This story was published in partnership with Prison Journalism Project, a national nonprofit organization which trains incarcerated writers in journalism and publishes their work. Sign up for PJP’s newsletter, or follow them on Instagram and X.

I was never a party animal, and I didn’t need to use drugs to enhance my natural good vibes. It’s like the old heads used to say about getting high off of dope, “One time is too many, and too many is never enough.”

I had zero history of heroin or opioid use prior to my arrest in 2004. Many of my incarcerated peers have turned to Allah or Christ to sustain their mental and emotional health throughout our decades of incarceration. I, not being the most spiritually inclined brother, turned instead to drugs to numb the pain of my regrets stemming from my criminal activities. I did it to maintain my sanity.

Slipping into darkness, in a moment of stupidity, I started blowing joint (snorting heroin) in the DC Jail back in 2005. For a while, it worked miracles, silencing the shame and guilt I felt from the hurt I caused myself.

The drugs muzzled all the negative barking in my head: “You sold your family out for the streets. You’re a deadbeat dad. You’re an ignorant, stupid, worthless Black motherfucker. You ain’t never getting out of prison, and you deserve to die in jail.”

Fast forward several years. I was transferred to the Federal Bureau of Prisons to serve out my sentence, as are all people convicted of D.C. crimes. By then, those moments of euphoric escape transformed into a merciless stranglehold, a chemical and physical addiction. I still struggle to completely escape its grasp. Many of my fellow prisoners are struggling, too. And from where I’m now sitting, inside the 5A housing unit at USP McCreary in Pine Knot, Kentucky, it looks like the BOP doesn’t give a damn.

Over the past several years, there have been a slew of drug overdoses throughout BOP facilities. Too many have ended in death. Many could have been prevented.

A February report from the U.S. Department of Justice’s inspector general on deaths inside BOP facilities found that at least 70 people died of drug overdoses between fiscal years 2014 and 2021. That figure makes up about 20 percent of the 344 deaths in BOP facilities during that time. Drug overdose was the second leading cause of death; hanging was the first.

The inspector general also found “significant shortcomings” in the BOP’s responses to nearly half of all in-custody deaths the agency looked at. Problems included a lack of urgency, failure to bring the appropriate medical equipment, and issues or failure to use naloxone, the opioid overdose antidote.

The report identifies the most tragic outcomes for prisoners who are addicted to drugs, and reflects the fears of many people I know inside who struggle with opioid dependency. But the truth is that daily life for a drug-addled person in a BOP facility is much grimmer than a sterile report can convey.

***

“One of the most horrific and traumatizing things you can witness in prison is watching a close friend, someone you love and care about, trying to kick, cold turkey, a heroin addiction,” says Leonard Bishop, a former advisory neighborhood commissioner at the DC Jail, who is now incarcerated with me at McCreary. “It’s ugly seeing brothers going through the throes of detox. Watching many of my friends and generational peers fall victim to the addictive lust for heroin and ultimately transforming into somebody that neither of you recognize—it’s hard feeling helpless to make your buddies understand that they’re playing right into their own self-destruction.”

When a prisoner decides to try and kick his habit in the BOP, he is often met with barriers, delays, and flat-out denials. The first obstacle is getting approved for treatment.

Such lifesaving medical care is promised in the First Step Act, signed into law in 2018. I have asked how to get a prescription for medication assisted treatment, such as Suboxone. But in my experience at USP McCreary, the medical and psychology departments have provided conflicting answers to my fellow prisoners and me about which department is tasked with providing addiction treatment. Neither department can explain the criteria we must meet to be placed in a recovery program.

For example, I have been told that the program is only open to guys with 90 days left in their sentence.

Michael “Boogie Swan” Johnson, from Baltimore City and who served time in USP McCreary from 2023 to 2024, says he received a similar response.

“While I was in USP McCreary, I was denied medical treatment, and they told me they were only providing medication treatment for those 90 days to the door or less,” Johnson, who has been incarcerated since he was 18 years old, says via email. “That didn’t apply to me because I have 12 years with four to go.”

He says when he was transferred earlier this year to FCI Williamsburg, a lower security facility in South Carolina, he was immediately prescribed Suboxone, a medication used to treat opioid addiction, and he now takes one 8-milligram strip per day.

“What it does is it takes out the craving for opioids,” Johnson says via email. “So it helps me function on a day-to-day basis much better.”

