What Prison Hospice Taught Me About Freedom

Hello, End Well. How are you?

I have a big smile, but this story is going to get a little dark for a moment, so bear with me.

When I was 16 years old, I was sentenced to a long time in prison. That sentence felt like the end of every possibility. The sound of the prison doors closing behind me was the sound of my future disappearing.

Time in prison is heavy and still. It is filled with a silence that makes you question who you are and what remains of you.

I grew up in a cell with a scratched mirror above the toilet. Year after year, I would look into it and wonder how I was going to survive.

When the sounds of prison became too loud, I would close my eyes and imagine the Golden Gate Bridge stretching from Marin to San Francisco. I imagined seagulls, waves, children playing and kites flying through the sky.

I built upon those visions. I would sit cross-legged in my cell, face the wall and close my eyes. I would become the star of my own television show.

I loved Friends. I wanted to be Joey Tribbiani.

“How you doin’?”

It was a hit across the many prisons where I spent decades: Juvenile Hall, Pelican Bay, High Desert State Prison and even a tent at California Medical Facility during the pandemic, while the entire world was on fire.

I was still getting up every day and doing the things I am going to tell you about.

I used to challenge myself by asking, “What if the gate opened right now and someone told me I could go home? What would I do?”

Mind you, I did not have a release date. I had life in prison.

It was over. I was going to die there.

Even with that feeling, I wanted to prepare for the unknown. I began treating my cell like a simulator. I practiced freedom inside it.

I wrote in journals. I prepared a résumé.

How delusional, right?

I read books and assigned myself book reports. I wanted to become as proficient as possible so that, if the time ever came and I stepped into the greater gathering, I could succeed.

I could reintegrate into society, walk among you and be like everybody else.

“Hello, neighbor. How are you doing?”

My cellies, our term for cellmates, would look at me and say, “What is this crazy idiot doing?”

I would tell them, “I’m practicing freedom.”

They thought it was nonsense.

Decades into my incarceration, I began living in housing units where I could put those lessons into practice.

For the first 19 years of my incarceration, I lived in what are called Level IV prisons. Movement was severely restricted. We had limited access to education and limited contact with our families.

Our identities were replaced with numbers. Our clothes were replaced with what I came to think of as a costume of inferiority.

As time passed, I remembered what it felt like to be young and have no positive male role model to emulate. After practicing in my simulator for so many years, I wanted to become visible within the housing units.

By then, I was in my mid-30s. I would leave the housing unit to work in hospice, attend school and participate in self-help programs.

Young men who looked just like I had at 17, 18 or 19 would be shooting dice or smoking in the hallway. They would ask, “OG, where are you going every day? Why do you always have that binder in your hand?”

I would say, “I’m glad you asked. I’m going to school. I’m going to hospice.”

They would respond, “You’re never getting out of prison. Why are you doing all of that?”

I told them, “Because I want to be free now.”

Regardless of the gates and walls keeping us inside, I wanted to rise so far above them that I could experience freedom.

They would say, “Cool,” and go back to shooting dice.

But those same young people would often circle back later and say, “Hey, I want to go where you go.”

I always carried the paperwork with me so I could sign them up immediately.

“Here you go.”

I wanted to do more than tell young people what I was doing. I wanted to have the means to bring them with me.

That led me to introduce many of them to a place that few people living alongside me in prison knew existed: the California Medical Facility Hospice.

It was a 17-bed unit that people across a prison system of roughly 135,000 hoped to access if they were diagnosed with a terminal illness.

It was a space of normalization, where incarcerated people, correctional staff and nurses worked side by side with one shared focus: the patient.

It was remarkable.

That place gave me meaning, and I was excited to share it with others.

Whenever I walked out of the hospice, I felt anonymous because nobody in my community knew what I did there. It felt good to welcome other people into that space.

When I began working in hospice, I was amazed to see everyone working toward a common goal.

Some of the people who came before me were big, muscular men who wore what I thought of as masks. Those masks did not necessarily reflect who they were as individuals.

Inside the hospice, they took them off. Their vulnerability became a superpower. Grief was held and honored as we cared for people dying from terminal illnesses.

It was a place where I had the opportunity to change the sheets beneath a dying person.

That experience broke something open inside me.

Vulnerability became a sacred language of care. In a world built around control, surrendering to care was an act of power.

In 2017, I met the writer Suleika Jaouad. She spent two weeks with us and wrote extensively about our work.

She described the compassion I brought to the work, along with my willingness to express vulnerability by crying.

I thought, “Damn it, why are you writing that about me? I’m supposed to be a tough guy in here.”

Working alongside correctional officers also opened my eyes. I was stunned to learn that their average life expectancy was 58 years, an outcome closely aligned with that of the incarcerated people they were responsible for overseeing.

One in five incarcerated people was over the age of 50. There were debilitating health outcomes shared across the institution, creating a connection among everyone inside it.

