It was March 1973. I was just turning eighteen. I’d been at MIT for about six months and my mind had been blown open. To be sure, it was a tumultuous time in America. The Vietnam War was finally winding down, though, like other eighteen-year-olds, I’d registered for the draft, which was still very much active. Richard Nixon had just been sworn in for his second term, but the Watergate investigation was getting underway. The racial and political tensions that had inflamed the country in the 1960s continued to simmer.

It was a tumultuous time for me as well – I can’t think of another period in my life where I had encountered more new people, new activities, new ideas. And I was changing quickly.

I think we forget – and, of course, some of you never knew – just how narrow-bore life was fifty years ago, before fiber optics brought high-speed internet and four hundred channels of TV into our homes and our lives. For me, in high school in LA, life was predictable, uncomplicated, unchallenging. We had little in the way of family around. I had a handful of nerdy friends. There were three television networks, delivering the same news into our home at the same hour every evening.

I didn’t do much or see much. My idea of a good and mind-expanding time was a bracing game of Risk with my buddies. No alcohol – I didn’t like how it tasted! – and certainly no pot – it’s illegal! The truth is I had a small taste of what the wider world was like the summer before my senior year, when I attended what was essentially a fancy science camp at Colorado College in Colorado Springs – but still largely in the company of nerds.

All that changed the moment I stepped off the plane in Logan in September 1972, not even knowing where I was going to sleep that night. Over the next few days, I think I met more new people than I’d met in my entire life to that point. I tried new things. I thought new thoughts. Before leaving LA, god forgive me, I had distributed campaign literature for Nixon. I spent Election Day 1972 in Lewiston, Maine, going door to door to get out the vote for George McGovern.

All of which is just to set the context for one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done. I spent a night in March 1973 locked up in Walpole State Penitentiary with the meanest and nastiest inmates in the state. And, for good measure, with no guards in the prison.

Only now, prompted to confirm some of my recollections and googling the history here, do I understand that I was a small footnote to a wild movement in the 1970s to reform the prison system – and put the prisoners in charge! They’d even formed a union. As you might imagine, this idea did not sit well with prison guards and tensions between guards and inmates ratcheted up, which only made matters worse. In an effort to mediate – at least that’s what they said – a group of prison reform advocates formed an organization called Ad Hoc Committee on Prison Reform and secured permission to put citizen observers in Walpole to keep an eye on things.

One of my MIT fraternity brothers, a couple of years older and much more socially woke, persuaded me to join him in taking a shift as an observer at the prison. (Side note: This is the same guy who, as my roommate the following semester, would pipe up with interesting tidbits from his biology homework while I struggled with differential equations and quantum physics; I changed my major that semester.)

Sure, why not, I thought.

At the appointed hour – I think it was a Saturday night – we showed up at the prison, about thirty miles southeast of Boston. We found the place ringed by State Trooper vehicles with blue lights flashing – it seems the guards had vacated the prison and the inmates were now in charge.

No problem – in we went. We passed through a series of heavy locked gates, operated, I assume, by the troopers, and soon found our way inside.

And it was true, the inmates had the run of the place. The only civilians inside were the observers and a handful of social workers. The place was kind of a mess. Prior to the uprising, the inmates had undertaken a general strike and refused to leave their cells for three months. Their principal form of protest, it seems, had been to hurl their shit against the walls of the cell block. They hadn’t gotten around to cleaning it up yet.

But the mood among the inmates was ebullient. They were happy to see us and to talk to us. When we conducted a lock-down headcount – where the inmates return to their cells, so that everyone can be accounted for – we got it done in about twenty minutes. According to the prisoners, the guards typically took two hours.

We wandered around the prison, chatting with the inmates, playing cards with them, just basically hanging out all night long. It was kind of a party. Many of the inmates were surprisingly soft-spoken and articulate; the older ones were downright avuncular. It was hard to imagine what they’d done to end up in Walpole; most of them weren’t prepared to say. On the other hand, there were guys whose eyes told you at a glance that they’d murder their own grandmother without a moment’s thought.

I remember three inmates in particular. One young guy, whose name I don’t recall, spent a great deal of time trying to convince me that it wasn’t his fault he’d shot a taxi driver in the face. I think he’d been working on the story for a while; by the end of it, I almost believed him.

I met a charismatic man named Lefty Gilday, who, though I didn’t know it at the time, was a notorious 1960s radical, part of the famous Weather Underground. Gilday and a bunch of fellow travelers, including several Brandeis students, robbed a bank in Boston in September 1970 to “expropriate” funds to support their opposition to the Vietnam War. During the robbery, a cop was shot and killed. Though most believe Gilday didn’t actually pull the trigger, he was captured after ten days on the lam in the largest manhunt in New England history, convicted of murder, sentenced to death (eventually reduced to life in prison), and sent to Walpole just a few months before my visit. He was, honestly, a delight to chat with.

And then there was Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler. The Boston Strangler was suspected in the deaths of thirteen women between 1962 and 1964. Interestingly, we spent a family vacation in Boston in the summer of 1963, at the height of Strangler mania; I distinctly remember lying awake in bed scared that the Strangler was coming for me. DeSalvo wasn’t terribly scary in person, but he was boisterous and clearly enjoyed his celebrity among the inmates (for the record, he was never convicted of those crimes, but there seems to be little doubt he was responsible). He had his name stenciled on the back of his prison work shirt and he made choker necklaces in the prison machine shop which could be purchased at the prison’s gift shop. When I was talking to him, he was quite exercised by a press conference held earlier that day by wives of the striking guards. He was especially offended by a comment that their husbands were in constant danger from “those animals.”

“If those bitches don’t shut up,” he said, “I may have to consider coming out of retirement.”

DeSalvo was stabbed to death in the prison the following year.

Crazy as this whole experience sounds – and it was; I still can’t believe I did it – this was not my only time in prison.

Fast-forward about five years. I was working at a radio station in Winnipeg. Somehow, we got hooked up with a bunch of inmates at Stony Mountain, which was a high-security penitentiary just north of the city. We helped them produce a weekly radio show, which they called “View from the Mountain.” Every week we packed portable recording equipment into my car and drove out to the prison, which was located on a small rise (it was no mountain) on the prairie. We worked primarily with three inmates, whom we got to know quite well. None of them would say what they’d done to end up on the Mountain, but the other guys were only too happy to tell us.

One of the inmates, the leader of the group, was extremely intelligent and well spoken. We never quite found out what his crime was, except to learn that he was in a biker gang. A second guy was very sweet, if not especially bright. Turns out he’d murdered a guy, stuffed him in the trunk of his car, and drew the attention of cops who pulled up behind him at a light and noticed blood leaking out of the car. The third fellow was clearly more of a hothead. His crime: He held up the front desk of the fleabag hotel he was staying at, then went up to his room, where he was promptly arrested a few minutes later.

I have little doubt any of the people I met in prison were guilty of the terrible things they’d done. Some, like the kid who shot the cabbie in the face, were guilty of crimes of passion – their anger or emotion got the better of them in one fateful, life-turning moment. Some were rational, considered, and planned – perhaps even principled in a way (thinking about the Weather Underground radicals). Others were just plain evil. But what I learned from these experiences is that, whatever they’d done, they were not that different from me. They had interior lives, hopes and dreams, moments of happiness and despair. What they’d lost for the most part is probably the thing that we value most, even if we rarely think about it, which is agency – the ability to do what we want, when we want, to generally control our own lives. These guys, most of whom would be locked up for the rest of their time on earth, had almost none of that – and each, in his own way, was trying to make the best of it.