Writer: Sheldon Johnson

As a young man growing up in crack-era Harlem I bore witness to the havoc and mayhem that crack reigned in my community. The separation…

In April of 2008, my son was arrested for accidentally killing a Columbia graduate student while trying to impress a group of shallow friends who…

I sat at the computer, intently. I was in the school building at Sing-Sing Correctional Facility’s Inmate Liaison Office (ILC). We shared our office with…

Mr. District Attorney Alvin Bragg, My name is Sheldon Preston Johnson. I have been incarcerated twenty-five years on a fifty year sentence. I am writing…

  The pieces are everywhere. I get down on my hands and knees as if in prayer in an effort to retrieve them. One at…

My earliest release date is 2041. According to the World Almanac, my life expectancy as a Black man is 67 years old. I’ll be 66…

At the ripe young age of eleven, in the fifth grade of elementary school, I was arrested and transferred to Mount Sinai psych ward for…

Dear Younger Self, If you only knew where you were headed and the degree of suffering you will endure, you'd stop the hands of time.…

  I spoke to my 19 year-old nephew, Cordell, for the first time today. I found myself emotionally torn between realizing that not only have…

Juan Mosquero was isolated in Sing-Sing Correctional Facility’s infirmary on March 20, 2020, after suffering in his cell for more than two weeks with symptoms…

I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it couldn’t have been more than a nanosecond after “fucking bitch” that my face exploded and blood…

As we know, I am currently in prison, which I have learned does one of two significant things to its occupants: brings the best out…