Building My Lifeline: The First Time I Negotiated With Prison Administration to Start a Program

By Ivan Kilgore

I landed on B-facility at CSP-Sac in 2011 with the kind of quiet dread you don’t always admit out loud. It wasn’t just a housing move from C-yard to B-yard; it felt like a transfer from possibility to scarcity. C-facility had routines that made me feel human: programs, familiar faces, a rhythm that hinted at progress. B-facility, by contrast, carried a reputation that sat heavy on the air: a SHU “kickout yard,” where
men were dropped after years in solitary confinement and expected to “adjust” to general population life with almost no programming to soften the transition.

The first thing I noticed was how easy it was to disappear there.

On C-facility, for six straight years, I had been a participant in a Creative Writing class that became my weekly lifeline. I didn’t understand at first how much that room mattered. I only knew that when prison did what prison does—isolated me, reduced me to a number, tried to make my emotions either a weakness or a liability—writing gave me a way to stay intact. It gave me a place to be more than my worst decision. It gave me language for the stuff I had buried, and it gave me a way to be heard in an institution that often survives by making sure you aren’t.

By the time I hit B-facility, I had already learned the dangerous truth about hope: once you’ve had it, you can’t pretend you don’t need it.

So when I realized there were no creative writing classes on B-facility, I felt a type of panic I didn’t want anyone to see. In prison, you learn to mask urgency. You learn to make your needs look like preferences. You learn to act like you can do without anything you can’t control. But inside, I knew what the loss meant. Those weekly sessions had shaped the man I was becoming. They had taught me discipline and time management; how to show up, how to finish what I started. They sharpened my empathy, because you can’t listen to other people’s stories with sincerity and remain the same. They gave me insight into how culture, environment, and institutional structures push people toward certain choices. They even helped me begin to see how I ended up here, not in an excuse-making way, but in a “now I can finally understand the pattern” way.

And most of all, those classes reminded me that I wasn’t forgotten. B-facility didn’t offer that reminder. B-facility offered survival.

I kept writing anyway. Quietly. On my own time. At a metal bunk, in a loud dayroom, in the cracks of the schedule where a man can still choose who he’s going to be. I didn’t stop because I couldn’t stop. Writing had become more than a hobby. It had become a method of staying alive without becoming numb.

But private writing wasn’t enough.

A class is different. A class is community. A class is structure. A class is accountability. A class is a room where men can practice being human without paying for it later. And I knew B-facility needed that room badly, especially on a yard full of men coming out of solitary, men who had been trained by years of confinement to distrust closeness, to fear vulnerability, to view every interaction as either threat or negotiation.

I didn’t walk onto the yard thinking, I’m going to negotiate with prison administration and create a program. That sounds clean, confident, and cinematic. The truth is, I walked onto the yard thinking: How do I rebuild my lifeline?

What I did have—what I didn’t fully appreciate until later—was my foundation in Toastmasters International’s Gravel Club at CSP-Sac. I had spent several years immersed in it, and Toastmasters didn’t just teach me how to speak. It taught me how to think in front of people. How to organize. How to persuade without aggression. How to create meeting agendas and follow them. How to take feedback without
collapsing. How to lead without performing. How to prepare, how to time myself, how to anticipate objections, how to answer questions without getting rattled.

At the time, I thought I was just learning how to communicate better. In reality, I was learning how to negotiate.

For a while after transferring, I watched the yard. I listened. I paid attention to what men complained about, what they longed for, what they missed. I heard the frustration; how B-facility was thin on programming, how the days stretched long and
empty, how idle time turned into conflict, and conflict turned into lockdowns, and lockdowns turned into more loss. I could see the cycle. And I knew that even a small program, one weekly class, could interrupt it for some of us. Maybe not everyone. But enough people to matter.

I started having conversations with other prisoners—low-key at first, the way you do when you’re testing whether an idea can survive contact with reality. I’d ask questions, not make speeches. If we had a writing class, would you come? What kind of writing? Poetry? Memoir? Fiction? Would you share your work or keep it private? I watched how they responded. I listened for excitement, but I also listened for the concerns underneath the excitement: Is it safe to be seen trying? Is it worth it if it gets shut down? Will staff even allow it?

