few years was one thing, but now I was looking at life. The remorse came years later. Fellow prisoners tend to romanticize my crime—it’s gangster to kill a gangster! Yes, he was a wild guy. But so was I. They’d be saying the same thing if somebody had taken me out. And what does that say about my worth?

The author in his state greens, at Sing Sing. Christaan Felber

Just as true as it is that I was once a dopey twenty-four-year-old dealer, I’m also, sixteen years later, a prison journalist. I’m a murderer, but I’m a lot of other things. The man I killed was a lot of other things, too: a son, a brother, an uncle. I hurt his family deeply. I’m sorry.

Once I began serving my twenty-eight-to-life, I called Eugene a half-dozen times a year. He also knew the man I killed, and when he found out what I’d done, he didn’t throw religion in my face, not this time. “How could you do that, John?” was all he said. Still, he visited me, sporadically, each time less lucid than the last. In 2008, during a bad visit, he was anxious and distracted; all he could talk about was when he’d get to smoke his next cigarette, then he left early. That turned out to be the last time I saw him.

In December 2011, Eugene’s body was discovered in an SRO in Times Square. He’d overdosed on pills and heroin. He’d been dead for days. No one knew he was gone until the neighbors noticed the smell.

On June 29, 2016, Joe was free. He’d been at Attica for one year and two months. Four hundred twenty-one days. Ten thousand one hundred and four hours.

For someone with psychosis, the challenges of transitioning back into society are nearly insurmountable. There is a strong correlation between mental illness and a raised risk of recidivism: One recent study found that parolees with a psychiatric diagnosis are 36 percent more likely to violate parole. And a number of studies suggest what common sense dictates: Reentry programs tailored for people with mental illness help reduce that recidivism, particularly ones built around multidisciplinary teams—mental-health providers, substance-use specialists, social workers.

Last year, Esquire helped me track Joe down. Two months before he was released, his discharge planning began, a coordinated effort between DOCCS and OMH that’s meant to serve the needs of someone who, like Joe, has serious mental illness. He was set up with a parole officer, a case manager, public housing, paperwork to apply for benefits such as Supplemental Security Income, appointments with a psychiatrist and a therapist.

Once out, Joe moved back to Oneonta. In his first few days of freedom, he said, he marveled at watching television, drinking fresh coffee, smoking as many cigarettes as he wanted. His first meal was at McDonald’s.

He lived for a while in a sober-living halfway home, then at an SRO, until he was forced to leave after a dispute with two residents. Since February of last year, he’s lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a building that the city recently declared unsafe. He sometimes calls his sister Maria to tell her about strange men snooping around his mailbox or whispering about him on the street. His application to restore his SSI benefits was denied for reasons that remain unclear. As of press time, an appeal is still pending.

As for me, in November 2016 I moved to Sing Sing, thirty miles up the Hudson River from New York City. Enrolled in a privately funded college program, I take night courses and will soon earn a bachelor’s in behavioral science. As an assignment, I work alongside OMH staff on the facility’s ICP. Every morning, I coax residents to get up, wash up, and walk down the hill to the program building. Through its huge windows facing west, the worst-off prisoners watch trains screaming down riverside tracks, leading to somewhere else.

In a recent group session on life skills, the head psychologist asked me why I chose to be here. She talked about countertransference: how working alongside these men may kick up my own issues. I told the room about Eugene, about Joe, about how I saw parts of them in the men who sat before me. I opened up about my shame for having been a bad brother and a bad man. I said that this work made me feel, if not good, then better. The tears that followed, though unexpected, were long overdue.

Joe’s parole ended in April, so he and I are now allowed to talk. He’s usually at home, alone, doing nothing. “Chilling,” he calls it. He loves watching horror movies and made me promise to mention a hidden message halfway through 1973’s The Exorcist. “When the priest sprinkles holy water on Regan and she speaks backwards,” Joe tells me, “you have to listen closely. She says, ‘Maria, Joey, Luigia’—that’s my sister, me, and our grandmother!” He still produces light orbs. Just the other day, he shot new footage of paranormal activity on his phone. He hopes it will finally prove to the world he’s okay.

John J. Lennon can be reached at johnjlennonjournalist@gmail.com

