John J. Lennon has been incarcerated for 21 years. He wrote this Op-Ed from prison.
The wall of John J. Lennon's prison cell is covered in scraps of paper. Over the years, he has taped up quotes that guide his writing process, including from Hemingway's iceberg theory of keeping the deeper meaning of the story below the surface and from Nicholas Kristof's and Bret Stephens's guides to writing Op-Eds. There's also a line from James Baldwin: "The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose." That Baldwin quote animates Lennon's essay for Times Opinion this week, about prison reform, education and hope. |
Lennon has been incarcerated since 2002. Nine years ago, he started writing about prisons and criminal justice for publications including the The Times Magazine, The Atlantic and Esquire, where he is a contributing editor. He has written several essays for Times Opinion over the past year and a half on issues including vaccine hesitancy in prison and clemency, and he is at work on a narrative nonfiction book project. |
"I think conflict and character drive story, and there's plenty of both in prison," Lennon told me this week. He said that if he finds himself "lip-snarling disgusted about a prison policy," that's a sign that he should pitch an Opinion essay. When he's drawn into a story's characters and conflicts, he calls his friend and mentor Vauhini Vara, who was until recently an editor at The Times Magazine, to discuss whether the idea might make for a strong feature. |
Lennon does not have access to a laptop, so he composes drafts on his prison-issued JPay tablet. "I thumb-tap the piece on a JPay tablet, live with it, think, read out loud in my cell," he said of his process. He then sends the version to his team on the outside, a small group of friends and advocates, one of whom pastes the text into a Google doc and sends it from Lennon's journalism Gmail account to his editors (in this case, my colleague Vanessa Mobley and me). Then, when we send back our edits, one of his friends takes a photo of every page and sends them back to Lennon's JPay. He incorporates the edits into his next draft, and repeats the process until the piece is complete. "It's like a dance until we perfect every step," he said. |
Earlier in his career, before he had access to a tablet, Lennon dictated drafts to editors from the prison yard over the phone. Sometimes, when we are facing tight deadlines, he still calls me to make revisions — down to punctuation and paragraph breaks. Once final edits are reviewed and the piece is up, someone on Lennon's team tweets it out from his Twitter account @JohnJLennon1 |
In his essay this week, he writes, "When long passages of time in prison allow you to get away from the old you — earn degrees, gain emotional intelligence — there's a new kind of harrowing hopelessness that sets in." So he proposes that President Biden consider what he is calling a "hope and healing" prison reform bill. |
The effort to get his words into print is worth it. "When you live in a cell, but your words appear in The New York Times — well, it's an incredible feeling of gratitude that comes over you. For real," he said. |
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