A Memoir Reflection by Sam Williams, Executive Director
Inside the Walls of my Mental Health: A Memoir Reflection by Sam Williams 8-5-25
Prison doesn’t just confine your body; it seizes your emotions, your memories, your thoughts, and your feelings. The weight of time is relentless, and the silence can be deafening. What I remember most vividly is the feeling of watching others go home before me. That kind of hope, dangled just out of reach, can break a person down slowly.
Loneliness became my shadow. Days bled into nights filled with sadness and depression. I felt helpless, hopeless, cut off from everything and everyone that once gave me a sense of meaning. Promised visits that never came left me with a hollow ache. Each disappointment chipped away at my belief that I still mattered to the world outside.
Without canteen money, even basic needs became unattainable. I couldn’t buy what I needed or even what I craved for comfort. Sharing a cell with people I didn’t know, or trust increased my stress. There was no privacy, no peace. And the thought of my family struggling on the outside only deepened the guilt. I couldn’t help them. I couldn’t even help myself.
Seasons passed without joy. Summer brought unbearable heat; winter brought biting cold. Rainy days, sunny days, storms, they all served as cruel reminders that time was passing without me. I watched the world through a window, untouchable. The attitudes and behaviors of correctional staff made things worse. Cold stares, sharp words, constant power trips. There was no dignity left to hold on to.
Inside, there was a hierarchy, an unspoken caste system based on charges, reputation, and rumors. If you were a murderer, you had clout, but if you were a sex offender, you were of the lowest class. Survival wasn’t just physical; it was mental and emotional. I witnessed violence regularly. Sometimes I was close enough to feel the shock of it. Other times, I was just a bystander, helpless to intervene. Watching close friends get transferred to other facilities left me grieving again and again.
The food was barely edible. Bland, repetitive, and served without care. But there was no alternative. I learned early on to swallow my emotions the same way I struggled to swallow that food, quickly and without complaint. I had no voice. I was holding everything in, slowly suffocating on my own silence.
Every day was controlled, scheduled and suffocating: count time, chow time, lockdown. Then came the random shakedowns, where the IPPS would turn my room inside out. And the strip searches, sometimes even cavity searches, left me feeling dehumanized. No matter how many times it happened, I never got used to the shame.
Even visits didn’t bring much joy and relief. Learning that my family was being mistreated before seeing me added another layer of guilt and self-blame. During visits, I was monitored so closely that it never really felt like a connection, just a supervised reminder of what I was missing. Phone calls were brief, rationed, and often filled with more pain than comfort. If you stayed on longer than you were supposed to, arguments, fights or even violence would manifest.
Sometimes I felt like my family could never understand what I was going through. And worse, I believed that society had already decided I wasn’t worth caring about anyway.
Eventually, I stopped caring about myself. Recurring dreams came and went, often leaving me with memories of a jury coming back with a guilty verdict, over and over, like a punishment that never ended. I lived in constant uncertainty, not knowing who might want to harm me inside those walls. I feared for my life and even more for what it might look like once I got out. Would I make it? Would I end up in a similar tragedy, just like my victim?
Time moved slowly, painfully so. I began to wonder if life had left me behind completely. Anger lived inside me. I was angry at my father, who never showed up in my life. Angry at my co-defendant who betrayed me. Angry at the people who blocked my collect calls. Angry at the friends who disappeared when I needed them most. Angry at the girlfriend who promised to stay and didn’t.
But more than anything, I was angry at being forced to live in an environment where trust didn’t exist. Every day was a question: Who can I trust? The answer, most days, was no one. This kind of life changes you. It strips you down to your rawest self, forcing you to confront every part of who you are, or who you thought you were. And in those darkest moments, I began to understand that survival wasn’t just about making it to the next day. It was about finding a reason to keep going at all.