Earlier, I described my prison uniform as a costume of inferiority and spoke about the anonymity I felt. Correctional officers often experienced their own version of that anonymity when they left work. Few people in their communities knew what they actually did each day.

There was a connection between our experiences, and I wanted to speak directly to it.

I will never forget the first time I saw one of the correctional officers I worked with recognize that common humanity.

We were talking when a patient’s call light went off.

Beep.

The officer walked into the room and asked, “How can I help you?”

The patient said, “I dropped my cup.”

I nearly dropped my own cup because something seemingly ordinary had just happened. The officer had recognized the humanity of an incarcerated person.

He was taking in what he had witnessed from us. Someone who had previously seen incarcerated people only as individuals who needed to be punished and locked away was now seeing a human being.

“How can I help you?”

That officer eventually became good friends with the patient. I watched him cry when the patient died.

This was someone who had entered hospice with a “lock them up and throw away the key” mentality. Now he was helping fingerprint the patient, place him in a body bag and move him onto the gurney that would carry him to the basement.

In carceral settings, many people grieve the lives they were unable to live. They grieve the birthdays they missed and the children they did not get to raise.

I saw photographs on the hospice walls showing what people used to look like. Around 40 percent of the patients were veterans.

I saw photographs of them standing tall in their uniforms, proud beside their flags. I listened as they told me what it was like to return from Vietnam.

For some of them, time had stopped in 1972. Decades later, I sat beside them with tears running down my face, listening to their “what ifs.”

Through presence, remembrance and the holding of their stories, I felt we were establishing a legacy.

There was so much meaning emerging from loss in that space.

The people who worked alongside me demonstrated radical bravery. They made themselves available to absorb so much.

I wanted to share that story so you would understand how I arrived here.

After Suleika published an article about our work, I received a call from the governor of California.

I will never forget that day.

A correctional officer I had known for years came to find me in my tent. We will call him Mans, although that is not his real name.

He said, “Fernando, I have something for you. You have a phone call.”

I said, “A phone call? Incarcerated people don’t get phone calls.”

He walked me through a maze of hallways in typical prison fashion, with keys rattling and people coming and going from their jobs.

He led me into a room and told me to sit down. There was a Post-it note attached to the phone.

He picked it up, dialed the number and said, “He’s here. Are you ready?”

I thought, “What the heck is going on?”

I picked up the receiver. A voice on the other end said, “Hi. Do you know who this is?”

I said, “No. You called me.”

The person said, “This is the governor’s office. We want to let you know that we’re letting you go home.”

I asked them to say it again.

They said, “Most people just cry at this point.”

I told them, “You know what? I’ve cried enough. I’ve been practicing freedom in a cell for so long. I’m ready for this moment.”

It was not enough for me simply to get out. I had to make a difference.

Today is the fifth anniversary of my return home.

I asked, “When can I go?”

They laughed and said, “We’ll see you soon.”

Ten days later, on November 20, 2020, at the height of the pandemic, I began my final morning in prison just as I began every other day.

At 5:30 in the morning, I walked down to the hospice. I looked around and saw call lights flashing.

I said, “Why isn’t anyone answering the call lights?”

So I started answering them as though I were working a regular shift.

Chaplain Keith, our director of pastoral care services and someone who is like family to me, said, “Fernando, they’re ready for you. What are you doing?”

I told him, “Nobody is answering the call lights.”

He said, “Let’s pray on the way to the door.”

He took my hand, and an entourage of people followed us. Correctional officers shook my hand and hugged me while Chaplain Keith prayed.

I heard officers say, “They finally got one right. I’m so excited to see you go home.”

I thought, “Where was all this when I wanted an extra food tray, bro?”

I became emotional.

I did not cry when the governor’s office called, but I cried in that moment because I remembered every soul I had cared for who died in my presence.

I knew they would have done anything to be in my shoes.

I had a responsibility to live for them. I had to place myself in positions where I could stand before people like you, share their stories and give them a voice.

I wanted you to know that their lives had meaning and purpose. The least interesting thing about every one of them was the moment they committed their crime.

I walked outside and saw my family.

The first thing I wanted to see was the Golden Gate Bridge.

Since then, I have been published in several academic medical journals. I have worked at one of the world’s most prestigious medical universities, the University of California, San Francisco.

Today, I am doing important work with the Humane Prison Hospice Project, bringing caregiving programs to incarcerated people so they can better support those who are medically fragile.

I sought freedom inside a cell. That journey was supported by so many people who invested in me, both inside prison and within what my friend Suleika calls “the greater gathering.”

I offer my life to those who no longer have a voice.

I am here to tell you that transformation is possible. Care heals. It restores and builds legacy.

Before I go, I want you to know that it is possible in there.

It is possible out here.

Give a voice to the voiceless. Advocate for the people who cannot advocate for themselves.

I’ll see you later for a drink or something.