BOP spokesperson Randilee Giamusso says an order to begin treatment in many BOP programs “is arranged according to projected release date, [but] services should not be withheld until someone is 90 days before release.” That wouldn’t even be enough time to complete the two residential treatment programs, which run for 12 months and 18 to 24 months, respectively, she acknowledges.

The type of medication-assisted treatment that Johnson is receiving at FCI Williamsburg should be available at any point during a person’s incarceration “depending on clinical need,” Giamusso says. 

Giamusso initially told City Paper that two kinds of residential addiction treatment programs should be available at McCreary. The Challenge Program, which runs from 18 to 24 months and is specific to high-security institutions, provides treatment for drug addiction and mental illness as well as violence intervention. At McCreary, the program currently has an enrollment of 46 people, according to the BOP, according to the BOP, with a waitlist of 94 people. In response to follow-up questions, the BOP clarifies that the separate Residential Drug Treatment Program, which typically runs for nine months, is not offered at McCreary. A non-residential treatment program here currently has 35 people enrolled, according to the BOP, with a 424-person waitlist. 

In light of questions regarding the denial of these programs and treatment, Giamusso says that the “FBOP will be sure to follow up and provide any necessary training or information to ensure treatment is compliant with policy at all locations, including USP McCreary.”

In 2022, the Marshall Project reported on deficiencies with the BOP’s compliance with the First Step Act’s drug treatment provisions. At the time, the outlet reported that only 10 percent of the estimated 15,000 people in BOP custody who needed opioid addiction treatment were receiving it.

By the end of October 2022, nearly four years after the First Step Act went into effect, 21 prisons offered no addiction medication, and 59 more were treating 10 or fewer people, TMP reported.

Guys who are close to release should absolutely be given treatment because of their higher chance of relapse and overdose when they’re out. But what about those of us who have been led to believe we don’t qualify for treatment? We fall deeper into the disease, made to feel as though our lives are less valuable, or worse, expendable.

***

Serving time at McCreary is chronically depressing. Intellectual and artistic stimuli are practically nonexistent. When we’re not locked down, we are allowed out of our cells at 6 a.m. Healthy, able-bodied men, who could be engaged in intensive rehabilitative and reentry programming, just sit around in an overcrowded day room. They play card games or other tabletop games; some play video games on their tablets.

In an attempt to break the monotony of this all-consuming idleness, some of us turn to drug use as a coping mechanism. The high provides momentary escape. But drug use and addiction in prison have ripple effects.

Some addicts are better than others at hiding their dependency. Insulated with a little cash and a degree of hustle, a prisoner with an opioid addiction can find the means to keep their fronts up by dressing neatly, shopping at commissary regularly, and paying their debts in a timely fashion, which allows them to maintain a prison work detail without a problem.

For prisoners struggling with opioid addiction who don’t have the capital to float their habit, life can be dangerous.

Addicted prisoners run up debts small and large—anywhere from $20 to $1,500 in cases that I’ve known about—that they are unable to pay. Avoiding those consequences is, in my estimation, the No. 1 cause of prisoners’ requesting placement into protective custody, which is typically an act of desperation intended to avoid violent retribution. The inspector general’s audit broadly confirms that drug addiction and debt in prison beget violence.

The more aggressive opioid addicts resort to strong-arm tactics to get their fix. Some use homemade knives and shanks to rob jailhouse dealers. I’ve been in housing units where two or three addicted prisoners mob up, walk into the cell of the prison dealer, hold him up at knifepoint, yank his pants and boxer briefs down to his ankles, and retrieve the narcotics hidden between his cheeks.

Over the years, I’ve witnessed other acts of desperation, too.

Prisoners will make shanks and sell them to anyone willing to pay—even to opposition groups—all to fuel an addiction. Making weapons for rival gangs is like treason on the inside. If he’s discovered, he could get beat, stabbed, or both.

Guys will tell all sorts of lies to their family and loved ones, goading them out of their money so they can pay for drugs inside.

Men and women have been known to sell their bodies in exchange for drugs or the money to buy drugs. This doesn’t change for incarcerated people, but it does become more dangerous. Men and women in prison don’t have condoms for protection against contracting or spreading sexually transmitted infections.

Suicide behind these walls has also been linked with drug use. The inspector general’s findings cite BOP-producted reports on two suicidal deaths that say the individuals who took their own lives “experienced hopelessness about the inability to repay their drug debt.” 

And even if a BOP prisoner is accepted into a recovery program, they risk punishment (loss of good-time credit and phone, email, and commissary privileges) if they backslide and end up with a dirty piss test. Relapse is a well-understood hallmark of addiction recovery.

