Mark: Most people think prison is where life ends. What if, for some, it’s where life, a real, examined life, actually begins? Today, we’re talking about a man who committed murder, spent seven years in solitary, and found his humanity in a 6-by-8-foot concrete box. Michelle: Wow. That’s a heavy premise. The idea that the most extreme form of confinement could lead to the most profound form of freedom is… it’s a paradox that really makes you stop and think. Mark: It’s the journey at the heart of Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Transformation in an American Prison by Shaka Senghor. Michelle: And Senghor's story is just incredible. This isn't some obscure memoir; it became a New York Times bestseller, got him on Oprah's SuperSoul 100 list, and he even became a Fellow at the MIT Media Lab. He went from a prison cell to one of the world's top innovation hubs. Mark: Exactly. The arc is almost unbelievable. And to understand that unbelievable leap, we have to start where he started—not in prison, but on the streets of Detroit, where the cycle of violence first took hold of him. Michelle: Right, because people don't just wake up one day and end up there. There's always a story that comes before.

Mark: Precisely. And his story didn't start with violence. It started in what he describes as a stable, loving, middle-class home. He was an honor roll student who dreamed of being a doctor. But then, the foundation cracked. His parents' marriage started to fall apart. Michelle: That’s a story a lot of people can relate to, but his took a particularly sharp turn. Mark: It did. After a second, final separation, his mother sat him down and said something that would change the course of his life. She told him, "I can no longer raise you. You are a young man now, and you will be better off living with your father." Michelle: Oh, man. That's heartbreaking. To hear your own mother essentially say she's giving up on you... that's a profound form of abandonment. I can't imagine the kind of walls a kid would build around his heart after that. Mark: He says it himself. He built emotional walls and developed an "I don't give a fuck" attitude. It was a defense mechanism. He writes, "I didn’t care about anything, nothing could hurt me." And with that hardened heart, he left home and turned to the streets. Michelle: And the streets have their own logic, their own rules for survival. Mark: A brutal logic. He was only fourteen when he started dealing drugs. And he tells this harrowing story of being robbed at gunpoint. He was working a crack house, and two addicts he knew, Tiny and Tone, lured him outside. Michelle: This sounds like it's going to end badly. Mark: He describes Tiny pressing a gun to his head and yelling, "Come up off that shit, li’l nigga!" In that moment, Senghor says he wasn't a scared kid anymore. He went into pure survival mode, handed over the drugs and money, fully expecting to be shot. But for some reason, they let him go. Michelle: Wow. To face your own death at fourteen… And what happened after? Did he run home? Did he quit? Mark: That's the chilling part. He went to a diner, called his boss, Miko, and masked his fear with anger. He was more concerned about his reputation and the lost product than the fact that he almost died. The street logic had already taken root. Michelle: That says everything about that world, doesn't it? The system of 'respect' and business completely overrides basic human concern. His boss's reaction probably wasn't "Are you okay?" but "Where's my money?" Mark: Exactly. And this is the environment that shapes him. He later reflects on this period, quoting the psychologist Amos Wilson, saying he had "perfected the art of being the best at being the worst." He was chasing a reputation built on fear. Michelle: It raises that classic, difficult question of choice versus circumstance. How much of this is him being a product of that brutal environment, and how much is him making his own decisions? Mark: The book doesn't give an easy answer. It presents it as a tangled web. The initial wound from his family made him vulnerable, the streets offered a twisted sense of power and belonging, and his own choices solidified that path. A path that, at age nineteen, led him to shoot and kill a man during an argument over drugs. Michelle: And that's where the first part of his life ends, and the next, unimaginable chapter begins.

