Voices of the Incarcerated: A Prisoner's Worst Nightmare
The following piece, "They Wanted to Have Fewer Prisons. Instead, They Got a Prisoner’s Worst Nightmare," appeared in Slate Magazine in May 2025, and is written by Robert Lee Williams, incarcerated in New York State.
Excerpts appear below.
*****
Robert Lee Denis, 34, recently returned from his trip to Bronx Supreme Court back to Eastern Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison located in Napanoch, New York. We both reside in a cell block called East Wing. They call it “baby Brooklyn,” because it’s heavy with Brooklyn cats, which gives the place that gritty Kings County vibe. I stood off to the side in East Wing’s lobby, waited for the welcome-back daps ’n’ hugs to end before I approached Denis to give him my own.
Denis smiled half-heartedly through his beard. He wore the haggard shell-shocked expression everyone wears after leaving transit.
“I know,” I said. “It’s all in your eyes: Green Haven.”
After Downstate Correctional Facility closed in 2022, the massive job of holding and transporting hundreds of incarcerated people to prisons across the state was crammed into a single roach-and-rat-infested cell block in Green Haven, a maximum-security prison located in a rural town called Stormville. While investigating this story, I learned of the place’s dark history.
“It looked like there was a fire in there,” Denis said. “Dead roaches on the walls, spit, what looked like blood, more dead roaches on the gate. Live roaches everywhere. The mattress was burnt, with holes in it. No toothpaste. No toilet tissue. The whole bed frame was roach infested.”
The cell block was freezing, he told me, and the constant fear of roaches crawling inside his ears caused him not only to keep his clothes and boots on but also to keep his lights on. For the first three days, sleep was impossible.
Denis’ horror story mirrors my own, and that of many others. Last September, before being bused to Eastern prison, I spent five days inside H Block. It was the worst five days of my 15 years in prison. I experienced everything Denis experienced. Then something broke inside me.
I knelt on my bed, burying my tears into my jacket until I started to growl. To summon the strength to endure these diabolical conditions, I invoked images of my ancestors chained together in the leaky hulls of vermin-infested slave ships, saying to myself that if they could survive the transatlantic Middle Passage, then I could survive New York state’s carceral middle passage.
“For decades, New York state prisons have subjected incarcerated people to abuse, torture, and brutal environments,” said New York Senator Julia Salazar, the chair of the Corrections and Community Supervision Committee. “There is little to no oversight, and it’s extremely rare for correction officers or facilities to be held accountable. I will continue to fight for increased transparency, accountability, and oversight, and today I am calling on Green Haven Correctional Facility to immediately address the inhumane conditions it is forcing incarcerated people to live in.”
*****
Read the full piece, "They Wanted to Have Fewer Prisons. Instead, They Got a Prisoner’s Worst Nightmare" at Slate Magazine.
Robert Lee Williams is an incarcerated writer in New York. His work has been published in Literary Hub, PEN America, and Plough Quarterly, English and German.
