The thing about returning to prison is that it doesn't change. It was all as I remembered it, from the khaki uniforms printed with my old inmate number, to the combination steel sinks and commodes, to the thickly painted red lines marked OUT OF BOUNDS. There was something cruel and taunting about the sameness, as if the cinderblock walls had been expecting me.

There you are, they sneered. We knew you'd be back, so we kept everything as you left it.

That terrible déjà vu began before I'd even reached the prison's chain link fences, when I happened to be booked by the same loquacious Puerto Rican jailer from twelve years ago. He was as sympathetic and good-natured now as he was then, advising me to keep a low profile and to tell no one of my charges, the same advice he'd given me the first time. Later, in what was perhaps the same courtroom I'd been sentenced a decade earlier, my old prosecutor returned for an encore, arguing to the same old judge—gray then and grayer still—that I was a sexual deviant deserving of the harshest discipline.

My lawyer was not the same. She was not the slick-haired, granite-jawed man from a decade ago but a fair-skinned woman who had a habit of twirling her fiery hair while addressing the court but who was otherwise competent. Her tactic, as she called it, was not to try to discredit my failed polygraph, which she argued would have been futile. Instead, she attacked the prison system for failing to provide me treatment in the ten years I was locked up, treatment the judge had mandated as part of my original sentence. It was the lack of therapy and a broken justice system, she argued, that had sabotaged my chance of successful reentry and which begged some leniency.

I looked around the courtroom at the mahogany paneled walls and glowing brass sconces, dug the heels of my canvas slip-ons into the plush burgundy carpets. It was a strikingly different room from the holding cell I'd just come from with its steel bars, peeling paint, and bare cement floors. It occurred to me that justice has two faces, one public and one private. The private face was one of utility, designed expressly to keep the bad actors in, while the public face was the spokesperson of justice, communicating to the galley a carefully curated image of grandeur, authority, and irrefutability.

A strange calm comes over a person in the moment just before he is sentenced. It's a calmness that comes out of complete powerlessness, when the fight leaves you because you know that a decision has been reached, your fate is sealed, and there is nothing you can do to reshape the past or what is to come.

The tactic appeared to work. The judge was appalled to learn I'd never received the treatment he'd decreed. He sentenced me to five months behind bars, less time than what the prosecutor had suggested. He also recommended me to a nearby federal facility with a large treatment program for sex offenders. There I'd receive the help I'd been denied during my first bid, help I clearly needed. (Spoiler alert: I would receive no such treatment during my time in Seagoville.)

Mine was the first of five cases on the docket that morning, and back in the holding cell the other defendants asked what verdict I'd received.

"Did he seem like he was in a good mood?" one kid asked, for we'd been told by the bailiff that our judge had been known to throw the book at people when agitated. The four men agreed my relatively light five months boded well for their own verdicts. One by one they were led shackled into the courtroom where the judge dispensed sentences like candy from a judicial Pez, and one by one they returned to share the news: Ten months. Twelve years. Eighteen years. Seven years and some change.

After sentencing we were taken by van to a private holding facility out near Waco where I was placed in protective custody in a pod with two Muslims, one black, and old queer, and a transgender woman who at night would drape her bras over the empty bunk above mine to dry. Nobody spoke much in the two months I was there. Our thoughts were fixed on our futures. All of us were either waiting to be sentenced or waiting to be transferred to permanent facility to serve out our sentences. The old queer fell into the former category, and at night, while the tranny drew fantastical homoerotic scenes of queer fairies and centaurs on the cell walls with a pencil stub, the man would sit on the edge of my bunk and ask me questions about prison.

"What's it like?" "Will I be safe there?" "How much time off will I get for good behavior?"

I found it amusing that I, who was once wet and and wide-eyed with a bedroll beneath one arm, should now find myself the seasoned veteran on all things prison. The old man was looking at five to twenty years for downloading CP, as I had, and what he wanted to know most was what his odds were of getting the minimum sentence.