I have no desire to return to my family or community addicted to heroin. I recently attempted detoxing, as I have before. Every waking second, I’m thinking about it, fighting the temptation. Guys like myself, who have jailhouse addictions, are seeking addiction medication, and since we’ve been denied at USP McCreary, some of us are spending our own money on medication that the prison should be supplying to us. I pay $25 for 1/16 of a strip of Suboxone when I can afford it. Technically, it’s considered contraband.

The BOP should provide this treatment to all who need it. No more lives need be lost for a problem that the federal prison system is capable of fixing.

Additional reporting by Mitch Ryals.

This article has been updated to clarify USP McCreary does not offer a residential drug treatment program.

Askia Afrika-Ber was born and raised in Southeast D.C. and Prince George’s County and is serving a 53-year sentence for felony murder in USP McCreary, a high-security prison in Kentucky. He published a book about life inside prison in 2024. Inside Voices is produced in collaboration with More Than Our Crimes, a nonprofit dedicated to raising the voices of people locked in federal prisons across the country.

In November, I was transferred from U.S. Penitentiary Big Sandy, a high-security prison in Inez, Kentucky, to yet another wretched facility that is far worse. About a three-hour drive from Big Sandy is a sleepy, creepy little town called Pine Knot, Kentucky, home to USP McCreary.

At this high-security pen, Warden John Gilley has created a house of horrors.

Prisoners are hungry. Violence is everywhere. And those things, I believe, are not unrelated. Gilley’s policy of collective punishment—where many are punished for the misbehavior of a few—has weaponized the prison’s cafeteria food and commissary privileges and created animosity among those of us who are incarcerated here at McCreary. Fights and assaults are regular occurrences, often over food. There is a ban on books sent into the facility, and plexiglass barriers left over from the pandemic diminish the value of contact visits.

Soon after my arrival, a man was killed in his cell, and his body went unnoticed by guards for 72 hours. We are supposed to stand for count twice a day, but officers only realized the man was dead after his neighbor complained of the smell.

The collective punishment policy hinges on the assumption that prisoners will hold each other accountable. But that policy, where an entire housing unit’s commissary privileges are taken away for any act of violence or found contraband (drugs, alcohol, weapons), is doomed to fail. 

Why? Here’s the situation: Prison gangs are like a secret society. Nonmembers are not privy to gang members’ plans. If a gang’s shot-caller decides to green-light a hit on a member who has fallen out of favor or a rival member who attempts to walk the same prison yard, a nonmember will not interfere. Meddling in prison politics can cause unnecessary beef.

Basically, what I am saying is that I jumped straight out of the frying pan and into the fire.

***

My ears were bombarded with rumors of the miserable and inhumane living conditions at USP McCreary (about 570 miles from my hometown D.C.) while I warily waited in the transit unit last year.

When I arrived on the yard at McCreary for the first time, the first thing to grab my attention was just how depressed and raggedy the men appeared. They reminded me of still images of starving POWs in Japanese internment camps and Nazi concentration camps, or more recent images of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Prisoners walked around the housing unit and rec yard looking stressed and undernourished. They wore old, dingy gray sweats and gym shorts and worn-out tennis shoes—some with the soles hanging off. A common theme reverberated through the conversations I had with men from various ethnicities and geographical locations: hunger. Every single man I talked to complained of being utterly and completely hungry.

Those living in the 5A housing unit where I have been assigned haven’t been allowed to purchase electronics, clothing, or food items (rice, beans, meat, fish, flour tortillas, spices, etc.) from the commissary since the start of 2023. The restriction was already in place when I arrived and is the result of the warden’s collective punishment policy.

If you happened to see a man on 5A eating a bag of Doritos, chances are he paid another man a hefty price tag—$16 or more is the going rate, depending on whether a bidding war had started over the nacho chips. In December, I overheard a young man announce that he was willing to pay $50 for a $3.50 bag of Keefe freeze-dried coffee.

In my view, Gilley’s excessive collective punishment policy has led prisoners to exploit each other’s hunger pangs for their own financial gains. The policy has created skyrocketing inflation in the prison’s black market economy as the price for food items and prison contraband has risen to astronomical heights.

Then there’s the matter of the bologna diet. The administration doesn’t allow us to eat dinner in the prison cafeteria. We’re told that this is to reduce the potential for prisoner-on-prisoner assaults in the dining area during the evening shift when there are fewer guards on duty to respond to distress calls. (The staffing shortage in Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities is well-documented, as are the consequences, including horrible conditions, inhumane treatment, and violence.)

