From Six by Ten, a collection of firsthand accounts of solitary confinement edited by Mateo Hoke and Taylor Pendergrass. This story is by Brian Nelson, who was convicted of murder in Illinois in 1983 and sentenced to twenty-six years in prison. He was released in 2010. The book will be published in October by Haymarket Books.

This would have been around 1987.

There was a riot between the black and the white gangs. Big riot. Two weeks later, the warden called me to the office and told me the guards wanted me to find out what the issues…