The Master Plan: My Journey from Life in Prison to a Life of Purpose

The prison administration takes Wilson’s photo business profits from the youth fund and uses them to install new security cameras. Wilson wants to lower the photo price to the break-even point, but the administration instead forces him to raise the price. Showstack reports that the outgoing judge once again denied his request, but the young lawyer insists that the incoming judge, Cathy Serrette, will prove more favorable. Wilson and Steve spend three years painting Patuxent and creating murals, including one that features “two dung beetles pushing an enormous ball of feces up a hill” (187). Wilson sees the dung beetles as a metaphor.

Group therapy produces stories from inmates who have experienced traumatic events that shock Wilson. As part of a Victim Impact program, an elderly black woman appears before the group and shows the inmates a picture of her 16-year-old granddaughter. The woman then describes how a group of men raped, murdered, and dismembered her granddaughter. Wilson is shaken and horrified by the grandmother’s account, but the bammas in the group joke about it. Wilson never liked the Victim Impact program because he failed to see its relevance to him or to the other inmates who had not committed those particular crimes, but now he understands it differently.