About halfway through my twenty-year prison sentence, I told my mom, “The day I leave this place will be the happiest and the saddest day of my life.”

The happiest—because I would finally regain my liberty after decades behind bars. The saddest—because by then, prison had also given me brothers. Men I lived with, worked with, prayed with. Men whose presence softened the daily dehumanization of incarceration. Without those relationships, many of us would not have survived.

That paradox has never left me.