My Unlikely Path From Jail to Journalism

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I never expected to become a real reporter. While the other students in my first journalism class could go out into the community to interview sources, my options were limited. As an inmate, the only people I could interview were other prisoners and the guards.

It was 2010, and I was a 28-year-old alcoholic with a crack habit serving a yearlong sentence in a Wisconsin county jail. I’d been convicted of burglary after breaking into a bar and walking out with a bottle of liquor. It was a felony, and it was right on time — the culmination of wrecked cars, lost jobs and alcohol-fueled arrests. When the judge sentenced me, he said I exemplified “a waste of a human life.” He wasn’t wrong.

During those first months behind bars, there was no sun, no night sky. I measured time by the opening and closing of the steel cell doors. But midway through my sentence, as is typical in many cases, the judge granted me the option to work or take classes during the day at a nearby university.

I took a janitorial job in the community, elated to be out of my cell. One morning as I vacuumed, I grabbed a Rolling Stone magazine from a coffee table. Out slipped a flier for a college journalism contest; winning entries would appear in the magazine. Only college students could enter.

I didn’t know anything about journalism, but I felt an odd sensation — an intuition — that I’d finally found something I didn’t even know I needed. That day, I enrolled in the university closest to the jail.

That’s how I found myself, weeks later, interviewing my correctional officer for a story in the student newspaper. We had never spoken with each other so mindfully or exactingly. This was someone who, at any other time, had absolute authority over me. Yet in that moment, while interviewing him, I felt a subtle and palpable shift of power.