Advancing age causes a natural and gradual reassessment of values. What was once important becomes trivial (and vice versa) when measured against one’s own looming mortality, because the remaining sand in the hourglass simply becomes more precious as it runs out. However, there was nothing natural or gradual in my coming to this reassessment of values at fifty-six years of age. In fact, it all occurred within nanoseconds of the impact of a gavel and the resulting echoes of the hard finality that had reverberated throughout a federal courtroom. “I sentence you to 234 months,” the judge said before slamming the gavel down and putting to death the life that I had always known and effectively gutting the last remaining quality years of life that I may have left. Still, nineteen and a half years is a long time, so the question for me became: What do I do with my sentence?
Like the main character in the movie Forrest Gump, who steps off his porch and reinvents himself by running after losing his mother and girlfriend, I found myself grieving for my lost life and bleak future when I arrived at FCI-Seagoville in March 2023 to begin serving my sentence. And in a conscious effort to cope with my new long-term reality, I, too, “stepped off the porch” but, instead of running, I began to incessantly write. It has been through this writing that I have come to appreciate how much I am shielded from most of the distractions and existential struggles that challenge free world writers.
I have discovered that I have much to say, a unique way of expressing it and that I still matter. For me, writing is powerful and empowering. Writing is persuasion and protection. Writing is therapeutic and entertaining. Writing helps me do better time. The publication of my various op-eds, essays and nonfiction short stories by outside media serves as periodic place-holders for me in a free world that I cannot physically participate in. Therefore, prison writing is my ersatz freedom.
Randall Morris is an incarcerated military veteran, a writer of absurdist humor and the editor-in-chief of a prison newsletter serving veterans-in-custody at FCI-Seagoville since June 2023. Writing is his biggest passion. His other passion is education, and prison has motivated him to maniacally pursue both.
