Citizens for Criminal Justice Reform – New Hampshire

It was a sunny day. I was standing in line for chow. The guy ahead of me stretched lazily and yawned.

Billy was a big lump of a man. I met him when he got transferred to the sex offender program in the New Hampshire State Prison. By then he was twenty-nine.

It takes fifty minutes to drive from Dover to Concord. I wished it would take longer even though handcuffs chaffed my wrists.

He shuffles across the prison yard, hands in the pockets of a coat he’s worn for the past eight winters. When it was new, it more or less fit. Now it hangs from his frame like a shroud.