Is This the Key to Improving Prison Life—and Climate Change?
The Bittman Project | Mike Diago
January 16, 2025
The first time Kelton O’Connor approached the gates of a prison, he saw the glinting barbed wire and the surveillance tower gunmen against the blue California sky, and his heart pounded in anticipation. Just a toddler, he hadn’t seen his mother for a year—not since she was taken at gunpoint from their apartment by federal agents—and now, peering through his grandmother’s car window, he could finally see where she’d been living. Parking and passing through the gates, a guard led him and his grandmother to a visitation room door where his mother stood. O’Connor absorbed her embrace and felt the charge of joy, safety, freedom, and love pulse through him again. They spent that day together, coloring with crayons on butcher paper. When the visit was over, he sobbed. In a recent personal journal entry, he wrote, “I couldn’t describe my feelings then, but looking back, it was the feeling of incarceration. My mother’s prison was my home, and my grandmother’s car was like a prison.”