Day: October 5, 2021

Categories
Writing

A Canon for the American Prisoner

January 19, 2018 - New York, NY : John J. Lennon, a journalist and inmate at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York, poses for a portrait in a room at the facility on Friday morning, January 19. Lennon, who is serving a sentence of twenty-eight years to life, has been published in a number of major media outlets including The Atlantic, The New York Times, the Pacific Standard, and The Chronicle for Higher Education.

In 2001, Reginald Dwayne Betts was about five years into a nine-year sentence in a Virginia prison for a carjacking he’d committed at age sixteen. That was the year that I shot and killed a man on a Brooklyn street, when I was twenty-four years old.