The title of this post is the title of this notable new book authored by Jeremiah Bourgeois. The book is a collection of columns, mostly written while Jeremiah Bourgeois was serving a term of life imprisonment for a crime committed at the age of fourteen. Here is how the work is described at Amazon:

On June 7, 2016, an email from a prospective writer appeared in the inbox of The Crime Report, a nonprofit criminal justice news site. The last line in the message caught the editors' attention: "I realize that submissions should include more information. However, I hope you overlook that requirement in light of the fact that I am incarcerated."

Over the next three years, Jeremiah Bourgeois, then confined to the Stafford Creek Corrections Center, a mixed medium-minimum security prison for men near Aberdeen, Washington, contributed 36 columns on his own transformation from self-destructive rage to dedicated writer and on subjects such as the treatment of gay and transgender prisoners, the lack of a #MeToo movement for incarcerated women, and the hypocrisies of prison "family visitation" events.

Months after Bourgeois finally won his parole in 2019, The Crime Report is publishing this collection of Jeremiah Bourgeois's most searing and unforgettable work.

The Crime Report provides more of the story in this posting:

When he wrote us, he was 38 years old — and had already spent the previous 24 years behind bars for the May 19, 1992, revenge killing of Seattle store owner Tecle Ghebremichale, who had testified against his brother in an assault case. Aged 14 at the time of his crime, he was sentenced to life without parole in the era before the Supreme Court ruled such sentences for juveniles unconstitutional.  Jeremiah had every expectation of spending the rest of his life in prison. "It was probably the saddest case I've ever had," his lawyer, Michael Trickey, told the Seattle Times in 2005, noting both Jeremiah's age and length of sentence.

Jeremiah spent much of his first decade in prison in a permanent state of anger and defensiveness, frequently in conflict with corrections officers and fellow inmates.  But then something changed.  Prisoner #708897, as he would later write in his columns, realized that he was on a path to self-destruction.  He began reinventing and reeducating himself through long hours in the prison library.

He is not the first incarceree to write his story.  Prison writing has long been a special genre, and The Crime Report has frequently published work written behind bars — by both juveniles and adults. But Jeremiah's emergence as an independent, often contrarian, voice has been especially timely as our national debate about mass incarceration approaches a crossroads.