Category: Essays

A friend and I popped into a Whole Foods recently for some produce and had a disturbing experience.

For six months, I’ve been looking over my shoulder. Staying home, keeping my head down and my counsel close. The boat that was my new life had been taking on water, and I’ve been trying to stop it from sinking. Everything I’d worked for my first year out of prison was suddenly in jeopardy.

Christmas has come and gone, again. The calendar will have flipped to 2023 by the time you read this. A full year has passed since that first strange holiday season as a “free man” after six years incarcerated. On my desk still sits a framed print that reminds me to wonder: “Where will I be a year from now?” Events and their meanings are only really clear in hindsight, if they ever is at all – “the information is unavailable to the mortal man,” as Paul Simon once put it. But this seems like a good moment to check in with 2022, and the issues that keep coming up are mental health and emotional well-being. Events of the last few years have driven people to start sharing and airing these issues, and talking about them more publicly. So:

Roll up your pants legs, this sh*t is about to get kind of deep. Sometimes I wonder how long it’ll take before every other thought isn’t about prison. And the answer probably is: until I stop giving prison all that free space in my head to define and dictate the ways I move in the world.

by Daniel A. Rosen | March 14, 2022 “Miss D said you could help me find housing,” said the stranger on the other end of the phone. I had to chuckle; it sounded like something she’d say. “I’m no expert but I’ll try to pass on what I’ve learned,” I promised him. “I just got … Continue reading Home Alone: Reentry, Housing, Trauma, and Healing

by Daniel A. Rosen | January 20, 2022 MEMORANDUM TO: DC City Council & MORCA; All DC-Based Residential Reentry Organizations; DC Reentry Action Network (RAN) Members FROM: A Returning Citizen/Resident of a Residential Reentry Program (Jubilee House) SUBJECT: How NOT to Run a Residential Reentry Program Overview: Providing returning citizens with housing through residential reentry … Continue reading How NOT to Run a Residential Reentry Program

by Daniel A. Rosen | Like most holidays in prison, Thanksgiving isn’t much to write home about. Just another day on the calendar you want to see pass to bring you closer to your release date – albeit one where you get fed decently. In the free world, the holiday means family, friends, gratitude, and … Continue reading Just Another Day on the Calendar? My First Post-Prison Thanksgiving

by Daniel A. Rosen | So, this is my first post from outside the walls, and I’ve been away from writing for a few months. This was written on a real laptop, from a real house (and a coffeeshop, and a hotel patio, and so on) in the real world. Everything in my life changed, … Continue reading Reentry, Revisited

by Daniel A. Rosen | Out there in the real world, time is the one thing no one has enough of. You can't buy or create more. In here, time is all you have. It's considered the enemy, the thing you dread, the commodity you find ways to kill, to waste, to purposefully squander. People … Continue reading Change of Plans: Thoughts on Six Years Behind Bars

by Daniel A. Rosen | Everywhere you look, signs say: "Now Hiring" and "Apply Within." News reports air nightly about businesses that can't reopen because they're understaffed. Teenagers and college kids are getting good jobs that they'd normally never be considered for. But if you've got a felony record, that sign out front often says: … Continue reading Short-Handed? Have I Got a Guy For You.

by Daniel A. Rosen | Bill Cosby surely celebrated his new-found independence this 4th of July at his Philadelphia mansion - the same place where he raped dozens of women over the years. Unfortunately, 2.3 million other Americans - about half of them black, and the vast majority of them poor - marked the holiday … Continue reading Undue Process: Thoughts on Bill Cosby’s Overturned Conviction

by Daniel A. Rosen | "America loves a crime story, because America is a crime story" - Promo for a recent season of Fargo.Sure, it's just a clever marketing campaign to get you to binge-watch more streaming television, but it also has the ring of deeper truth to it. Violence was part of our nation's … Continue reading True Crime

by Daniel A. Rosen | Sitting here in my prison cell tonight, I'm wondering: What will it take to end America's addiction to mass incarceration? For decades, too many powerless people were stuffed down the yawning maw of this greedy beast until 2.3 million of our fellow citizens languished in its distended belly. Millions more … Continue reading Mass Incarceration Is Not Inevitable

by Daniel A. Rosen | "This is an industry that profits from human suffering."-- David Fathi, Director, ACLU National Prison ProjectStarting with math may be a bad idea, but numbers help tell this story: In Virginia, keeping the average prisoner behind bars costs taxpayers about $30,000 per year; in some states like New York or … Continue reading The Punishment Economy: Winners and Losers in the Business of Mass Incarceration (May 2021 PLN Cover)

by Daniel A. Rosen | The PBS Newshour's excellent series "Searching for Justice" aired a piece recently about how difficult it can be for returning citizens to secure valid photo identification ("How Obtaining ID Can Complicate the Road From Prison," February 16, 2021). As one longtime inmate and recent parolee said of the state bureaucracy, … Continue reading The 3 R’s: Reentry, Recidivism, and Reality

by Daniel A. Rosen | Maybe starting with math is a bad idea, but here goes: In Virginia, keeping the average inmate in prison costs the state about $30,000 per year; in some states like New York and California, it's twice that much. Inmates over 50 years old with chronic health conditions often cost taxpayers … Continue reading The Punishment Economy: Who Wins, Who Loses

by Daniel A. Rosen | Meghan McCain, the Republican Party's resident Marie Antoinette, once said this on "The View": "He's a criminal - he should eat dog food!" She was talking about Jake Angeli, the so-called "Q-Anon Shaman" who hails from her home state of Arizona, and who was arrested after leading the siege of … Continue reading “Let Them Eat Dog Food”: Nutrition and Health Behind Bars

by Daniel A. Rosen | Recent news reports have informed those of us incarcerated in Virginia that the COVID-19 vaccine is coming soon - we'll be part of Group 1B sometime in January, apparently. According to those same reports, some Virginians are angry that inmates would be put in line ahead of the general public. … Continue reading What Early Vaccinations Mean to Prison Inmates

by Daniel A. Rosen | I don't know if I'm the only one of Joe Biden's former interns serving time in prison, but I'm sure it's not a long list. During my junior year of college at UCLA, I took off school for a quarter to intern in Joe Biden's Senate office in Washington, D.C. … Continue reading On the Election of Joe Biden: Impressions of a Former Senate Intern

by Daniel A. Rosen | A young black man named Vincent Lamont Martin killed a white police officer named Michael Patrick Connors in November of 1979. Martin served 37 years in prison as a result. He was supposed to walk out of the Nottoway Correctional Center on May 11, after being granted parole on Good … Continue reading The Murder of Mercy: Attacking Virginia’s Parole Board

by Daniel A. Rosen | "This moment calls for structural change and transformative change." -Patrice Cullors, BLM Co-founder | As the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and systemic racism came to a head in 2020, the Trump Administration had an opportunity in an election year to provide real leadership and demonstrate that people's lives mattered. They … Continue reading Tear Down These Walls: A Justice Reform Agenda for the Biden Administration