Mark: Right. And those decisions led him to a 17-to-40-year sentence. But as we said at the start, the most shocking part of his story isn't the crime; it’s what happened inside. Specifically, inside 'the hole'—solitary confinement, where he spent seven years. Michelle: Seven years. I can't even wrap my head around that. What is that experience even like? Mark: He describes it as a place designed to break you. He was at Oaks Correctional Facility, and he says the place reeked of human waste and despair. He witnessed men descend into psychosis, screaming all night, throwing feces—what they grimly called "weapons of ass destruction." It was complete sensory deprivation mixed with psychological torment. Michelle: It sounds like the furthest place from rehabilitation you could possibly design. How does anyone come back from that, let alone become a better person? Mark: For a long time, he didn't. He was consumed by bitterness and rage. But then came the turning point. It wasn't a guard or a program. It was a letter from his son, Li'l Jay. Michelle: Oh, I have a feeling this is going to be powerful. Mark: It's devastating. His son, who was just a little boy, wrote to him. And in this letter, in a child's handwriting, were the words: "MY MOM TOLD ME WHY YOU’RE IN JAIL, BECAUSE OF MURDER! DON’T KILL DAD PLEASE THAT IS A SIN." Michelle: Oh, wow. That's a gut punch. It’s one thing to be a convict, a number in the system. It’s another to see yourself through your child's eyes as a monster. Mark: Exactly. And then his son wrote something that broke him open. He said, "It’s the anger in my heart that hurts me the most without a dad in the house. My mama said I am the man of the house. She tells me I have to take over the anger so I won’t be in jail." Michelle: He’s passing the trauma down. The cycle is literally continuing in that very letter. He’s not just in prison; he's created a prison of anger for his own son. Mark: That realization was the catalyst. Senghor understood he had to change, not just for himself, but to break that cycle for his son. And this is where the architecture of redemption begins. He decides to treat his cell not as a cage, but as a university. He starts ordering books, creating courses for himself, journaling, and, for the first time, truly examining his life. Michelle: So he starts living the epigraph of his own book, the quote from Socrates: "The unexamined life is not worth living." He was forced into a situation where the only thing he could do was examine his life. Mark: He had nothing but his own thoughts. He read voraciously. He mentions Donald Goines, whose novels reflected the street life he knew, but then he discovered The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He said Goines created a desire to read, but Malcolm’s words "snatched my eyes open and embedded in me a burning desire to do something meaningful with my life." Michelle: That makes so much sense. Reading wasn't just an escape; it was like he was gathering building materials. Malcolm X, Black history, philosophy... these were the bricks and mortar for a new identity, a new internal world he could live in. Mark: A perfect analogy. He was building a sanctuary inside the madness. And that leads to the final, and perhaps hardest, part of that construction project: forgiveness. Michelle: Okay, this is the part I find hardest to grasp. How does he get to forgiveness? Especially self-forgiveness for taking a life. That feels like the final boss of personal growth. Mark: It was a long, brutal process. He writes about staring at his own reflection in the polished steel mirror in his cell and forcing himself to forgive everyone who had ever hurt him. But the last person on the list was the hardest: himself. He realized that blaming his past, his parents, the system—it was all a way of avoiding responsibility. The moment of true change came when he accepted full accountability for his actions.

Michelle: So the journey out of that cell, mentally at least, was paved with radical accountability. Mark: That's the core of it. The same environment that taught him violence and emotional detachment was replaced by an internal environment he built himself through books and self-reflection. He had to literally 'write his wrongs' in his journals to begin to right his wrongs in the world. Michelle: It’s a message of hope, but it's not a cheap or easy one. It’s earned through immense suffering and work. Mark: And it wasn't just his own work. The book's afterword contains one of the most powerful stories of forgiveness I've ever read. Years into his sentence, he gets a letter from Nancy, the godmother of the man he killed. She tells him about the devastation he caused the family, but then she writes, "What I want you to know... is that I love you, and I forgive you." Michelle: I have chills. From the victim's family. That's an almost superhuman level of grace. Mark: It is. And Senghor himself points out the timeline. Nancy's letter planted that seed of hope in 1997, but he says the profound change within him didn't truly begin for another five years. It shows that transformation is a long, grueling, and unpredictable process. It doesn't happen overnight. Michelle: That’s such a crucial point. We want these clean, quick redemption arcs, but real change is messy and slow. Her forgiveness didn't fix him instantly, but it made a future fix possible. It kept a door open in his soul that he could eventually walk through. Mark: It makes you wonder, how many other people are we writing off who just need that one seed of hope, that one act of forgiveness, to start that long journey back? Michelle: A powerful question. And it challenges us to see the humanity in everyone, no matter their past. It’s a call to look beyond the crime and see the potential for transformation that exists in all of us. We'd love to hear what you all think. What does redemption mean to you? Find us on our socials and share your thoughts. Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.