Playing Chess in King Henry's Court: A Prison Metaphor and Story

In prison, I joined a group that brought in volunteers from a local university—mainly graduate students and their professors. For years, I looked forward to those sessions. They offered us artistic outlets, creative workshops, classes for college credit, and—maybe most importantly—a break from the normal prison grind.

It was refreshing when people came in from the outside and they weren’t staff, they weren’t officers. They called you by your first name. They spoke to you like you were just a regular person. They read our writings and gave us feedback that was encouraging. They looked at our drawings and recognized our underdeveloped (or in some cases developed) talents. They looked us in the eye and said we mattered, and by their attention and presence I believed them. They told us we were smart. We all believed it.

The group also hinted they could help us find employment once we were released. We were left with the impression that they would be there to help us. They weren’t a re-entry program, but there were some connections and a willingness to help—they were part of a university, after all. That mattered to me. I have a bachelor’s degree in science, and I worked for a short time in both academia and industry. I wanted to get back to research. I wanted a job that made me feel like me again.

And suddenly here was my chance to get it back. I had this vision of working alongside a patient PhD in a lab doing meaningful research—catching up on the latest methods, bringing my skills current, and earning a living wage. I pictured a mentor surprised to find someone eager to throw themselves into the work—whatever hours, whatever it took. What I pictured was… redemption.

But in prison, you don’t have power. It’s like living in the court of King Henry VIII—you have to maneuver carefully, scheme quietly, and find ways to stand out without overstepping. Everything you ask for feels like strategy—like a game of chess. You rehearse, you rewrite, you plan your timing. So I carefully prepared how I would approach the director of this program. I waited years until it was closer to my release date, then I waited until a day she was in the prison. And then a moment when she wasn’t swamped by inmates or rushed out by officers. Then I made my move.

I told her about my degree, my experience, and how I’d been out of the field for years but was teachable and willing to do whatever it took to catch up. I tried to show determination, making it clear I wasn’t asking for a handout—I was asking for a chance. If I ever had anything close to a natural talent, it was research. The whole exchange was my most sincere and desperate elevator speech, offered in the few seconds I hoped might change everything.

She paused, she looked at me, and she carefully said: “Well, yes, we do help people get jobs… but more like at a restaurant, or maybe retail.”

In communication theory, they call this a disconfirmation moment—when someone denies the identity you know to be true about yourself. When I said, “I’m a scientist,” what she didn’t say, but communicated, was: “No, you’re a prisoner who can maybe work as a waitress.”

It wasn’t just the words that crushed me—it was the look. Up until then, I thought she saw me as a person. In that moment, I realized she only ever saw me as a prisoner. My place wasn’t the same as hers. It wasn’t in a respectable position in her university.

From a normal citizen’s perspective, maybe the director was being pragmatic. People assume that committing a crime closes doors to higher-level professional roles, especially those tied to trust and credentials. To them, her words might sound like realism, not betrayal. But that’s not how it felt to me. The power of the betrayal was in the gap between what had been implied and what was delivered. Hope had been built, and that was my mistake. I had been in prison a long time. I knew better.

This was the director, and that made the moment sting more. It didn’t make me think the whole program was worthless—it wasn’t. The classes, the encouragement, the art, and the chance to feel like a person again were real gifts. But this exchange exposed a seam in the fabric, a reminder that no matter how hard I worked or how much I hoped, the word prisoner still shadowed everything. The harsher label of felon would trail me long after release, closing doors I believed she might help open. In that moment, I realized she hadn’t transcended that line the way I thought she had.

Still, I believe in the program, and I believe in her and the good work she has done. I think she would celebrate any success I, or others from this program, achieve. I wonder if she ever thinks back to that moment the way I do. Some interactions linger, the kind you keep turning over in your mind to make sense of. I walked away from that conversation with heavy feelings. And because I believe she is the kind of person who would, I trust she did too.

Thank you for reading.