Instead, we are fed a low-calorie diet consisting of four pieces of bread, two slices of low-grade bologna, 1/4 cup of diced carrots or celery, and a single, one ounce bag of chips. On other days, we are fed a cold piece of roast beef, tuna, or peanut butter and jelly, with the same ole sides.

The men I’ve spoken to in the 5A housing unit, and throughout the prison, are losing weight because of this diet. Many have complained to me about their health problems, including hypertension, high cholesterol, acid reflux, gas, and constipation, which they believe are due to their current diets. Even the medical department here makes fun of the bologna diet.

Editor’s note: In response to questions about food service and collective punishment, a BOP spokesperson declined to comment on specific claims. Generally, the spokesperson says via email, wardens can “establish controls or implement temporary security measures to ensure the good order and security of their institution, as well as ensure the safety of the employees and individuals in our custody. In making any modifications, it is always the hope the security measure will be short-lived and returned to normal operations as quickly as possible.”

The spokesperson says “sanctions are not imposed in a capricious or retaliatory manner” and discipline “is administered based upon specific individual details of each incident and may vary from facility to facility.”

People held in the BOP have the opportunity to purchase food, clothing, and other items other than those provided, the spokesperson says via email, but the warden has discretion to limit or deny access to that privilege. BOP provides three meals per day, “two of which are hot,” the spokesperson says.

***

At least one man has died inside USP McCreary since I arrived in November, and several others have been seriously injured. 

The death, I’m told, stemmed from a dispute between cellies over allegations of stolen property. The deceased man’s body remained in his bunk for 72 hours before guards noticed. (The BOP spokesperson confirms that a man was found unresponsive inside the prison in early November and was transported to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The FBI was notified, according to BOP, and the death remains under investigation.)

Another man overdosed in the visiting room after he swallowed a balloon filled with drugs. I think it was fentanyl. Medical staff was able to revive him.

A third man was beaten so badly in the cafeteria that I’m told he went into a coma. There have been a number of fistfights, assaults with weapons, and officers assaulting prisoners over the smallest of incidents. The violence here is far worse than at Big Sandy.

Hell, on Dec. 10 in the 5A housing unit, a rival Mexican gang member was repeatedly shanked, and no less than 20 minutes after the biohazard detail crew cleaned the blood off the floor, another small brawl broke out in a different unit. The entire prison was locked down 24/7 for the next week and a half.

In my view, the only thing the warden has successfully accomplished with his growing list of deterrents is to create a famished, desperately aggressive, hostile, and unsafe environment. Any prisoner serious about rehabilitating himself faces long odds.

Editor’s note: The most recent report on USP McCreary from the D.C. Corrections Information Council, which draws on survey answers and interviews with D.C. men incarcerated in the facility, corroborates many of these details. According to the report, every resident interviewed said the whole unit is punished when one person does something wrong. “Residents state that this is unfair and causes more violence in the facility,” the report says.

The report also says corrections officers in the special housing unit (or SHU) “try to provoke residents to engage in fights,” and 25 survey respondents say the staff makes racist remarks. Another 25 respondents say staff behavior at McCreary is worse than other penitentiaries. 

One unnamed resident said he was assaulted by a correctional officer after he told the officer a light was busted out. “The officer slapped him and put him in the SHU because he would not say that he broke it,” according to the report. “He also said he has marks from restraints, and that officers use pepper spray.”

Another resident said he was “slammed to the floor while in handcuffs. My head hit the floor, also I was wrote up for assaulting an officer. I’ve been placed in restraints so tight where they cut into my skin. Also my circulation was being cut off. I was in chains twice: once for 16 hours—the other over 13 hours. The lieutenant came in every 2 hours and roughed me up. I still have wounds to show.”

***

Warden Gilley’s collective punishment extends to his efforts to keep contraband out of the prison. He has banned prisoners’ family and friends from ordering books and having them sent to us—but not everyone is trying to smuggle illegal items into the prison.

I believe another motivation may be at play.

The majority of men who are locked up inside USP McCreary are African American, and most of the reading material coming through the mail room is progressive, Black cultural literature. I believe Warden Gilley is fearful that certain books could arouse motivations to organize against his collective punishment’s sanctions.

Editor’s note: A BOP spokesperson says via email that “agency guidance is clear that we do not implement blanket restrictions on book ordering.” Rejection of any publication is made on an individual basis and that “the specific publication at issue was detrimental to the security, good order, or discipline of the institution, or might facilitate criminal activity.”

