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What information can strangers find out about me at the click of a button? As a prisoner, I don’t have direct access to Google search, but occasionally when I’m on the phone with my sister Angela I ask her to search “Robert Lee Williams journalist.” She’ll complain about me needing to find a secretary before rattling off the results, links to Slate articles and a recent award. The more articles I publish, and the more publications that showcase my work, the deeper the old negative press gets pushed to the bottom.

But last year, a Slate piece of mine was syndicated by Apple News. I was published in the New York Times. Then I noticed a footprint that I didn’t make, at least not directly, had crept back up onto Page 1 of the search results. It’s the reason I’m sitting in Eastern NY Correctional Facility, in Napanoch, New York, serving my 17th year for manslaughter.

In 2009, my girlfriend and I had been drinking and arguing. She stabbed me. I stabbed her. She died. I was taken to the hospital for my injuries, and a few weeks later, I was taken to jail and then prison.

A reporter at the Times Herald covered my crime, stripped of context, affording neither of us humanity. The publication of my crime is not what floods me with anxiety: It’s the thumbnail, taken inside Orange County jail after I’d spent close to a month recovering from a collapsed lung in the hospital. Unshaven. No haircut. No sleep. I was told not to smile.

That slanted coverage, the unflattering image, is attached to my name. When you get locked up, your digital presence is the total sum of your activity on social media, and its footprints continue stepping without you.

There are approximately 450,000 to 600,000 people returning home from federal and state prison each year, according to Prisonpolicy.org. Why is protecting a digital presence uniquely critical for someone with a criminal record? How does its weight differ from that for an average citizen? What dangers does it invite?

In 1981, Richard Rivera went to prison for killing an off-duty officer during a failed robbery. Inside, Rivera knew in order to........

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