The Felonist

The last days of December settle over Albion with a heavy, exhausted quiet. After weeks of chaos and heartbreak, the Felonist turns inward — rereading her journal, confronting the grip of pride, covetousness, and “stuff,” and trying to make sense of the year she’s survived. Christmas arrives in her cube with carols, memories of her mother, and the ache of distance. And she gives herself one brutal...

December in a women’s prison is its own kind of violence,and that December in Albion is just horrible. In this episode, the Felonist reminds everyone exactly why she’s called the White Martha Stewart Bitch — sharp, stubborn, bitchy, and absolutely unwilling to be pushed around. When afight erupts over the hot‑plate and her hour to cook, she refuses to move, refuses to be bullied, and refuses to su...

The Felonist descends into a fierce stretch of spiritual wrestling, filling her journal with pages from Julian of Norwich, Bonhoeffer, Rohr, the catechism, and every scrap of wisdom she can scrape from the silence. She questions forgiveness, marriage, self recrimination, and the wreckage she has caused. She wonders whether suffering is love, whether she must carry everything, whether she deserves...

A long stretch of November days unfolds in fragments — coffee, cold air, chapel, work, letters, interviews, apples, snow, and the constant ache of missing the people who once formed the center of her life. The Felonist drifts in and out of herself, writing in bursts, disassociating in between, trying to stay upright inside a place that feels both pointless and punishing. She forgives everyone she...

A stretch of days at Albion turns deeply inward as the Felonist immerses herself in Richard Rohr, Anne Lamott, Iyanla Vanzant, and Thich Nhat Hanh, filling her journal with the ideas that begin reshaping her understanding of success, identity, faith, and self worth. She wrestles with capitalism, patriarchy, white male hegemony and radical dependency while delving into the compulsions that once dro...

In this episode, the Felonist moves through agrinding stretch of Albion life marked by sleepless nights, snoring dorms, denied programs, IRS visits, head colds, and the constant ache of missing her daughter. She studies charisms, dreams in symbols, fights for a non‑smokingdorm, and tries to hold onto faith even as doubt and despair press in. A move to a single cube brings a rare breath of relief —...

In this episode, The Felonist moves through three weeksdefined by two words that echo again and again in her Albion journals: sad and tired. The emotional landscape is anything but quiet — it’s a storm of homesickness, spiritual doubt, poison ivy, sleepless nights, longing for her daughter, and the kind of heartache that spills into tears and curses hurled atGod. Yet even in the chaos, she keeps w...

As the Felonist settles deeper into life at Albion, she wrestles with the meaning of love — how to practice it, protect it, and survive it inside a women’s prison. Between reading Thomas Merton and Corinthians, homesickness, and the grind of her prison programming, she searches for the “bright line” between surrender and self‑preservation. And in the middle of all that soul‑work, one offhand comme...

The Felonist continues her early days at Albion, still riding the shockwave of the “cork popping” healing that left her clearer, lighter, and unexpectedly connected to something bigger than herself. As she moves through Phase One, she’s writing nonstop, walking miles, praying deeply, and rediscovering her humor and problem‑solving instincts. Between beginning her work assignments, deep hunger, lon...

The Felonist arrives at Albion Correctional Facility after a brutal transport ride and steps into a women’s prison that’s calmer than Bedford but still a cage. As she tries to stay connected to Grace and navigate the unit’s dynamics, a prison healing service delivers a shocking moment—a literal pop , “like a cork,” that shifts everything. The Albion Diaries begin with fear, clarity, and an unexpec...

Early August doesn’t hit me with outside blows — it turns inward. Melancholy settles in like fog, and self‑punishment becomes a daily ritual I perform without hesitation. I move through these days dissecting every thought, every failure, every imagined future, turning them into weapons and using them on myself with precision. Hope flickers, smothered by exhaustion, loneliness, and the suicidal tho...

In this episode I learn what “crazy” really means in prison. You’re not crazy if you’re playing with your shit, painting with it, acting out with it, using it to get attention or get moved. That’s coping. But if you’re eating it? That’s a different story altogether. Check the crazy box. As I’m trying to understand the mental health landscape inside a women’s prison, I start to see that Bedford isn...

