“Allow me to reintroduce myself,” writes Ivan Kilgore, an inmate at California State Prison, Sacramento. “Within these walls … I am a socially dead person whose existence has no legitimacy whatsoever.”

Now [45], Kilgore began serving his life-sentence in 2000. Today, he nears [19] years [incarcerated] , where he writes speeches and essays to pass the time. Kilgore’s works refer to prison by a common nickname: “the Zo”—short for “the Twilight Zone”. They argue that this nickname is fitting. In the Twilight Zone, they say, things happen that defy reason. Things happen that are hard to explain.

The concept of the “Twilight Zone” originated in 1959, as the titular subject of Rod Serling’s sci-fi anthology. The show finds characters disoriented by red herrings, otherworldly occurrences, and various other suspensions of rationality. Viewers of the series are manipulated into believing one thing, then the opposite, then another. This manipulation is deliberate. The body of each episode is designed with obfuscation in mind—to throw-off viewers’ guesses about its conclusion, or whatever comes next. From the outset, the show’s writers hoped to untether viewers from familiar structures, traditions, worldviews, and logic (for a TV series, and more generally). Untethered, unsettled, unprepared viewers would be more malleable, they presumed,and more open to the series’ lessons in turn.

To be incarcerated, Kilgore argues, is to step into the Twilight Zone—though of course, for more sinister reasons than amusement. Prison officials instill untethered-ness, unsettled-ness, and unprepared-ness in inmates as did writers in viewers of the show….