Our prison monitoring volunteers visit one-on-one with people in prison. Often, these visits include small moments that stay with them long after they leave a facility. A conversation, an unexpected connection, a reminder that people in prison are more than the circumstances that brought them there.
Laura is one of our volunteers. She recently shared a moment that stayed with her after meeting Brian at SCI Phoenix, where he has been since January.
Brian heard about the Prison Society from a fellow incarcerated man he trusted, and he was curious. He asked for a visit.
"He has the intelligence, gravitas, wisdom, modesty, and positive demeanor of someone one might expect to be a trusted leader on the outside," Laura reflected.
Brian is quick to deflect compliments, though. He credits much of who he is today to a change that began about 10 years ago.
He describes his younger self as unfocused, angry, impulsive – “a knucklehead,” as he puts it. He entered prison as a young man and spent years moving through facility after facility.
Years later,Then an older incarcerated man, a lifer who was dying, befriended him. He gave Brian advice, took time with him, and offered him the kind of attention that prisons are not designed to provide and that young men in crisis rarely receive. Brian describes it as the spark he needed. He has worked hard on himself ever since.
He calls himself a prison success story. He says it without pride, just as a fact — the way someone might describe a long recovery. This is what happened. This is who I became.
Today, Brian is focused entirely on the men around him. Particularly the younger ones, whom he sees as needing the same kind of guidance he once received. Mentoring them has become, in his words and actions, a mission.
He has developed a program called "Starting In" designed to orient and educate men when they first arrive at a facility, and to give them something the system rarely offers at intake: guidance, a community, and a sense that the time ahead does not have to be simply endured.
"I've learned to live life instead of do life," he told Laura.
Brian's story is a story about what human connection makes possible inside prisons.
“I left that visit moved.” Laura shared.
He asked for nothing except an opportunity to be useful, to be of service, to reach the younger men the way that dying old lifer once reached him.
What happens inside prisons matters. Recognizing the humanity of the people confined there — and doing what we can to further it – is at the heart of our mission at the Prison Society.
