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Crafting a Writer's Life in Prison is a Matter of Life and Death

by Ojo Webb

I know what you’re thinking: “That title is a little dramatic. You’re just trying to be provocative.” So let me be clear: when I say life and death, I mean that literally. Who am I to be so confident-borderline-cocky about this subject? Let's just say if surviving prison was a profession, I would be at the forefront. Unfortunately, I am one of the few—but not few enough I might add—that has the unique experience of being incarcerated since I was a juvenile, 17 years old to be exact. Let’s do the math: I’m 43 years old now; that’s 25 ½ years of prison, so you can imagine the things I have seen and been through. When I first came to prison with a 30-year sentence at 100%, I was in survival mode, not really fearing for my life or safety, but aware of how dangerous prison is and carrying the overall fear of the unknown. Like most people, I thought about surviving prison in the old cliche terms (you know, having to fight or stab someone, with “someone” being other inmates), not knowing who or what the real fight was with. As they say in the law, ignorance is not a defense. By stepping off that bus, I entered in the fight of my life with the most powerful and strongest opponent I had ever faced: the Prison Industrial Complex. One of the first things to become aware of in prison is that everything is a struggle. In maximum security prison it’s basically warehousing. No programs – just lock up and shut up. Anything contrary or opposed to that was met with whatever force necessary to squish it.

To be honest, I was not planning on doing much writing in prison. Boy, was I wrong about that. I never wrote anything in my life before coming to prison. Well, maybe a rap or two when I was younger, but definitely no papers, essays, or letters. Now to zero in on my point, crafting a writer’s life in prison is a matter of life and death, meaning without writing, you will die.

Let’s examine what I believe is essential for survival in prison. You ready? 

Food.

Water. 

Shelter. 

Health care (mental, social, spiritual). 

Now before I get to more on these basic needs, let me let you know the only effective tool that a person has in prison to fight the powers that be: the grievance. I do not care what your issue is; if you do not put it in written grievance form, through the proper channels and chain of command, they will not even pretend to address it. Now back to that list of mine. I have so many instances of us (I say us because my story is unique but I share the same struggle as thousands of others  every day in prison. The triumphs and failures I have had in prison were shared experiences with my comrades.

So, let’s take food. Without it, you will die. What about the quality? Bad food can kill you slowly or poison you quickly. It just so happens that my first introduction to writing anything of substance in prison was a grievance about this subject. I think we can all agree that prison food sucks, but as the young poet Meek Mill wrote, “It’s levels’ to this shit!” So, when our esteemed governor at the time, Rod Blagojevich, switched our mostly real food to a mostly soy-based diet, the food sunk to a new level. Right away the problems for me –us– started. I – us – started having digestive issues: lack of energy complaints to staff and healthcare were to no avail. Then, learning about the long-term effects of so much soy, it was grievance time.

I wrote that grievance with no experience, no technical training, just passion. That is why when Vivian Nixon wrote in her essay “The Power of Grieving in Words,” speaking about the struggle of her own grievance process, “But when we turned our complaints to into official grievances,” she made me wish we had some kind of class or training in the way to write a proper grievance (191). That would have helped me and so many others. That grievance went nowhere, but it was my first punch and miss in a fight that I’m still in. On a happier note, after many more grievances from people a lot more advanced than me (lawsuits, etc.), we finally got rid of soy. Who knows how many died from that poisoning, how many illnesses were chanced by that horrible diet.

Water and shelter are two things essential to survival. I can vividly remember those summers in Menard prison in Southern Illinois when temperatures in the cellhouses easily reach over 100 degrees with no relief. The only thing we had was a small fan that blew hot air. This was my first experience of the collective grievance. I think the whole prison may have wrote one. I know I did. I remember that I did my homework: I researched the topic and filed my grievance. And wouldn’t you know, about a month later they let us purchase an additional fan. It wasn’t much but it helped a little. I am not going to pretend that my grievance was what made that happen. I’m just highlighting the power of the pen as a collective second punch thrown. It was a light jab, but it landed.

Now to healthcare, which to me includes mental, social, and spiritual health. It was a time early on in my sentence that we were on lockdown so much we might have seen outside maybe three months out of the year. This went on for years. Being isolated and confined to a cell for long periods of time can have a negative effect on you, with no phone to converse with loved ones. I started writing people in my immediate family, my extended family, and friends. Writing those letters, expressing myself, getting out my emotions, was extremely therapeutic for me. Getting responses back was exciting and an example of that social connection that we as humans need. To this day, getting mail in prison just brightens my day up. The relationships that I cultivated during those times are still thriving. I know mental health was not a term to us back then, but thinking back, I realized that writing those letters helped me stay sane in the middle of chaos. I have seen so many succumb to that chaos. I have seen suicides, people just breaking mentally and never coming back, and the dreaded med-line getting on meds just to not feel. Writing helped me not to go down that road.

In conclusion, as you can now clearly see, my initial statement was not dramatic or provocative; creating a writer’s life in prison is a matter of life and death. The stories and shared experiences in this essay are just a few of the things that I have seen and been through over the past 25 years. These are clear examples of how, had it not been for writing, I would have died. As my man Thomas Bartlett Whitaker wrote in his essay, “The Price of Remaining Human,” speaking about why he started writing, “The state plopped me down in the middle of a whirlwind, and I saw it begin to sandblast the men around me; I saw it begin to wear me down as well” (168). That’s why he wrote: to protect his sanity. It was almost animalistic. Fight or flight. Pick up the pen or die.

Works Cited

Mill, Meek. “Levels.” Dreams and Nightmares. Maybach Music Group LLC, 2013.

Nixon, Vivian. “The Power of Grieving in Words.” The Sentences That Create Us, edited by 

Caits Meissner, Haymarket Books, 2022, pp. 190-194.

Whitaker, Thomas. “The Price of Remaining Human.” The Sentences That Create Us, edited by 

Caits Meissner, Haymarket Books, 2022, pp.167-170.