Prison Radio Audio Feed

"I can't breathe." Most of America was first introduced to those three words after footage surfaced of the police murdering Eric Garner in New York City. But those words became a part of my life much earlier. I spent five straight years in solitary confinement while housed at SCI Greene in Western Pennsylvania. At the time, it was Pennsylvania's only supermax prison. For 61 months straight, I was confined to a small cell alone, 23 hours per day, not allowed to interact with any other human being except for prison guards who hated me as if I were responsible for every hardship that they'd ever suffered.Solitary confinement is designed to break the hearts and minds and spirits of those forced to endure it. The silence back there is deafening, and even the strong don't always survive. The hole, as most of us know it, is exactly that: a living graveyard. It's where prison administrators send prisoners like myself to die, and the only way for many prisoners to survive is to constantly resist."I can't breathe." The