When enough men responded with a genuine interest, when the idea started sounding less like my personal craving and more like something the yard could benefit from, I knew I had to take a step that felt risky in a place built to punish initiative.

I needed a staff sponsor.

That’s where reality checks you. In prison, ideas don’t move without paperwork, and paperwork doesn’t move without staff support. You can have the best intentions on the yard, but if you can’t translate your vision into a format the institution recognizes, proposal, curriculum outline, security considerations, time and location, you’ll stay stuck in wishful thinking.

I was fortunate; my good standing with the education department opened a door. Not a wide door, but a door. A teacher took interest, not just in the concept, but in my willingness to do the work. They didn’t promise me anything. They didn’t sugarcoat the process. Instead, they offered something more valuable: a map.

They walked me through what the administration would expect to see.

That was my first true lesson in negotiating with prison administration: you don’t pitch a dream, you pitch a plan.

So I sat down and began building the proposal the way I’d learned to build a speech: with purpose, structure, and the audience in mind. I developed a formal curriculum tailored to incarcerated people and storytelling—something realistic, something measurable, something that could be explained in plain terms. I thought through classroom space. I considered attendance. I thought about supplies. I anticipated the obvious concerns: security, supervision, disruptions, and whether the class could be manipulated. I made sure the proposal didn’t read like an emotional plea. I made it read like a program.

Because administration doesn’t approve feelings. They approve frameworks.

When the paperwork started moving, I realized I was entering a world with its own gravity: the chain of command. It didn’t go straight to “yes” or “no.” It went step by step—review, questions, revisions, more review. And eventually, it moved up: facility captain, associate warden, warden.

Each time it climbed, it felt like walking into a larger room with higher ceilings. The stakes grew. The questions sharpened. The margins for error narrowed.

I remember the interviews as moments where I had to decide who I was going to be under pressure. There’s a way prisoners often feel forced to interact with staff: guarded, reactive, suspicious, sometimes defiant because defiance feels like dignity. But Toastmasters had trained something else into me—an ability to stay calm, speak clearly, and treat a hard question as an invitation to clarify rather than an attack to survive.

So when administration asked the kinds of questions they always ask—Who will supervise? What’s the objective? How do you prevent it from becoming a security problem? What happens if there’s conflict? What measurable benefit does this create? I leaned on the very skills I’d practiced for years.

I didn’t overtalk.
I didn’t under-explain.
I didn’t perform “perfect inmate.”

I focused on outcomes.

The strange part was how my confidence grew with each step, not because I felt powerful, but because I felt prepared. And preparation is a rare form of power in prison. Most men are used to being evaluated without being understood. Most men are used to rules that shift without notice. In that process, though, I could feel something different happening : I wasn’t begging for permission. I was advocating for a structured solution to a real problem.

And that shift—inside me—was everything.

When the approval finally came, I didn’t celebrate loudly. Prison teaches you not to draw attention to the good things. But inside, I felt something click into place. That approval wasn’t just a green light for a class. It was proof that I could take something that mattered, translate it into institutional language, and move it through a system designed to keep my influence small.

It was the first time I truly understood that leadership in prison isn’t about authority, it’s about building what you wish existed and then doing the work to make it real.

That writing class became more than a program. It became a model. It showed me that my growth didn’t have to stop at self-improvement; it could expand into community-building. It taught me that negotiation doesn’t always look like confrontation. Sometimes negotiation looks like patience, paperwork, planning, and choosing to be consistent in a world that expects you to be chaotic.

Looking back now, I can trace a direct line from those early writing workshops and Toastmasters meetings on CSP-Sac to everything I would later become: a writer who learned to shape truth into language ; an educator who learned to create learning environments under hard constraints; and eventually the founder of the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation, committed to turning lived experience into pathways for others.

But it started there, on B-facility—on a yard with few opportunities—where I realized that if I wanted a lifeline, I might have to build it.

And if I could build it once, I could build it again.