The Felonist

In Finally Owning What’s Mine , the Felonist steps into the hardest and most necessary reckoning of her Rikers journey: the moment she stops running from her choices, her patterns, her denial, and the wreckage she helped create, and finally tells the truth—to herself. This episode captures the emotional and spiritual weight of taking full ownership after years of deflection, self‑protection, and f...

After more than two months without a visit, the Felonist reaches the point where the emotional, psychological, and spiritual strain of Rikers becomes unbearable, and the unraveling she has been trying to outrun finally overtakes her. This episode captures the raw collapse of a woman pushed past her limits—sleepless nights, nightmares, paranoia, rage, intrusive thoughts, the terror of being forgott...

The Felonist hits the emotional wall she has been circling for months, forced to confront the brutal truth of her relationships, her fear, and the weight of her own choices. Easter becomes a mirror she can’t look away from: her husband's anger, her daughter’s absence, the ache of missing family, the longing for forgiveness, and the crushing realization that contact hurts but distance hurts mor...

In Reality Bites , the Felonist reaches the moment where denial finally cracks and the truth of her situation lands with a sting she can no longer outrun. This episode captures the emotional whiplash of six months inside: the fight between negativity and hope, the fragile pride in what she has rebuilt, the fear of what she has broken, and the ache of missing her daughter while navigating a legal s...

In Fear Is Winning , the Felonist reaches the point where faith, strength, and routine can no longer hold back the rising tide of panic, and she is forced to confront the rawest truth of her incarceration: fear has taken the wheel. This episode captures the emotional and psychological unraveling that happens when hope keeps getting denied—when the DA refuses bail again, when family feels far away,...

In Aching and Awakening , the Felonist reaches the point where isolation stops being a circumstance and becomes a state of mind, forcing her to confront the loneliness, fear, and emotional exhaustion that have been building for months inside Rikers. This episode traces the jagged path between despair and resilience: the ache of missing her daughter, the cold distance growing in her marriage, the w...

In this episode of the Rikers Diaries, the Felonist reaches the point where longing becomes its own kind of torment—caught between the noise of Rikers, the silence from home, and the spiritual desperation of wanting to be anywhere but the life she’s trapped in. This episode captures the emotional and mental toll of incarceration: the loneliness, the shame, the dreams of home that feel more real th...

In Train Wreck in Slow Motion , the Felonist is dragged through the brutal machinery of the court system—shuttled, cuffed, ignored, injured, and left to navigate the emotional and psychological violence of incarceration with no clarity, no timeline, and no protection. This episode captures the raw reality of life in the holding pen: the noise, the fear, the racial tension, the physical pain of a w...

In Lost in the Void , the Felonist confronts the psychological freefall of incarceration: the loneliness, the overmedication haze, the crushing anxiety, and the desperate search for meaning when the legal system stalls and every source of support feels out of reach. This episode dives into the mental health impact of long‑term confinement, the emotional toll of separation from family, and the brut...

In Forsaken , the Felonist enters the darkest stretch of her incarceration, confronting the emotional collapse that comes with prolonged isolation, family separation, and the mental health toll of life inside Rikers. This episode captures the raw reality of despair in confinement: the absence of visits, the breakdown of support systems, the fear of never going home, and the crushing loneliness tha...

This episode captures the exact moment when the Felonist feels herself slipping between who she was and who she is becoming, suspended in the uneasy space where hope, fear, and exhaustion collide. She wakes from dreams of home into the starkness of Rikers, fighting to stay present while her mind keeps reaching for answers that never come. Anxiety churns through her body, faith steadies her for a b...

In Okay, So Now What? , the Felonist stops circling the wreckage and finally stands in the center of it—not triumphant, not healed, not redeemed, just awake. After months of fear, self‑punishment, addiction patterns, and the mental health spiral of incarceration, she begins to see the truth she’s been avoiding: she can’t go back to who she was, and she can’t outrun what she’s done. The drinking, t...

Finally, the Felonist stops running from herself—not the polished self, not the competent self, not the charming self, but the real one underneath the drinking, the denial, the self‑punishment, the frantic coping, the marriage she can’t fix, and the fear she’s been outrunning for decades. What unfolds is the brutal honesty of someone realizing she is both the wound and the one who keeps reopening...