The warden has also maintained the plexiglass partitions that were erected inside of the contact visiting room during the start of the pandemic. The partitions were meant to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus. But even after the pandemic has ended, and in-person visits have resumed, the plexiglass remains, creating a physical barrier between us and our visitors.

The warden intends to keep the plexiglass dividers as another way to prevent contraband from getting in, but the barriers defeat the whole purpose of contact visits—to maintain human contact and healthy family ties. You cannot feel the same connection from behind plexiglass.

I, along with every other Washington, D.C., prisoner at USP McCreary, humbly request that a delegation of D.C. representatives, including Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White, joins with the Corrections Information Council to visit with us and check on our repressive and inhumane living conditions here at USP McCreary.

Askia Afrika-Ber was born and raised in Southeast D.C. and Prince George’s County and is serving a 53-year sentence for felony murder in USP McCreary, a high-security prison in Kentucky. You can read more about him here. This column is produced in collaboration with More Than Our Crimes, a nonprofit dedicated to raising the voices of people locked in federal prisons across the country.

After the D.C. Council’s historic passage of the Restore the Vote Amendment Act that gave incarcerated people convicted of felonies the right to vote in 2020, I composed a brief missive, detailing my observations of the voter registration process for a D.C. prisoner here at USP Big Sandy in Martin County, Kentucky. I mailed a copy to Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office.

In the letter, I thanked Mayor Bowser and the Council for restoring our right to vote and for the opportunity to make our collective voices heard. I also volunteered to help with any efforts to improve on prison voter education and registration and suggested plans for get-out-the-vote drives directed toward our families, friends, and returned citizens.

I requested information and materials that could assist me in educating myself and my fellow D.C. prisoners about the importance and value of exercising our new enfranchisement. Unfortunately, no one from Mayor Bowser’s office bothered to reply. 

In light of Bowser’s ill-conceived and misguided decision to veto the Revised Criminal Code Act, the silence from her office is not surprising to me as a prisoner from the nation’s capital.

I hear White politicians, law enforcement spokespeople, and right-wing media personalities advocating the tough-on-crime line. And when I hear Black elected officials like Mayor Bowser regurgitate the same rhetoric, I reflect back to Black activist Isaiah T. Montgomery, who argued that illiterate Black people should be denied the right to vote.

To add insult to injury, D.C.’s criminal code hasn’t been revised since 1901. At that time, Jim Crow laws were still in effect, the post-Civil War practice of “convict leasing,” which was essentially another form of slavery, was booming, and the NAACP had yet to be established. It seems to me that the people who wrote the 1901 D.C. criminal code did not have the best interest of the African American community in mind.

Now that we, as incarcerated people from D.C., can have a say in who our elected leaders are, maybe that will change. But first, we need some help.

The lack of political awareness and disorder among D.C. prisoners

Many Black prisoners are not, and have never been, politically savvy. Without the proper education on the process and the candidates, elections in prison will be reduced to the level of a high school popularity contest. That was the ugly reality I observed here at USP Big Sandy in 2020, the first time incarcerated felons were able to vote.

The majority of my fellow D.C. prisoners were not familiar with many of the candidates on the 2021 ballot other than the political heavies such as Del. Eleanor Holmes-Norton, President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and former president and vice president Donald Trump and Mike Pence. Most incarcerated people had no knowledge of the local candidates.

D.C. prisoners who lived with me in the B2 housing unit at USP Big Sandy also had difficulty filling out the voter registration form. I assisted several prisoners after staff refused to answer their questions, and I discovered that quite a few of them do not know the last four digits of their social security numbers—another issue I had mentioned in my letter to the mayor’s office.

Unsurprisingly, D.C. prisoners (myself included) began to receive letters from the D.C. Board of Elections on Sept. 28, 2021, detailing three common mistakes on our voter registration applications.

1) Failure to include a D.C. address

2) Failure to sign and date

3) Failure to include a D.C. ID number or the last four digits of their social security number.

The first test run for many incarcerated D.C. voters didn’t run so smoothly. I felt nauseous and frustrated.

D.C. prisoners need reliable information on our elected representatives

It is imperative that we help educate every single incarcerated D.C. resident on the importance of voting and building a voting bloc to bring to the attention of our elected officials our deepest collective desire to build a new prison complex and to implement effective, humane, and scientifically researched policy on rehabilitation and incarceration.

I welcome anyone interested in working with me and More Than Our Crimes to build and find funding for a “Prison Voter Education Project” to produce a quarterly political pamphlet.

