“I worry that we will ruin the spirit of Søbysøgård.”

He’s described that spirit throughout our tour: sober work and study, supportive community, and active reintegration into life outside. An officer that I spoke to expressed a similar sentiment. He’d served in a closed prison, and he did not want to go back.

But it was inside Erik’s cell that dread lifted my neck hairs at the thought of serving time in such a place. A breeze touched the leaves of the maple tree outside his window. Then it curled the corners of the pictures tacked and taped to the wall: Erik in a tux beside his silver-tiara-ed girl; he and friends on a beach with his dog, a dopey-looking setter. Prisoners develop a sixth sense for the moods of others. It’s a required skill for anyone who has lived with people who suffer emotional and mental disorders that can turn violent. He sensed that something was up. I looked at him.

“I did this to myself,” he said.

I did not know what to say. I said, “I’m sorry.”

“Not as sorry as I am.”

***

Jeremy has been in my maximum-security writing workshop for three years. He’s serving 22 years to life. He has difficulty getting to the class due to conflicts with religious practice and guards that seem to enjoy picking on him because he’s Puerto Rican, Muslim, physically slight (about 5’5” and 140 pounds), and a law-library clerk (thus standing just above child molesters among guards’ favorite targets). His major project has been a long essay about his crime. He was raised by an abusive stepfather who once held a gun to his head and threatened to kill him. On the street, he was harassed by a neighborhood bully. The bully was strong and tough but, unlike Jeremy, unpopular with girls. The bully once broke Jeremy’s arm so badly that a steel plate now holds it together. Without a place of retreat either inside or outside his home, Jeremy decided to kill himself. He took his father’s gun. He was high, but needed to get higher to work up his courage, when he ran into the bully outside a liquor store and shot him. Jeremy was 17.

He’s mindful of actions he might have taken: moving in with his sister, seeking outside help, even getting control of his popularity with girls. With a merely competent lawyer his story might have played well with a jury, but he had no money for a real defense. He didn’t deny that he’d killed. He took a plea bargain from a DA who threatened what prisoners call a “lights out” stretch of years, used to scare suspects into saving the state the time and costs of a jury trial.

I have listened to men complain about their cases, their do-nothing lawyers, about racism. Jeremy does not complain. He’s a self-effacing young man. But I wonder what he’ll be by his first parole hearing at age 40. He can feel no more profound regret than he does already for the family of the young man he killed. He can feel no deeper remorse for his actions. Yet for another 18 years he will endure counselors (many of them former guards) who do little more than keep prisoner files in order. He will continue the daily work of self-protection from men in need of mental health and addiction care. He’ll continue to do white-collar work for wages that can be counted in dimes and pennies. He’ll talk with his sister from a phone in the yard, impatient men waiting behind him, at sky-high rates charged only to prisoners. And for 18 years he’ll negotiate the moods of correctional officers who find in him enjoyable sport. Jeremy is no longer the scared kid who pulled a trigger. He has said, in many ways, “I did this to myself.” But by the time he leaves he may be too far removed from that kid, across decades among violently desperate men, and staff whose simplistic refrain stretches nation-wide: “If you can’t do the time, you shouldn’t have done the crime.”