Elijah believes life is like a highway and prison is just a rest stop.

What happens at this rest stop matters. Travelers can stretch their legs and top off the gas before rushing back out headed in the same direction unchanged. Or they can take their time, reassess where they’re heading and go in a different direction. Maybe they can even stay a while, listen to the stories of others like them and learn something.

It’s a lesson Elijah picked up during a staff-led group called Go Further, where he was encouraged to analyze where his life of crime began.

“To be aware of where it started, it kind of helped to change [my perspective],” he says. Elijah pinpoints the start of his criminal life as a teenager growing up in Baltimore. “Most of my friends were drug dealers,” he says.

As the youngest in a large family, he was often overlooked. His father wanted him to learn from the Quran, but it was up to Elijah to study those lessons on his own. When he was in eighth grade, his grandmother died, and the family split up.

A band geek who sold weed, Elijah says he did what he had to do to survive. “The only way to fit in was to start doing the criminal stuff that everybody else was doing,” he says. “It never was really who I am, but it became me.”

So he’s been working toward improvement. Since his incarceration at Lake Erie in May 2016, Elijah has become certified in fiber optic and copper installation and serves as a mentor for the prison’s trauma program. He also oversees 96 other guys as commander of the prison’s veterans association.

On Fridays, he and others pore over the Quran in the chapel. In every group he’s joined, Elijah has learned to reconnect with the good things that were important to him on the outside.

ID13 takes a slightly different, more experimental approach. The literacy project asks participants to look inside themselves and project that to the outside world. In other words, they are not inmates taking a writing course, but writers who are in prison.

“We have the criminal justice system that has decided, in a sense, what people can or can’t do in society,” says Dum. “The guys in the prison have already gone through that apparatus. They’ve already been tried and sentenced.”

So, unless students bring up their records on their own, their crimes are rarely discussed. Instead, ID13 focuses entirely on the work produced.

Rather than Googling someone’s name and turning up a news story about the offense or a prison record, Dum says, maybe the results are different.

“In a sense, it’s trying to add a different narrative,” he says. “If you Google this person’s name, maybe you’ll find a poem or some artwork by them instead.”

In many ways, ID13 is trying to rewrite public perception about who can be rehabilitated and how that can be accomplished.

“I think that it’s important to show not everyone has forgotten them or views them as untouchable or not worthy of human connection,” says Dum.

For Elijah, ID13 has been empowering. “Here, only here, can we just be ourselves completely and totally and just unleash everything we have in our minds,” he says.

On the ID13 website, Elijah is prolific, publishing poems, drawings and reflections from a little more than a year in the group.

In “I Fix Things,” a 33-line poem, he turns his fiber optic and copper installation skills into the superhuman ability to break anything down. His narrator can repair and rebuild broken machinery to create new things — though in the end, he realizes the only thing he can’t fix is himself.

In “I Am,” a 100-word essay, Elijah wrestles with his issues in an attempt to reclaim power over them. “I am your reality blocker, your internal pessimist. I ensure whatever you decide goes wrong,” he writes. By the end, it’s clear how difficult the battle remains. “It’s not me, it’s you. I’m king. I am depression.”

“In my mind, everybody has some kind of burden that they’re trying to deal with,” Elijah explains. “I kind of want them to see that I’m just like them.”

In a short reflection titled “Changes,” he muses on why spring is his favorite season, tapping into questions of identity and exploring themes of nature and resilience.

“Just like the sprout I broke the soil grew to my predestined height bloomed my flower then withered away into this winter,” he writes. “But just like the perennial I will wait until I can spring loose and yet again strengthen my roots. What a funny thing change is.”

In his writing, Elijah can make the changes he dreams about. Born with spinal dysplasia, which stunted his growth, he fights against the perception that he’s weak because of his size. So, Elijah writes a new narrative.

“In my writings, I’m tall,” he says proudly. “I’m never in prison unless the writing prompt is that I’m in prison. I’m free, I’m in love, it’s bliss and everything is perfect.”

In order to publish outside the prison, ID13 must submit everything for approval by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation & Correction’s Office of Victim Services to lessen the likelihood that victims or family members of those incarcerated are revictimized by the work that they publish.

Due to the nature of Elijah’s crimes, he writes under the initials E.L. “I believe E.L. is my childhood prior to my downfall,” he says. “I just want to get back to that, back to who I really was: the writer who enjoyed writing for writing’s sake.”