Twist told me he never knew his father; he had grown up mostly with his mother and his little brother. He had experienced and observed lots of violence at a young age, both inside and outside the household. When Twist was in his early teens, his mother had a seizure and died.

In June 2006, when Twist was 16, he and some teenage friends were walking in the East Village in the early-morning hours and crossed paths with a man named Kevin Aviance, a drag-queen nightclub singer. After an exchange, Twist and his friends jumped him. It may have been one of Twist’s blows that broke the singer’s jaw. A report from New York’s district attorney said that Twist was using anti-gay slurs; Twist says he didn’t even know Aviance was gay, and that it was just an argument that turned into violence. At 17, he was convicted of first-degree assault as a hate crime and sentenced to 17 years in prison. (He says he only pled guilty because he was advised to take a plea deal.)

Twist wrote raps with a nice flow and had an overall creative vibe. He showed me a couple chapters of a book he was working on; I showed him my pieces about gun control. At the time, many of us wanted to get out of Attica and hoped to land a transfer to one of two prisons, Sing Sing and Eastern, that were closer to New York City. Both prisons had—and still have—robust privately funded undergraduate programs. Sing Sing’s is funded largely by a nonprofit called Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison (run mostly by formerly incarcerated people), and Eastern’s through the Bard Prison Initiative. The atmosphere of those institutions was less tense because of those opportunities. By 2015, after committing myself to my studies, I earned an associate’s degree. I was transferred to Sing Sing the next year and lost track of Twist.

Read: How the war on drugs kept black men out of college

In September 1994, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, penned by Joe Biden, then a Delaware senator. Experts have had plenty of debates about whether the 1994 crime bill was responsible for a subsequent decline in crime rates to record lows, a rise in the prison population to record highs, or neither. (After peaking in the 2000s, the prison population has begun to fall; crime rates continue to decline as well.) What most scholars and policymakers can’t do—but I can—is demonstrate how the crime bill has affected life on the inside of the American prison.

In prisons, two policies in particular, both enacted as part of the law, created a culture of ignorance, violence, and hopelessness. First, a ban on incarcerated individuals receiving Pell Grants led to the removal of most of the college programs—which once numbered more than 770—that were operating in nearly 1,300 facilities nationwide. Second, “truth in sentencing” policies offered states up to $10 billion to build new prisons, on the condition that they restructure sentencing laws to keep violent offenders in prison for at least 85 percent of their sentence, without regard for the individual’s behavior or rehabilitation efforts.