The packet should include: a history on the African American political journey in America and in D.C.; an explanation of how the political process works; unbiased information on the Democratic and Republican parties; and biographies and political positions of all candidates running in D.C. elections. The packet should also feature political essays and reports written by journalists and D.C. prisoners.

Along with information, we need organization.

It is also imperative that we begin hosting comprehensive political education workshops in our cell blocks and prison libraries. 

We must start organizing large- and small-scale “Washingtonian Homie Meetings” on the prison rec yards to discuss criminal justice reform and local politicians’ stances and track records with regard to our criminal justice reform agenda.

We have to focus our creative and intellectual energies on sowing the seeds of criminal justice reform throughout the U.S. Bureau of Prisons system and back home in D.C. The objective should be to organize a political action campaign and mobilize our families and communities to influence local elections.

There are about 2,100 D.C. prisoners in the BOP system. If each one of us can get at least five family members or friends willing to vote for a candidate of our choosing, that’s a voting bloc 10,500 strong! We are in a position to create a criminal justice system in our nation’s capital that actually rehabilitates its prisoners instead of simply warehousing them and returning them to our communities in worse shape than when they entered the prison system.

The Council has afforded us an opportunity with the Restore the Vote Act to directly affect change in our lives, our families, and our communities. We must act.

A call for reform and a few ideas

We, as D.C. prisoners, share the same experience in the systematically racist criminal justice system. Over-charged and over-sentenced, we are classic examples of modern-day, high-tech lynchings. We spend decades behind bars, fruitlessly searching for loopholes in our criminal cases, combing through hundreds of pages of trial transcripts, discovery material, and investigative files hoping to find that one constitutional violation that can change everything. 

But there is another viable option: Reform the racist systems and policies. That will take organization, research, and resources.

Here is my short list of ideas for anyone interested in cultivating a better and safer quality of life for all D.C. residents, including those who are incarcerated and will eventually return home:

1) D.C. councilmembers should visit BOP facilities to talk directly to their incarcerated constituents to learn about the destructive environment where we live and what can be done to better prepare us to come home.

2) Open lines of communication between religious, civic, and cultural leaders, and university students and incarcerated people from D.C. to develop ideas and methods for reducing violent crime.

3) Form a “Reconciliation Commission,” similar to the group that the late Desmond Tutu led after the fall of apartheid in South Africa.

Our current prison system, in which D.C. prisoners are housed in BOP facilities, does not encourage incarcerated people to pursue meaningful rehabilitation. Since 2001, when the Lorton Prison Complex closed, D.C. has shunned the responsibility of housing and rehabilitating its population of prisoners. We D.C. prisoners were banished from our beloved Chocolate City, and shipped hundreds of miles cross country to serve out our sentences in federal prisons.

In BOP facilities, D.C. prisoners are introduced to prison gang warfare. When D.C. prisoners collectively came to feds in 2001, all Chicago gangs/street organizations, such as the GDs, Vice Lords, P-Stones, and Latin Kings, put aside their petty differences and street beefs and agreed to a mutual alliance against D.C. guys. That dynamic still holds to this day. 

Over the years, some of the most violent prison riots and fatal knife fights have unfolded as a result of clashes between D.C. prisoners and active gang members from outside D.C. Just last year, two D.C. prisoners were murdered by gang members—men who would still be alive and possibly on the path to recovery had the D.C. government taken the time in the past 20 years to build their incarcerated residents a prison complex. There is no legitimate excuse the D.C. government can offer for its failure to create a safe environment where their prisoners can work on bettering themselves and where our incarcerated mothers and fathers can receive family visits on a weekly basis (rather than once or twice every two to three years).

Closer to home, it wasn’t until the January 6 defendants started raising grievances about the D.C. Jail’s unsanitary and inhumane conditions that I heard serious talk of building a new detention center. 

It is up to D.C.’s elected officials and incarcerated people to reimagine the purpose, effectiveness, and rules of incarceration and rehabilitation. Since our councilmembers have seen fit to restore our voting rights, the most coveted and practical lever to effect instant change, they must be open to our suggestions on effective rehabilitation and our transition from criminals to servants and pillars of our communities.

I am eager to start something politically productive and positive for me and my fellow incarcerated D.C. residents.

Askia Afrika-Ber was born and raised in Southeast D.C. and Prince George’s County and is serving his sentence in USP Big Sandy, a high-security prison in Kentucky. You can read more about him here. This column is produced in collaboration with More Than Our Crimes, a nonprofit dedicated to raising the voices of people locked in federal prisons across the country.