Arthur is a 50-year-old inmate at Monroe Correctional Complex in Monroe, Washington. He is serving life in prison without the possibility of parole for an aggravated murder he committed when he was 20. In this prison, the yard is only an acre and a half. But we pack into it hundreds at a time. Like every other place in here, it smells and sounds like people. Outside prison, mass incarceration is measured in numbers, which is understandable, because the numbers are staggering. But after more than 30 years in prison – my entire adult life – I have mass incarceration sewn into my flesh and bones. I can’t turn away from it or choose not to know it, and it leaves me with little or no capacity for hope. It buries me. It keeps me from breathing. When I close my eyes, certain faces of mass incarceration appear, unbidden, in my consciousness: Boo’s is wide and moon-shaped. He is the little Native American kid who wouldn’t let go of my leg at my sister’s foster home. He’s called me uncle ever since. If I open my eyes, I’ll see him as clearly as I did when we were boys, because he’s on this yard with me. At least a lifetime ago, he shot someone during a drug deal. He has life without the possibility of parole. Dean’s face is brighter and buoys me. He is the boy I met in a receiving home in Tacoma, Washington when he was nine and I was 12. Both of us, at that point, were already veterans of an interminable number of state placements. Dean was in the control unit in Walla Walla with me when guards firehosed me every week and kept me naked and in leg shackles for months. He lifted my spirit by giving me a thumbs-up through the narrow window slat of his cell door whenever the guards dragged me by. Dean is on the yard of a prison 60 miles south of here. Two decades ago, he struck out under this state’s three-strikes law — for burglary. He has life without the possibility of parole. I shared a room with Robert at the boys’ home in Silverdale, Washington the night he snuck out the window. He said he’d be back by morning, but he wasn’t. He was in an article in the next day’s newspaper because he beat up and robbed a man outside a tavern. I wasn’t surprised to learn that the man died a week later: Robert was bigger than all of us and always unaware of his strength. He is at a place 400 miles east. He has life in prison.

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