I Know, Sucker

Forty years, a 6-by-9 cage, and the best teacher I ever worked with

There's an alley next to where I live. I do laps in it. At one end a low tree branch works as a pull-up bar, so I do that too. Seven thousand steps most mornings. That's the deal now. Heart health.

My Fitbit went off this morning while I was out there. A reminder to move. A month ago I would have been annoyed. I've been getting better about that. Instead I heard myself say it out loud, good-natured, almost fond. *I know, sucker.* Smiling.

Then I stopped. That wasn't mine. That was AZ.

AZ isn't his name. He's still inside with a clemency petition sitting with the governor, the only door left. So he's AZ.

We worked together as peer counselors in Auburn. 2014, 2015, 2016. He was in his sixties then. He came into the New York State prison system in 1986 and got a number. That was forty years ago. That year I was in fifth grade, watching the Mets win the World Series, the last year I cared about them.

He's still there.

I don't know how his case was adjudicated, or what he says about his role in it. That's his to tell. What I know is the arithmetic, and what forty years of it looks like from the inside.

Forty years in a 6-by-9 cage with the toilet and sink right there. Lockdowns. Deprivation. Holding relationships together across all that time and losing them anyway. Losing loved ones, friends, property. Watching people get victimized. Getting victimized. Forty years' worth.

He has decades before he sees a parole board. He's in his seventies now. And when he does see one, he'll be a Black man whose victim was a white woman. Anybody who has sat in front of a board knows what that means.

---

It's morning where he is, same as here. That's the thing about a schedule inside. You always know where somebody is. So he's teaching right now, probably Aggression Replacement Training, the hardest group in the building to run. I say that as somebody who facilitated every program DOCCS had on offer.

AZ is a master teacher. I watched him walk into a room full of rowdies, guys who'd empty out a classroom anywhere in the state, and take the temperature down, put everybody at ease, get them talking. Then the learning would happen. He made it look like nothing.

The phrase came from him. Something would break the day, a count alarm, a CO coming through, one of the hundred interruptions that jerk you around inside, and I'd feel myself go tight. AZ didn't. He'd look up and say it, easy, almost warm. *I know, sucker.* Like the thing bothering him was an old friend he'd stopped being mad at years ago. The room would loosen. He wasn't teaching it on purpose, but that was the lesson. You can meet the thing that's got its hand on you without letting it have you.

I heard him say it a hundred times. This morning it came out of my own mouth and I didn't even reach for it.

Teacher's teacher, that's what everybody called him.

Out here I meet the people running reentry programs. Some are top notch, guys who walk it. Others got handed the job because somebody felt sorry for them. AZ has a network forty years deep, because people see what he is. He'd have programs running inside of a month.

---

New York has a bill called the Second Look Act. Other states have their own version. The nuances shift state to state. The pattern of chicanery, malfeasance, and general uncaring does not. I speak about New York because New York is what I know.

Here's the plain version. If you've served a long stretch, it lets you go back before a judge and ask to be resentenced. Not automatic release. A hearing. The judge looks at who you've become and decides whether the sentence still fits. It restores something the system took out a long time ago, the ability to look at a person again instead of only at the worst day of their life.

Think about what that means for a man like AZ. Forty years of running the hardest groups in the building, of being the guy other guys got sent to. The state is holding someone who'd be more useful to a community than most of the people we pay to do the work. Second Look is the only mechanism that would let a judge even see that.

The messaging behind it is good right now. The support is real. What it needs is people willing to say what forty years actually costs. I can speak to that part.

Here's the part I have to say plain. I was 23. A year and a half into heroin. Two people are dead because of me and I pleaded guilty to it. That belongs to me. It doesn't get returned or worked off or explained down.

And I am not that person. That was a madman, heroin-seeking, a miscreant. I came home in October after 26 years and the man who walked out is not the one who walked in.

If that can be true for me, it's true for him. It has to be. Otherwise the whole idea of a person changing is just something we say to keep the machine polite.

---

I do the laps every morning. I count the steps because a stent and a cardiac rehab schedule will make you count things. And now I know whose voice comes out of me when something goes off and I don't feel like being annoyed by it. He gave me that and probably doesn't know it. He gave a lot of guys a lot of things and probably doesn't know most of it.

Finished the laps. One more set on the branch. Walked home. Seven thousand steps.

He's still in there teaching.

Adam Roberts is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. He spent years as a peer counselor in DOCCS custody. He came home in October 2025 after 26 years inside. A 2026 Haymarket Books Writing Freedom Fellow, his work has appeared in The Marshall Project, Hyperallergic, and the Vera Institute of Justice. He writes The Squeeze Machine on Substack. @anotherparty25