This article was co-published by Truthout.

In 2013, when I had been locked up in solitary confinement for 25 years, I wrote an essay entitled “A Sentence Worse Than Death,” which I’m told has been read by upwards of a million people to date. It describes what life was like in “the box” (the special housing unit, or SHU for short) in New York’s state prisons, and posited that if given the choice, I would have opted for a sentence of death over more than two decades of incarceration in abject isolation.

At the time, I didn’t have that choice. Now, it appears, I do.

I am a 62-year-old man and have recently developed health issues that have led me to start thinking quite a bit about death and dying. When the problems you’re confronted with can kill you, it’s only natural to do this. Sooner or later, we will all have to face the fact of our mortality.

Not everyone, though, is locked up and serving a prison sentence longer than they will live to finish.

I am a prisoner who is serving such a sentence. Currently, I have been locked up for 39 years. I am not eligible for parole until August 2060, when I would be two months shy of my 97th birthday. Unless the law changes, in all likelihood I will be in prison for the rest of my life. Mine could be a sentence of death by incarceration.

I started my death thoughts at the obvious place: I thought about the life I would likely be living if I fought hard to beat the lung disease I have that could kill me, and managed to conquer it.

“How should I gauge the quality of life I’d be seeing in the future if I live on?” I asked myself. Then I reflected on what my life had been looking like before my disease became part of the picture.

In 2021, following passage of the Humane Alternatives to Long-Term (HALT) Solitary Confinement Act, I was finally released from solitary confinement after 34 years, and placed in the general population at Shawangunk Correctional Facility.

When I was let out of the box after so many years, it at first felt to me like I had been paroled. In SHU, I had nearly nothing in my cell. I could not get packages, other than reading materials (books, magazines, newspapers, etc.). I could only make limited commissary purchases (no food, clothing, or anything else but personal hygiene items, paper, stamps, and the like) once a month. I had no access to TV, and I got only an hour a day out of my cell for “recreation,” which I’d spend in a small empty cage not much bigger than the average cell. In prison’s general population, I quickly got some personal clothes sent in packages, got myself a TV and radio, and bought plenty of food in the commissary, including candy I hadn’t eaten in decades. I got hours a day out of my cell to hang out with my fellow incarcerated brothers.

After living a life of extreme austerity and isolation for so long, I would feel off-the-chart elation over the simplest stuff. Even when a movie on TV had been released many years before, I would experience it like it was wonderful and new—because to me, it was. I hadn’t seen a television in three decades, so just about every movie and show was fresh and new to me. And better still, I not only had a TV in my cell, but I was also able to watch ball games with a group of guys in the day room, with all the predicting and prognosticating and back-and-forth banter about sports that goes with it. Just being able to move among and interact with people without being separated by bars or fences or cages was joy to me more than it should have been, more than it had ever been before. Even the prison food was hotter and better than I ever remembered it being in SHU.

For decades I had seen nothing but an hour out-of-cell time a day spent in an 8x 15-foot barred cage set atop concrete, one man alone per cage, a row of them lined up like you’d see in a kennel. But when I went to Shawangunk’s huge population yard, the grass looked greener and the sky bluer than I recalled. There were weights and showers and phones, and both a soccer and softball field for me to move around in.

All of it together, population juxtaposed with isolation, was what light is to darkness, what heaven is to hell—and the sudden change, after so many years with almost nothing, put me in a state of euphoria that I knew was not normal and knew wouldn’t last forever.

And I was right. 

Prison soon began to feel like prison again. Life being locked up is not easy, not even in the best of times. It is especially difficult when you have no release date to focus your sights on, when you’re serving a sentence longer than you will live.

Some prisoners can still find meaning in their lives when they have no hope of ever seeing the streets again. I am not one of them. I have always believed that life in prison without the possibility of parole—like prolonged time in solitary confinement—is a sentence worse than death.

I am an eleutheromaniac—a person who is obsessed with freedom. I spent those 34 years in the box not for disciplinary reasons, but because the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) deemed me to be a serious escape risk.

In fact, I have a history of escaping from custody that goes back to my childhood. As a 15-year-old, after finding my way out of juvenile lockup, I jumped into and swam across a flooding Genesee River while being chased by two staff members. That same year, 1979, after pushing the door open and stepping into juvenile court, I quickly spun and slammed the door in the faces of the two deputies escorting me, bolted across the courtroom, and dove forearms-first through a large plate glass window. I loved my freedom so much, I had risked my safety and my life to get it back, even as a child.

As an adult, I killed a man while attempting to regain my freedom. Soon after my arrest in 1987, at the age of 23, I attempted to escape and shot two sheriff’s deputies in the process. One died. This is the grievous crime that earned me my current sentence. I mention the urge behind it by way of an explanation, not an excuse. 

I believe I hate losing my freedom even more than most people in prison do. Every day of my life locked up, I am to a degree in internal pain, albeit bearable pain. There can never be enough meaning in my life to make it worthwhile to keep living when I am doing it from inside of a cage—not if there is no hope of my living to see release.

I have kept my hopes alive by praying that a change in the law will happen, a change that will make it possible for me to see parole—and to see many other old-timers like myself get a chance at dying in a better place. I know in my heart, though, that I have my hopes set on something that may never come. Fool’s hope, some folks call this sort of thing.

