I Went to Prison and Found Support and Community

Mr. Sittenfeld is a freelance writer working on a memoir.

On my second day into my 16-month sentence at Federal Correctional Institution in Ashland, Ky., I surprised myself by doing something that I well understood you aren’t supposed to do in prison: I cried.

I had joined the inmate-led Bible study in the prison’s small, drab chapel, pulling a chair up to the circle of a dozen men. A member of the group introduced a short scriptural reading followed by a prompt, and each one of us was given a chance to respond.

I hadn’t yet been able to access the prison phone room, and when it was my turn to talk, I told the group how desperately I wanted simply to hear my wife’s voice and how our two young sons were doing. From the guys in the circle, there were no insults, no admonishments to toughen up or be a man. They offered encouragement, comforted me and said that we were all navigating a difficult stretch of life together.

I did not fully understand it then, but the place where I was least free in my life would also become a place where I felt deeply connected to those around me, and where I got to experience a level of camaraderie and solidarity that so many on the outside go without. Unlike the version of prison conjured on TV and in the movies, where “shot callers” control subordinates, I found a community quick to be generous and much less inclined to try to assert superiority over one another.

My celly, or cellmate, went by “Crum” and became my closest friend at F.C.I. Ashland. He’d grown up poor in Appalachia, was quick to admit he resembled the leader of a biker gang and was serving a 20-year sentence on drug charges.

I was a lanky, bespectacled Princeton grad and former Cincinnati City Council member acquitted on four counts and convicted on one count of federal extortion and one count of federal bribery. That put me in the category of what guys with long sentences referred to as “short-termers.”

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