The days take on a strange clarity here, as if everything is arriving in a deliberate sequence—books that echo one another, letters that land at the exact moment I need them, conversations that fold into a larger pattern I can finally feel forming. Bedford begins to feel less like a prison and more like a spiritual retreat, a place where my cube becomes a kind of penitent’s cell and where routine...

Late July hits me like a series of blows in a mismatched prize fight — me on the ropes, bruised, bleeding, and getting clobbered. The shock denial, the fear of being moved to another prison far away, the anniversary of my mother’s death, the collapse of my marriage, and the sudden and casual cruelty coming through the phone all land before I can brace. The synchronicities that once steadied me sti...

These entries capture the moment when the core — the truest part of me — rose back to the surface, and the current — the force of surrender — began to guide me instead of fear. In The Core and the Current , I start to see the self I had buried under years of effort, noise, and pride, and I begin to understand how far I had drifted from God and from myself. The Rule of Prayer was already written by...

In this episode, I leave RCOD for the back buildings, and the world shifts in ways only someone who has lived confinement can understand. These entries capture the shock of small objects and even smaller freedoms — a pen, ice cubes, coffee, soap, and finally having real implements for grooming after months of making do with a plastic spork. The smallest items suddenly carry the weight of dignity,...

Season Two begins with my first days at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility — a place that felt nothing like Rikers. The bus ride was hot, the intake was exhausting, but the moment I arrived, something in me lifted. Bedford was quiet, green, and strangely calming — a silence so deep it was almost loud, the kind of quiet that presses against you and makes you hear yourself again. In this episode, I...

In this episode, I return to July 4th weekend in 2014 — the first time I saw Grace after more than nine months apart. The anticipation, the quiet morning, the scripting of what to tell her, the tension with Bill, and the overwhelming relief of holding my daughter again all collide in these pages. I talk about the visit itself, the emotional recalibration that followed, the struggle to stay in the...

For this Felonist Friday, I’m opening the archive. At the end of the Rikers Diaries — and throughout the Bedford Diaries — I kept talking about my Rule of Prayer, and this week I finally found the original documents: the handwritten version I wrote at Rikers and the typed version I created at Bedford. These pages were my ballast, my grounding, my way of staying "In Spirit" when everythin...

The Felonist finally confronts the collapse she has been circling for months and names it for what it is: a failure so total it strips away every illusion of control, competence, and self‑protection. This episode traces the spiritual and psychological reckoning that unfolds inside incarceration—where anxiety, self‑punishment, and fear give way to a deeper truth about surrender, discernment, and th...

In Up and Out: On My Way to Bedford Women’s Correctional Facility , the Felonist steps into the final, disorienting hours of her Rikers chapter—packing up her belongings, organizing her prayers and “guidelines,” and preparing for the transfer that marks both an ending and a rebirth. This episode captures the profound spiritual clarity that emerges as she meditates, reflects, and realizes that obed...

The Felonist has reached the point where the noise, chaos, and emotional exhaustion of Rikers force her into a brutal kind of self‑inventory—one she can no longer outrun. This episode captures the disorienting swing between fleeting moments of peace and the grinding reality of coffee fights, dirty sheets, constant tension, and the fear that she is disappearing inside this place. As she meditates i...

In Becoming Other – But What Exactly? , the Felonist enters the most liminal chapter of her Rikers journey—the moment where she can no longer return to who she was, but cannot yet see who she is becoming. Through raw journal entries, she confronts the deployment patterns, self‑sacrifice reflexes, anger loops, shame spirals, and self‑loathing habits that shaped her life long before incarceration. P...

In Picking Up the Pieces , the Felonist emerges from the emotional wreckage of the previous weeks and enters the quiet, uncertain aftermath—the moment where the unraveling has already happened, and all that remains is the slow, trembling work of reassembling herself. This episode traces her attempt to reconnect with faith after a crisis, to make sense of dreams that feel like messages, to navigate...

In Darkness Takes Over , the Felonist descends into the deepest psychological and spiritual collapse of her Rikers journey, a place where isolation, abandonment, and fear converge into a darkness she can no longer outrun. This episode captures the raw reality of suicidal ideation inside incarceration, the unraveling of her marriage, the terror of losing her child, and the crushing weight of negoti...