After being in jail for a while, the mind starts stitching meaning into the chaos—dreams, signs, conspiracies, memories, pennies on the floor, anything that might prove the universe is still speaking. Finding Meaning in the Madness lives inside that strange, liminal space where incarceration, trauma, and mental health collide. The Felonist drifts between fear and faith, between the drama queen’s s...

There is a moment in every unraveling when the floor finally drops—when the rituals that kept you upright, the faith that steadied your breath, and the discipline that held your mind together all buckle under the weight of fear, hunger, exhaustion, and longing. Losing the Thread lives inside that moment. The Felonist hits the emotional bottom she’s been circling for weeks: the hormones, the hunger...

In this episode, The Felonist rides the emotional whiplash of legal updates, sleepless nights, and the countdown to freedom. Valentine’s Day hits different on the inside, stirring memories of real connection while she leans on writing to keep her mind steady. Between tense moments with other inmates and unexpected flashes of support, she searches for meaning in small signs — even a stray penny on...

In Bless Me Indeed, The Felonist doesn’t sugarcoat a thing -- this is the moment she finally stops seeing herself as broken and begins to believe she might actually deserve something good. After months of fear, guilt, self‑erasure, and the daily chaos of incarceration on Rikers Island, she reaches a quiet, startling clarity: she is worthy of blessing, worthy of love, worthy of coming home. The dra...

It's a new tradition: Feloni$t Friday, a Friday reflection on the current realities faced by felons. In this bonus episode, the Feloni$t dives headfirst into the emotions and triggers that many incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals face in today's dangerous political climate in the US.

Something shifts in Are You There God, It's Me Felonist — not a miracle, not a revelation, but a strange, steadying clarity that feels like it comes from somewhere just beyond her own mind. The Felonist wakes with the sense that something is different, that something is moving, that maybe she is being moved. She writes through the swirl of fear, hope, superstition, instinct, and the quiet susp...

In Sifting Drama from Truth , the Felonist begins to separate instinct from noise, fantasy from reality, and self‑protection from self‑betrayal, capturing the messy, moment‑to‑moment mental work of surviving incarceration and rebuilding her sense of self. She confronts courtroom anxiety, daydreams that reveal more than they hide, and the small acts of boundary‑setting that feel like tectonic shift...

Holding My Head marks the moment the Felonist stops collapsing into herself and begins, inch by inch, to lift her head again — literally and figuratively. Hunger, exhaustion, doubt, and the endless noise of Rikers press in on her, but something steadier is forming underneath: a refusal to be blamed, a refusal to shrink, a refusal to disappear. As she writes to Little Felonist, she traces the diffe...

The Felonist reaches the strange, disorienting moment where she meets herself again — not the good girl, not the party girl, not the drama queen, not the caretaker, but the person underneath all of it. Who Are You? Do I Know You? captures the first flicker of recognition after months of unraveling: the shock of waking up with hope, the quiet clarity that arrives without warning, the realization th...

In Gone Girl , The Felonist reaches the point where she feels herself slipping away. These Rikers diary entries capture the terrifying sense of becoming unrecognizable to herself — the guilt that won’t let go, the fear of losing her identity, the exhaustion of trying to stay human inside a place designed to strip that away. As she writes to Little Felonist, she confronts the collapse of memory, th...

In Ding Dong the Good Girl is Dead, something in the Felonist breaks — and something truer begins to take hold. The Felonist hits the point where the old performance can’t hold: the good girl, the appeaser, the one who kept the peace at any cost. Through these diary entries, written in the exhaustion and claustrophobia of Rikers, she confronts the roles she was trained to play and the rage that fi...

In this episode of the Rikers Island Diaries, the Felonist begins to sense the first faint shift inside herself — a flicker she can’t yet name. As she writes from the dorms and workrooms of Rikers, she moves between despair and the smallest glimmers of hope: a good visit, a shared candy bar, a moment of clarity, a prayer that lands. These entries capture the unstable middle ground between breaking...