On Aging and Dying in Captivity

When I was young, my great fear was growing old in prison. I came into the adult system at sixteen, and grew up in the company of men who had been incarcerated since their own childhoods. They were graying, slowing down, much nearer to the end of their lives than the beginning. All their stories took place in prison, except maybe one or two occasionally dredged up from their days of freedom in the 1970s or ’80s, times so antiquated to me that they seemed absurd, as fantastical as folklore. I respected these old convicts—indeed, I emulated them in the way I spoke, walked, and interacted with the world—but the prospect of becoming one of them sickened and terrified me.

I watched them die in prison. Cancer, heart attack, suicide. They died bitter, broken-down old men, often alone in the world, with no one for the state to contact when they went. No one to mourn their deaths but other convicts, men who would never let you see what the dying meant to them.

Witnessing institutional death deepened my fear of aging. Working as a porter in the infirmary, I saw a prisoner in his twenties spend his last days in hospice care, stage four bone cancer eating him away from the inside. Doctors had given him six months to live, but he had thirteen months left on his sentence. His crime was nonviolent and he scored minimum custody. Cynical as I was, it surprised me that the state insisted on him dying in custody. I assumed he lacked resources and offered to help. But his situation wasn’t a product of insufficient advocacy. He’d applied for a compassionate release. The response from the Department of Corrections was that he was still physically capable of committing a crime. His application was denied. Looking at him, at the disturbingly prominent shape of his skull, his eyes black-rimmed and sunken, his withered body weighing so little it hardly made an impression in the plastic prison-issue mattress, I understood in a way I never had before that there will never be mercy from the state.

Experiences like that one sharpened the urgency with which I approached getting out. As my family scrounged money to pay for appeals, I researched the law doggedly. I studied the process of lawmaking, learning the makeup and dynamics of the legislature. Gradually, I began organizing other prisoners around bills, first on my own, and then in coordination with organizations such as Civil Survival and the ACLU. I started writing about bills—letters to the editor, op-eds, and eventually surveys and open letters for large organizations, as well as articles analyzing legislation, corruption and bad policy within prisons, and mass incarceration generally.

The appeals failed. So did the bills. Time went on, unstoppable.

For years, the dread of aging in prison made me an insomniac. It was a relentless sense of inescapable doom that was always with me. I became pathologically obsessed with physical conditioning, with the notion of transforming my body into a time capsule. I despised birthdays. Each year that passed in captivity felt like a failure. Grays began showing in my hair and lines were etching themselves between my eyes, growing more pronounced by the day. Aches and pains accumulated. It felt like my body was betraying me.

I remember the intense frustration as my twenties wound down. The way I kept adjusting what I would settle for, in an admittedly insane negotiation process with the universe. The older I got, the more I was willing to give up: I could accept only getting the second half of that decade, then a couple of years, and finally I was desperate for just one, so long as I made it out at twenty-nine. The idea of turning thirty in a cage was too pathetic.

When my thirtieth birthday inevitably came, I was in solitary confinement. With no distractions available, I paced the floor all day, brooding about how my life was slipping away, infuriated by my helplessness. It was one of the darkest days of my life.

In my thirties, I would look around and see that I was already one of the oldest people in a holding cell or chow line. I looked in the mirror and saw that I was already older than some of my convict role models had been when I’d met them. All at once, several more years were gone, and I knew it was too late to stop it. The legislative process moves much more slowly than the biological, and appeals move slower still. Whatever win might come my way, aging would get to me first.

Finally, it happened. This year I passed an extravagantly grim milestone: I’ve now been in captivity longer than I’d been alive when I was arrested. One would expect that after a fear is actualized, it vanishes. How could it go on threatening you after it’s played out? But that’s exactly what has happened. I continue to fear this thing that’s already happened to me, as if it could somehow happen again. It’s irrational, I recognize that. You can only turn forty once. You can only lose your twenties once. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m locked into some Sisyphean enterprise, serving the same years again and again, losing the same life repeatedly, for all time.

But I know those days are gone. Eight thousand of them, give or take. I can’t get them back, but I won’t have to serve them again, either. Just recently, I was ambushed by the realization that it’s almost over. This never-ending sentence, this impossible task that’s consumed me throughout my adult life, is but a few years shy of coming to a close. On its own, wholly unconcerned with my countless failed attempts to shorten it, my sentence has been quietly running itself out.

What I feared these last twenty years was terrible and, in some measure, did come to pass. During two decades in captivity, I’ve lost many irreplaceable things: family, youth, an alternate life that there’s no sense in even trying to imagine. But I’m luckier, much luckier, than millions of others whose lives were lost absolutely. When I’m released, I’ll be older than I hoped I would be, but I’ll also be a published author, a college graduate, and a member of a broad activist coalition effecting change in my state. I’ll be married to a beautiful woman who loves me and shares my dreams. Writing about criminal justice and organizing my community around legislative bills has led me to astonishingly promising career prospects. I’ll be older, but there’s an entire world remaining for me. And I am, at long last, immensely grateful.

This essay was produced and published in partnership with Empowerment Avenue.

_{Image: Michael Held / Unsplash}

Contributors

Kevin Light-Roth Kevin Light-Roth is a freelance writer currently incarcerated in Washington. His work has appeared in the ‘Guardian,’ the ‘Hill,’ the ‘Seattle Times,’ and elsewhere.

Topics

• Institutions & Practices

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• conditions of confinement
• deaths in custody
• incarcerated and formerly incarcerated authors