When you have power, you have responsibility. It took me a long while to realize that the plays we were making affected not only me and my squad, but the whole prison environment. And that when a member left, he would carry that culture with him. First I had to learn there was a different way, then I had to master those skills, then I had to decide that was truly how I wanted to live my life. It was a three-step process, and it took me nine years to get through it. I was lucky it only took that long—due to my status, the other men didn’t try to test me, so I didn’t regress.
