From Violence to Vocabulary: One Man’s Transformation

Charles Smith explains how a lifelong sentence beginning at age 16 led to years of violence, isolation, and ultimately a powerful transformation through words.

I’ve been inside for 23 years now, and I’m nowhere near the same individual I was when I first entered. At 16 years old, I was sentenced to 69 years and sent straight into an adult facility. A child in a man’s world.

I taught myself early that under no circumstances would I show weakness, not to inmates, not to correctional officers. Out of self-protection, I buried every emotion. I refused to even smile. Do you know what that does to a kid’s mind? It twists everything inside you.

The First Fight and the Illusion of Strength

Five days into that 69-year sentence, I found myself in my first fight. It happened on the basketball court. Another inmate mouthed off, said something slick. Before I even thought about it, I was on him. I wanted to send a message: Leave that youngun’ alone.

The correctional officers in those days still had shotguns in the towers. They fired off a warning round. The blast echoed across the yard. But I didn’t care. Sitting in the hole afterward, I felt a strange pride. Fear, I thought, was the only armor that mattered. Being feared boosted my confidence. That fight was just the beginning of a violent cycle that delayed any hope of transformation.

Life at Wallens Ridge and the Breaking Point

I got into so many altercations that the Department of Corrections shipped me out west to one of the worst prisons in Virginia, Wallens Ridge. The moment the bus pulled up, we were surrounded by officers—redneck hillbillies who had no problem calling us niggers to our faces. I told myself I could handle it as long as they didn’t come at me directly. That lie didn’t last a week.

During a shakedown, officers claimed they’d found a shank in my cell. I was cuffed on the tier when one of them shoved the accusation in my face: “This your shank, boy?” He followed it with, “You know, boys, we’d need a big rope to hang this nigger.”

I told him, “Take these cuffs off and say that again.”

A lieutenant overheard. “What did you just say, boy?” I repeated myself. To my shock, he ordered them to take off my cuffs. My mindset was simple: Fight until death.

The second the restraints came off, I swung at the first white face in front of me. Within moments, 15 officers were on me. They stripped me naked, hog-tied me with chains, dragged me to the hole, and left me on the concrete floor for 72 hours. Eyes swollen shut. Head pounding. Naked and defeated.

Four days later, I was transferred to long-term segregation at Red Onion State Prison. I was 17 years old, one of the youngest in the entire place.

Red Onion and the Depths of Isolation

That first year in the hole, I went through every emotion possible, alone. I guess you could call it shock. I spent hours at my door, watching men lose their minds—smearing feces, cutting themselves, screaming into silence.

One day, I watched an inmate slice both wrists and his jugular vein. He bled out right there in his cell. Officers carried his pale body away in a sheet. The smell of iron hung in the air for days. I was just a teenager, watching death up close, wondering if this was all my life would ever be.

Discovering Words and the Path to Transformation

Then one day, out of nowhere, I found a pocket dictionary on the floor. To this day, I don’t know who dropped it. I picked it up, flipping through the pages, saying words out loud. It felt strange—hearing my own voice again after months of silence.

I found a pen and scrap paper and started with the first word I saw: aardvark. I copied it down. Then the next. Then another. I went word by word, page by page. Hours passed, then days. My cell walls filled with letters, definitions, words I could barely pronounce.

It wasn’t about school. It was survival. Writing words gave me a rhythm, a purpose, a way to keep my mind from rotting. That moment marked the beginning of my transformation.

Reflection on True Transformation

When I first came in, I thought being feared was the only way to make it. That fists and rage were my protection. But inside a concrete box with nothing but a dictionary, I discovered something else. Words could be weapons, too. Not to hurt, but to build. To tell the truth. To carve out a self that wasn’t just violence. And that’s what changed. That’s what true transformation looks like.

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