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  "description": "Avery Loring is an incarcerated writer in Clallam Bay Correction Center. ",
  "path": "/the-incarcerated-intellectual-an-introduction/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-19T22:24:26.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.jeffcobeacon.com",
  "textContent": "I am many things: an abolitionist, a reformist, a theorist, a father and a man who has spent much of his life trying to understand why pain reproduces itself so easily in our communities.\n\nOne thing I am not, however, is afraid of the truth.\n\nThe truth is that most people outside prison walls do not understand what incarceration actually looks like. They know statistics. Mugshots. Sentences. Headlines. They know the worst moment of someone’s life, but rarely the story that came before it. Rarely the childhood. Rarely the trauma. Rarely the systems that failed long before a crime was ever committed.\n\nMy name is Avery Lee Loring, and I am currently incarcerated in Washington State. I have spent years reflecting on how I arrived here and why so many others continue arriving here too. What I’ve learned is simple but uncomfortable: prison is not filled with monsters. It is filled with traumatized human beings.\n\nI grew up the youngest of eight children in what once appeared to be a stable household. My father was a Vietnam veteran and truck driver. My mother worked in education and foster care. But after my parents divorced, my life spiraled quickly into violence, instability, and homelessness. By twelve years old, I was running away from home. By fifteen, I was sleeping in parks, bus stops, abandoned houses, and crack dens throughout central California.\n\nPeople often ask how young people become “criminals.” I think they ask the wrong question. The better question is: what happens to a child before survival becomes more important than hope?\n\nAs a child, I experienced repeated sexual abuse and physical violence. I lost my nephew to sudden infant death syndrome and my paraplegic brother to a horrific act of negligence and abuse in a care facility. I became numb long before I ever became incarcerated. Violence, chaos, fear and abandonment became normalized in my nervous system. By the time I entered prison at eighteen-years-old, I already believed suffering was simply how life worked.\n\n__\"I believe some of the most effective rehabilitation work comes not from punishment, but from people with lived experience helping others process trauma they themselves understand intimately.\" — Avery Loring__\n\nWhat prison taught me initially was not healing. It taught me emotional suppression. Hypervigilance. Dissociation. I witnessed stabbings, assaults, overdoses, psychotic breaks, and despair so frequently that eventually they stopped registering as abnormal. One day, while incarcerated at the Washington State Penitentiary, I watched a man get stabbed dozens of times while screaming for his life. The next day, everything continued as normal. Nobody talked about trauma because trauma had become the atmosphere itself.\n\nYears later, I began learning about trauma-informed care, psychology and cognitive behavioral therapy. For the first time in my life, I started understanding that many of my reactions to stress were not simply moral failures, but maladaptive survival mechanisms developed during childhood. That realization changed everything for me.\n\nToday, I spend much of my time speaking with other incarcerated men about trauma, emotional regulation and healing. What society often labels as “criminal thinking” is frequently unresolved pain combined with environments that reward emotional numbness. Men are taught not to speak about abuse, fear, grief or shame. Inside prison, those emotional wounds often deepen rather than heal.\n\nThis is why peer mentorship matters so deeply to me.\n\nI have seen incarcerated people transform when given the tools to understand themselves. I have watched men who once believed violence defined them become mentors, counselors, students and leaders. I believe some of the most effective rehabilitation work comes not from punishment, but from people with lived experience helping others process trauma they themselves understand intimately.\n\nUnfortunately, many meaningful reform efforts face enormous institutional resistance. During my incarceration, I worked with advocates attempting to introduce programs centered on adverse childhood experiences, trauma recovery, and neurological development. The response was often supportive in theory but obstructed in practice. Every solution encountered another administrative barrier.\n\nThat resistance forced me to ask difficult questions about the systems surrounding incarceration. Why are programs that address root causes so difficult to implement? Why do we continue investing overwhelmingly in punishment while underfunding healing, education, housing, and mental health services? Why are people released from prison expected to succeed without being given the tools necessary to process the trauma that often brought them there?\n\nThese questions are not abstract political theories to me. They are personal.\n\nI think often about a moment from my youth when I was fifteen years old, homeless, intoxicated and sleeping outside on a staircase during winter. A boy from school—someone many of us cruelly mocked growing up—woke me up and offered me a blanket and a couch to sleep on. He showed me compassion during one of the darkest moments of my life without asking for anything in return. At a time when I had convinced myself the world was cold and unforgiving, someone chose kindness.\n\nThat moment stayed with me.\n\nPeople are capable of change when they experience dignity, empathy, accountability and human connection. I know this because I have lived both sides of it.\n\nThis column is not an attempt to excuse harm or avoid responsibility. It is an attempt to humanize people society has often decided are beyond humanity. It is also an attempt to ask whether our current systems actually produce healing, safety, and restoration—or whether they simply recycle trauma through generations of broken communities.\n\nI do not claim to have every answer. But I know this much: people are more than the worst thing they have ever done. And if we truly want safer communities, then we must become brave enough to confront the pain beneath the behavior.\n\nThat is where real reform begins.\n\n* * *\n\nTo get this column to Beacon readers, we co-edit Avery Loring's writing through his power of attorney, exchange messages on the prison messaging system and occasionally speak on the phone. Our justice reporting wouldn't be the same without Avery's contribution. If you have comments or feedback you would like him to see, please send it to _editor@jeffcobeacon.com_",
  "title": "The Incarcerated Intellectual: An Introduction",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-20T19:57:57.615Z"
}