I grew up in Brancaccio. I didn't understand what school was for — no one around me had ever gotten anything out of it. The role models were different. Reform school was almost a rite of passage: you've been? Then you're one of us.

I don't want to say I had no choice. I did. But you make choices with what's around you, with what you think is possible. And what I thought was possible was very little.

In prison, almost by chance, I found a library and a professor who came twice a week. I started listening to him because I had nothing better to do. Then I started reading. Then writing. I discovered that someone had put places like mine, lives like mine, into a book — and had considered them worthy of being told. Until that moment, it had never crossed my mind that anyone could do that.

But it wasn't prison that gave me that opportunity. It was that professor, those books. Things I could have encountered at fourteen, in a community center, in a neighborhood library, on a different path. Instead, I found them at twenty-seven, in a cell. And in between, there are years I'll never get back.

Prison doesn't heal and it doesn't repair. What I still ask myself today is simple: why did I have to wait so long? Why didn't anyone try sooner?

Today I work with kids who come from places like mine. I look at them and think that their story isn't already written. But someone has to decide to change it before they hit rock bottom. Because waiting for them to get there — as I did — isn't justice. It's abandonment.