The following are terms you may come across from time to time in this blog. They are not all words I would use, and actually, some I would never say out loud. A few I don’t even like saying in my mind, although I must admit I do have some songs on my phone by artists who use them. These are words that inmates use, words that Craig used and encountered on a near-daily basis while locked up.

I originally thought about re-writing the list myself, laying them out in a specific order, making some semblance of the items the way I would organize anything else. But the more I looked at the pages — which he had sent in the mail after tri-folding the 20 pages into a business-sized envelope while adding like seven stamps to the outside — I thought it would be fitting for you to see it in the same way that he presented it to me.

These terms, and some of the of other items that we’ll showcase here as we unveil this blog, carry a bit more weight in my eyes as they literally are his words, written in his own handwriting. They’re what he said, how he talked, his correspondence with other inmates to navigate his world inside camp. They are the definition of his time in prison, literally as he saw it.

It really surprised me the first time I read through this list. His letter had come in the mail and I let the fat envelope sit on the printer in my office for at least a week before I opened it. I assumed I knew what it was, but really, when I looked at it, it was overpowering. The thought that went into cultivating the words, 20 pages worth of the meaning of what he lived through, that was kind of a strong kick to the pants to me like, “Hey, he really means it when he says he wants to talk about what he went through, what the prison system was really like for him.”

This is eye-opening, in my opinion, because most of what you read here is what as it’s seen or heard through the prism of my views of our conversations about his life. That’s only natural and no one can change that short of Craig himself actually writing this story out in his own words. I think providing his list of terms in his original format accomplishes that, to a degree.