The Prison Project Novels & Stories

After being released from prison on Christmas Eve, I find my wife, Jessica Wright, waiting outside the gates with our daughter, Penny Joyner. The late fall sky stretches overhead in a warm, golden hue, but the look in Jessica's eyes is cold. "How annoying," she says. "They just had to let you out in time for Christmas dinner." Penny covers her nose in disgust. "Mom, Dad smells awful! I still like Uncle Caleb better." I remember how Jessica used Grandma's illness to force me to take the fall for her first love, Caleb Moore. Because of her, I went to prison in his place. It is also Penny's words that finally destroy the last of my hope. She says, "Dad, just go. Uncle Caleb will take goo

"Look at the project codename," Pim snapped, her eyes hollow, burning with the frantic light of someone who had just looked into the abyss and found it blinking back. "Scroll past the financial audits. Look at the foundation documents. The state-sanctioned surveillance project from the nineties? The one that turned the Ministry into an untouchable fortress? It didn't just disappear. It migrated. It evolved."

I was here forever. This pack prison was different from human prisons. No communal dining hall, no yard to walk in. Every day, I only had one hour to exercise in a cramped room with a concrete floor and windowless walls. One hour to release pent‑up energy. One hour to remember that I was still alive. I started with push‑ups. A hundred. Two hundred. Three hundred. My arms no longer trembled like they used to. My muscles had reformed—hard, solid. Prison had not made me weak. Prison had made me harder.

Curled up on the floor, bleeding and crying, I whispered, “I’m sorry… I’m a stray dog. I don’t deserve Alpha… I won’t love him again…” When my period stopped, I feared I was pregnant with Alpha’s pup and begged for medical attention. Instead, they laughed harder. “Where’s the pup, huh? Show us what’s so special about Alpha’s kid,” a guard mocked, jabbing my stomach with his baton. They pushed me until I blacked out. I woke on a cold operating table to the sound of a doctor’s derisive chuckle. “Pregnant and sentenced to Silver Prison? Were you screwing around outside? Irresponsible floozy.

Even with how thin she had become. Despite everything, she felt this hope awakening inside her. There was a shower waiting. She tried to remember the last time she'd had one and failed. Nora closed her eyes as she stood under the hot spray. She let the water wash away weeks of grime. It felt as if she were washing away the prison itself. Her skin tingled with warmth. And renewal. The steam was like a comforting blanket that wrapped around her. She just wanted to stay there forever. Just to savour this rare moment of comfort.

Rose's point of view: Mom and I reached the building where the members of the Hidden Race were imprisoned. The dungeon was very dark and dark. From the door, we could only see a few pale yellow and rusty incandescent lamps emitting a dim light. The floor was covered with black water with smelly excrement. The prison was like a putrid sewer. More than a dozen soldiers in charge of guarding the door were all outside, probably because the nauseating smell was unbearable. Our soldiers were quick to eliminate the prison guards.

No matter what it takes or what it costs, I will ensure your safety and help you reclaim everything that belongs to you. … The next evening, Cyrus, Alyssa, and Jonah were in the cellar of Heightsnew Villa. "What did you say? They had a fake prisoner take his place?" Cyrus raised his brows in shock. He was so surprised that he almost crushed the wine glass in his hand. "Did they fucking think the surveillance system in Solana City's prison is just for show? Are they trying to bring The Shawshank Redemption to life?" Alyssa swirled her wine glass while propping her chin up with her other hand. "It sounds more like The Shawshank Exchange to me."

My name is Riley, and today is the day Roman gets out. I have been counting down for three years, two months, and fourteen days—ever since the judge’s gavel fell and they took him away in chains for a crime he swears he didn’t commit. Armed robbery. Ten years reduced to four with good behavior and a letter-writing campaign led by an eighteen-year-old girl who barely knew what she was doing. Me. It started with a school project—write to a prisoner, learn about the justice system. I picked his name off a list because his mugshot looked sad, not scary. Dark hair, sharp jaw, eyes that stared straight into the camera like he was daring the world to blink first.

POV: Teresa Prison reduced the world to schedules, concrete, and the residual channels that official inventories never fully mapped. I had lost the boardroom, the filings, the vote, and the public face of the long project. I had not lost the ability to finish a design once it had been started. The cuffs and the interviews and the carefully worded offers delivered through counsel had been phases. This was the next one.

I love the loud music I hear almost everywhere, the view of scantily clad women parading the street, the noise and the burst of activities. Where I grew up was a more quiet place. At night everyone began to retreat inside their shells but it was at night I loved to come out after school. It was at night that I was thrown into that moving bus after Kent left me. I did not see the bus and everything happened quickly before the man in black before me turned blurry and my limbs became too heavy to move. For a while I have not thought about that prison, the large quantity of food, the agonizing screams, that man I killed…