The injustices I experienced in solitary confinement at the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado, were legion. I could recount them all, but they are already well documented. Suffice to say: It was brutal.
Yet even in this environment, I valued rehabilitation, and I strove to better myself and make my life a little more comfortable.
Below, I share a few tactics that helped me live a meaningful life during solitary in a supermax prison.
A spirit of innovation
From Jan. 16, 2015, to Nov. 21, 2023, I spent 23 to 24 hours each day in a cell no larger than a parking space. Add a sink, toilet, shower, concrete desk and concrete slab to lay the mattress on, and you can picture where I spent more than 57,000 hours.
It was a dark place. To find hope, you had to be innovative.
“Got to put that thang on the light,” a man named Abdul Salam once told me about how to warm up meals that almost always arrived cold. Older brothers had told me this for years, but the idea of wrapping my food in plastic and setting it on the light — two fluorescent tubes in a boxlike fixture on the cell wall — to heat it up never sat well with me. Until I tried it.
I do not know why the officers never gave us hot food. I had hot food maybe 10 times in nearly nine years. But setting food on the light was the solution.
One evening, I was served the standard burrito meal: undercooked rice, plain beans, a tortilla, so-called salsa and a little shredded cheese. I rolled some of the food in the tortilla, wrapped it in a chip bag, set it on the light and covered it with a folded prayer rug. Then I forgot all about it.
An hour later I remembered it was up there, got to inspecting the joint, took a bite, and it was straight up 7-Eleven burrito time! I could not believe I had gone five years without “puttin’ that thang on the light.”
Challenging workouts
Along with the occasional soft-taco supreme, workouts were essential to maintaining our mental, physical and spiritual health.
When I arrived there in 2015, I was amazed at the types of workouts dudes were doing: 300 burpees in less than 25 minutes; burpee-pull-up-dip supersets; 2,500 push-ups; 1,500 squats; 1,500 sit-ups; 500 pull-ups.
We built solidarity around those workouts, starting at 6 or 7 a.m., calling count out through our cells’ steel doors. I once shared with my cell neighbor that I rode unicycles and skateboards when I was younger. Sometimes when he and I would reach the last 100 burpees, he would yell his nickname for me: “Come on, Uni! Push through this last 100!”
Morning workouts were our way of saying that no matter what, we were going to help each other feel good mentally, physically and spiritually that day.
Meaningful relationships
Because we were isolated, our access to information was very limited. If I wanted to get positive things done, I had to depend on like-minded people. We pushed one another to strive harder toward accomplishing our goals.
These friends encouraged me to use critical thinking when assessing my thoughts, feelings and the environment that surrounded me in solitary.
Lateef, Big Gee and others helped me recognize the anxiety, paranoia and falsehood that prolonged confinement attempted to create in my mind.
Ise Bomb convinced me I was a poet the public needed to know.
KD gave me a great example of consistency and determination. KD had been fighting his initial case for 20 years and fighting a life sentence in a more recent case. But I never met someone more positive and optimistic about life.
He prepared and lived like he was going home the next day. When he was not doing legal work, we worked out or laughed together. Every time we interacted, I walked away feeling good. I walked away a better person. And I love him for that.
What I valued most were the friendships I forged with Abu Awf and Abu Umar. They reminded me there was nothing wrong with being unique, no shame in being Muslim, and that it is perfectly fine to believe that my collective experiences have led me to exactly where I am supposed to be on my life journey.
Sure, I carry the trauma of what I experienced, but I also carry strength and wisdom from lessons forged in solitary.