"I'm a first-time offender," he kept saying. "Never been in trouble before. Never touched anyone." As if any of that mattered. In speaking with the man it occurred to me that my own blistering naivete from years back must have severely annoyed those around me, too.

Finding myself an authority on prison, and given my failed experiment as a free person, I wondered if perhaps prison wasn't where I was meant to spend my life. As birds are meant for the skies and fish the streams, maybe incarceration was my milieu. Maybe I was built to live cloistered away in an eight-by-ten-foot cell. And maybe that was okay. Certainly others had made lives for themselves behind bars. One can find all manner of ways to justify his existence.

It was then that I began making a list on a blank leaf torn from a paperback—the only paper I had access to—of all the things I wished to do when I got back out of prison, all the things I should have been doing the first time around instead of looking at porn.

Go ice skating. Take a spin class. Bake banana bread.

Two months later when I was transferred to the facility in Seagoville, I carried the list with me in my sock.

Visit the Nasher Sculpture Center. Explore the Arts District. Make soup.

At Seagoville I stayed in a dormitory of some 150 men. The dorm had no AC, and during the day the June sun would heat our cinderblock cubicles to as high as 102 degrees according to a thermometer on the wall. I ran in to several men with whom I'd done time at other prisons. Though I hadn't known them well, I was surprised how glad I was to see them. Like a kid returning to a new classroom after summer vacation, I eagerly sought out and clung to whatever familiar faces I found. What they all wanted to know, upon spotting me, was what I'd done to return to prison.

"Drugs," I lied. (I'd never so much as smoke a joint in my life.) "I failed a UA and they revoked me."

I couldn't tell those men, all of whom were sex offenders themselves, that I'd returned to prison for looking at porn. We used to laugh at guys like that, the ones we'd see walking the yard ten months later because they couldn't keep their dicks out of their hands. Eventually we'd learn they'd been caught with CP or they'd exposed themselves or they'd been caught chatting with a minor. They were the real creeps, we assured ourselves. They were the pedophiles. They were the ones who ought to be locked up.

In my three months at Seagoville, when I wasn't walking the track or reading cozy British mysteries whose undemanding plots could be tidied up in 200 pages or fewer, I added to my list, which had grown to over 100 items.

Walk the Katy Trail. Write a letter to a friend. Ask someone for help.

Rachel, the kitchen manager at The Noodle House, wrote once. On the back of a stained invoice for bean sprouts she wrote that everyone at the restaurant missed me and looked forward to my return. My job, she promised, would be waiting for me when I get out. Rachel had insisted on attending the court hearing and had even testified on my behalf, along with my father, as a character witness. I looked at her not once while she was on the stand. I only listened with my head down to her rich, throaty smokers' voice fill the courtroom. When the prosecutor asked her whether she actually felt comfortable having me in the restaurant where families and young children dine. I heard a pause and feared for one terrifying moment I might hear her say, No, he is a menace, a monster. Instead, her answer came out unwavering, firm: "Yes, I absolutely trust him."

Leaving prison a second time I was struck again by the lack of ceremony, the perfect mundaneness of it. COs stood around the prison lobby looking bored, talking about gas prices and weekend plans. They seemed uninterested and unaware even of the man in khaki sitting, waiting for his life to change.

And just as with my first release, it was my father who would pick me, to deliver me not to a halfway house but to my apartment which had sat vacant for nearly a half year. He arrived on time, shuffling through the prison's vestibule looking uncertain, as though he might have written down the wrong address. His expression resolved when he spotted me, sitting with my small clutch of letters and with my list.

I didn't immediately move to embrace him. So accustomed had I grown to the leash, I stayed seated, waiting for some signal from my captors. My father too was unsure how to proceed and for a time we only stared at one another until a CO finally looked up, mildly surprised to see me still there, and asked, "What are you waiting for?"