Every day we spend with the people we love is precious and worth fighting hard for. Take that away and the value of life is lessened. In prison you are surrounded by more hate than love. So, it makes sense that someone out there in the world would find more motivation to do all they can to extend their life than someone who has been separated from all they love.

It is not possible for me to find motivation by looking forward to days spent with loved ones. Indeed, it is hard to find motivation to do much of anything but the time I’ve been sentenced to serve. Should I learn a trade I will never be in the streets to use? Should I attend a program that teaches skills to help a man make it successfully in a society I will never rejoin? The truth is, it can be exceedingly difficult to see the point in doing anything to grow at all.

This is my reality, and it stands before me while I consider what the point would be in prolonging my life when it would only prolong the number of years I would serve in prison. With no hope of freedom, the entire equation is vastly different from the one I’d be considering were I living in free society.

I am not depressed, nor do I feel weak and worn out, like I can’t do the prison program anymore. The crux of the matter is not whether I can go on and give lung disease the best battle I can; the issue is whether or not it would even be wise to do that. When death means a release date from prison — something that I presently do not have—would it not be the height of foolishness to fight hard to extend the life that has been and remains a very rough thing to endure?

Of course, I have gotten some good things done during my decades in prison, and I may yet do more in the future. But is the sum of the possibilities for the future enough to justify the effort it’ll take getting there? I thought about this, but quickly had the idea that I was getting philosophical, and I’m no philosopher. The other idea I had was that everything I might do would be minimized in value if I were doing it from inside of a prison.

After all the thinking, after all the time the thoughts of death and dying assailed me, I have decided I will let nature take its course. I won’t be having any surgeries, or any other type of radical treatments. Death is coming for everyone eventually. With my situation being what it is, it seems senseless to me to prolong the inevitable. I would only be delaying the release from prison that is on my mind every day, and in my dreams at night when I sleep.

There is one thing that could cause me to do some reconsidering, though.

Presently pending before the New York legislature is a bill entitled the Elder Parole Act (S454/A514). If signed into law, it would make incarcerated individuals who are over 55 years of age eligible for parole if they have served at least 15 years of their prison sentence, no matter what that sentence might be. It would not guarantee parole for anyone, but it would give older prisoners a chance for release that many do not have, that I don’t have. It would give us hope, where now there is none.

Like myself, most older prisoners who have served decades in prison deeply regret the crimes they committed when they were young, not only because of the damage the deeds have done to their own lives, but also because of the harm they wrongfully caused their victims to suffer. More years in prison will not lead them to more self-reflection and a greater sense of remorse; these feelings are already there. They are older and wiser than they were when they began their prison terms, and the best of them have long ago figured important things out. All prison holds for them is more suffering, more punishment for crimes they have for a long time wished they had never committed. That said, the hope offered by the possibility of release would give those among us of any age a concrete reason to change.  

In his 2025 State of the Judiciary address, Rowan D. Wilson, chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, spoke about the cost of incarceration in New York. In 2011, he said, the price the state paid to house one person in prison was $81,000. Ten years later, in 2021, that cost had more than tripled to over a quarter of a million dollars per incarcerated individual. Judge Wilson cited data obtained from the New York State comptroller. Moreover, that astronomical amount does not include other costs to the state included in the budget for DOCCS, like benefits and pensions for prison staff. With those costs added in—as they should be because they are borne by the taxpayers—it costs the State of New York more than half a million dollars for each and every person locked up in prison, or about $1,500 a day per prisoner. Certainly, that cost would only be higher for incarcerated individuals over the age of 50, because of treatment for health issues that older people face.

Judge Wilson also stated that “abundant research shows that criminality declines as people age.” And although he didn’t mention it specifically, he could have also noted that the recidivism rate for individuals age 50 and older is about 10 percent, the lowest of all age groups. 

A 2021 report by the Center for Justice at Columbia University found that enacting the Elder Parole and Fair and Timely Parole (S159/A127) bills would save New York State $522 million annually.

The financial cost of keeping elderly individuals locked up is high and apparent, but there is a human cost being paid, too. The older men and women, who are absent from society because they are serving lengthy prison terms long after they have reformed themselves and felt regret for what they had done, could be of value to the free world if given the chance to be. They could be the voices speaking to young people who are themselves heading down the self-same path that the old-timers once walked.

The fact is, nobody gains a thing from keeping old people in prison long after they have grown into decent people who wish harm to no one, who wish they could undo the harm they caused in their younger, more foolish years, and do better in the time they have remaining in this lifetime than they did in the past.

Both the Elder Parole Act and a companion bill, Fair and Timely Parole, which makes parole interviews more rigorous in evaluating incarcerated people’s risk to public safety, have majority support in New York’s state legislature. If brought to the floor for a vote, they would be passed into law, providing that the governor signs them.

A majority of the people’s representatives in the State Senate and Assembly have already signed onto the bills as co-sponsors, so it is therefore the will of the people that these bills become law. The will of the people should prevail, not the politics of the day.

The votes should happen and Gov. Kathy Hochul should sign them into law.

Banner Photo: Johan Sheridan / News10 ABC