An intimate first person non-fiction storytelling experience about incarceration in the United States.
Think about the past 31 years of your life.
That’s 31 blazing summers where fireflies danced through twilight evenings and crickets fiddled through the night. Camp outs, cookouts, and 31 Christmases that gifted way to hopeful new years.
I recently started my 31st year in prison.
Continue reading “Where I Am Does Not Define Me by Christopher”
When I think of music and prison in the same sentence, songs I know by heart echo through my mind. My journey through the abyss of American Corrections can best be told through song.
Music exposes the soft underbelly of the prison beast. I’ve suckled from its bosom rhythm and memories with the promise of a joyful future that for decades has been the province of my dreams.
Continue reading “My Songs Know What You Did In the Dark by Christopher”

I have a photograph. There are two people in it.
One is a man in blue buttondown shirt and light blue jean jacket. The other a silver haired woman. There is a red shirt visible beneath her black zippered sweater, the kind one wears when the world is still cold and dead.
On the Man’s graying head rests a white ball cap. The cap has a patch and I can tell it’s not sports related. No, not something as happy and carefree as that. The patch bears an emblem. I can almost make out a familiar image.
The bill of the cap shrouds the man’s face in shadow. Splinters of midday sunlight penetrate before being swiftly defeated by tinted glasses — the prescription kind, frameless lenses — hiding the man’s eyes. Lines etch his face carving the appearance of a frown, the type time and pained life experience emboss. His lips curve imperceptibly downward at the edges.
I hold the photo close as if this will some how allow me to discern his mind and soul. Nothing.
I turn my attention to the woman. Perhaps she will give me what I seek.
Unlike the man her eyes are plainly visible. Her pained gaze is focused at the photographer, but for all intents and purposes it may as well be directed at me.
The sun has conspired with shadows to hide her face just enough so that I can’t make out the color of her eyes, nor minute features of her face. I am perplexed. I find my self wondering how the shadows even exist for I cannot make out a source.
My eyes trace the grooves on her face. I can’t help but notice how they appear similar to the man’s. To a stranger it becomes obvious that these two people know each other. It is, dare I fall back upon the cliché, written all over their faces.
These are experienced people. They are older than me for sure, and I have walked this earth for 52 years.
In the background spindly branches of a leafless tree poke forlorn from behind a cement wall. I bring the photo close again.
I peer into the woman’s face searching for anything that will heal me from what I am feeling. I find no solace. She is as enigmatic as the man.
Left with no other choice I turn my attention to the wall. My mouth parts and a breath leaves me. I swallow. My dry tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.
Framed in between the man and woman is a beige plaque. It is one of many on the wall.
Before I can avert my gaze my mind has automatically read the text:
JOHN MICHAEL MONIHAN
COL USA
IRAQ
1974 2020
I stare at my brother’s grave. It was his birthday recently. I called his twin and wished him a happy birthday. We didn’t speak of John.
Instead we did what we have done ever since his passing; talked, laughed and clung to one another.
My life inside has taught me to live, for life is short.
*Christopher is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in Prison Journalism Project, Prison Writers, Minutes Before Six, and other publications. He is incarcerated in Ohio.
Navigating and surviving prison is mostly about trying to figure out where you fit in. In fact, fitting in is the greatest barrier to belonging. Fitting in is processing situations and groups of women, then twisting yourself into a human pretzel in order to get them to let you hang out with them.
Belonging is something else entirely. It is showing up and letting yourself be seen and known as you truly are. Most of us suffer from this split between who we are and who we present to the prison world in order to be accepted. But we are not letting ourselves be known, truly. This kind of living or existing is soul sucking.
The truth is, belonging starts with self acceptance. Your level of belonging in fact, can never be greater than your self acceptance, because believing you are enough is what gives you the courage to be authentic, vulnerable, and imperfect. When we don’t have that, we twist ourselves, once again, we hustle for the worthiness we already possess.
Levels of guilt are also healthy in prison. Guilt helps us stay on track because it’s about our behavior. It occurs when we compare something we have done or failed to do with our special values.
The discomfort that results often motivates real change and self-reflection.
Surviving prison is about realizing who you are at your core. Finding the answers to the tough questions we never “had time” to find while in the real world. Do this above all else, love and respect yourself. Prison will become something you survived and learned from.
Torrey
*Rachael Torrey is a lettersfromchristopher.com contributing writer.
Shortly after 3 pm on April 8, I donned my sunglasses and stood in the center of the prison yard. I watched as the coal-black lunar disc slowly smothered the sun. All around me I heard prisoners clapping and cheering. I removed the glasses, as it was safe to look at the total eclipse.
What I saw left me breathless.
Staring at the sky, I remembered the solar eclipse of Feb. 26, 1979, when I was 7. My father had helped me make an eclipse viewer: a cardboard box with a pinhole punched through it and a sheet of white paper glued inside.
Aimed skyward, our contraption held a perfect black-and-white image of the eclipse, a partial eclipse from our point in its path. I was moved by my father’s ingenuity to capture the moon and the sun together in a box.
The 2024 eclipse experience left some residents of my prison stunned. Todd Sodders said the eclipse left him feeling “wonder and awe juxtaposed with one’s insignificance.”
“It was surreal,” Oscar Santiago said.
The moment the total eclipse blackened the clear blue sky, an eerie 360-degree twilight gripped the mid-afternoon and triggered the yard’s floodlights. I was overwhelmed with feelings of hope for humanity, and felt inspired about our unknown future.
Minutes earlier, the sunshine had caused beads of sweat to dot my forehead. As the eclipse took hold, a strange breeze chilled my skin. Everyone, including the birds, became silent.
The sun had transformed. Red and orange solar flares licked out around the edge of the black disc engulfing it. I saw a flower — then a red, heavenly ring. Finally, the moon slipped slowly away, releasing the sun back to a familiar yellow splendor.
*This piece first appeared in Prison Journalism Project at prisonjournalismproject.org.
Christopher Monihan A310612