First incarcerated at the age of 19, Jacob Barrett has spent the last three decades behind bars. Spanning five “supermax” units and 18 jails and prisons in five states, his prison time has included 21.5 years in solitary confinement. 

Upon his release from solitary in May 2017, Barrett became a Certified Recovery Mentor through the Mental Health and Addiction Certification Board of Oregon. He now works as a Public Safety Consultant for the Choose Kindness Foundation and facilitates the Mindful Kindness Program. He has contributed to legislative prison education workgroups and currently serves as an ADA Orderly, helping elderly incarcerated people on the prison’s mental health unit. Outside of work, Barrett notes that he is the proud father of two successful daughters and grandfather of an amazing grandson.

Although he was released from his life sentence in 2021, Barrett remains incarcerated for crimes committed when he first entered prison as a youth, which resulted in his placement in solitary confinement. The following piece is an excerpt from his Facebook page, where Barrett chronicles his three decades of incarceration in a multi-part series. Diving into the early days of his time in solitary, Barrett illuminates the lasting impact extreme isolation has had on him. 

His other writings and artwork can be found online. Jacob Barrett can also be reached through his mailing address SID# 11123024, Oregon State Correctional Institution, 3405 Deer Park Drive, S.E., Salem, OR 97310 —Kilhah St Fort 

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Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan journalist and writer, wrote, “In the history of humankind the very act of destruction meets its response, sooner or later, in an act of creation.” I believe that prison can be both, destruction and creation.

In a previous post, I wrote about one of my cases recently being vacated and remanded. That conviction, almost 30 years ago, occurred when I arrived at the Oregon State Correctional Institution (OSCI) on December 12, 1995. I was barely 20 years old, couldn’t grow hair on my face, and had just spent nearly 14 months in county jail.

Back then, OSCI was known as “Gladiator School.” I look back on that time and the young immature kid I was. I thought I was so grown and had all the answers.

I believe that whomever a first time offender is celled up with when they first come to prison will dictate their destiny behind prison walls, absent intervention. Who your cellie is, how they do their time, and how they view and value the world around them will become part of your daily world. How they “teach you the ropes” can define your future. My first cellie was much older than I. He did not talk to me about how to do better for myself. Rather, he immediately began to school me in the convict code. I bought into it, not because I believed it, but because I believed it would help me survive.

In the introduction to In The Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison, Norman Mailer wrote that the book’s author, Jack Henry Abbot, informed him that very few men in prison truly knew about violence in prison. You may see it and experience it on some level, but to really have a firm perception of prison violence, it takes at least a decade before the reality of it “permeate[s] your psychology and your flesh.” It took about a decade for my young mind to realize that truth. When I read Mailer’s words years later, I couldn’t help but identify with them.

Shortly after getting off the bus to prison, officials put my co-defendant and me only a few cells apart, knowing it would cause a conflict. This is not a common practice and is, in fact, most always avoided. When I questioned it, one supervisor told me something I would hear more than once during my incarceration: “Fight, f**k, or get along.” Needless to say, we didn’t get along. Neither of us had the skills and I certainly did not have the maturity or personal insight to understand the path I was about to be on. I hadn’t been in prison for 30 days when I got into an altercation with my co-defendant and as a result found myself in solitary confinement. I was placed in a “black box” cell: a cell inside a cell with solid doors. In prison parlance, I was in “The Hole.”

I would go on to spend years in and out of solitary with no more than a day or week in general population. Of the last 30 years, I spent a combined 21.5 years in solitary confinement. I have been housed in more than five “supermax” units including the Intensive Management Unit in Oregon, H-unit in Oklahoma, Level Six in New Mexico, the Florida State Prison, and dozens of disciplinary segregation units.

I was finally released from solitary in 2017.

In those early years, all of my immediate social relationships were based on power—who had power and who had the power to resist power. My lack of power over myself and a desire to find a way to feel some sort of power in my life picked at my mind in those lonely cells. I would reach out and grasp for anything that made me feel like I had control over myself. The convict code that first cellie tried to indoctrinate me with would be a false shell that I tried to build an existence around.

I lived in the illusion that I had forced choices. The convict code and prison rules were two different social bodies that offered very different results.

I look back today on that altercation and realize how it set a tone for nearly a decade of my incarceration. The convict code boxed me in, tore me apart, and pulled me into a romanticised fantasy of prison—away from the person I was at my core. I was existing in a type of living death, and dragging my family, fellow prisoners and staff into a living hell along with me.

It is strange to think about that boy from so long ago, knowing he doesn’t resemble the man I am today. Even so, my walk through that hell gave me insight, while it destroyed the people around me. While I cannot change the past, I can live in the present and continue working toward a better future.

I will be writing about my experiences in solitary and want to apologize ahead of time as they will be real and raw. Some may be difficult to take in, but they need to be heard. They are not experiences unique to me but shared experiences of thousands of prisoners across the United States.

Featured photo: Special housing cells at an Oregon Department of Corrections prison. Oregon Department of Corrections.