I’d Never Owned a Computer. After 17 Years in Prison, I Finally Have One of My Own.

I’m currently enrolled in one of the first bachelor’s degree programs inside California prisons. The program is offered by California State University, Los Angeles, and the laptop is one of its perks. The students in my cohort—the program’s third, but the first to receive personal laptops—were all incarcerated at very young ages and sentenced to prison terms that reflect football scores. I’ve served 17 years of a 50-year-to-life sentence, and none of us foresaw living past our 18th birthdays, let alone attending university. But here we are, in our senior year of a communication studies degree. Sometimes, I walk out into the day room and sit at an available table to do my assignments. I set up my laptop, my MP3 player in my ears and my textbook in front of me. Sitting next to me is my cup of coffee. It’s a table for productivity. There, I’m the CEO of my education, my work, and my life, and I’m busy changing their course.People walk by and ask me what it’s like to have a laptop; they sit with me and ask about their college credits and talk about their aspirations to get into Cal State LA. It’s a conversation I invite, and in an odd way, it’s a reminder of the possibilities and opportunity that this place has. When I work on this borrowed computer in the day room, I can see a future, one I’ve never seen before, where I’m out there, in a coffee shop, working on a laptop of my own.

[Kunlyna Tauch is a Cambodian American storyteller who writes for Empowerment Avenue. Incarcerated at the age of 18, he has served 17 years and now writes about the more humanistic aspects of being incarcerated.]