When I became editor of New Mobility, I also became the de facto pen pal of dozens of wheelchair-using inmates around the country. I learned that for many wheelchair users doing time, the print copies of New Mobility are the only source for up-to-date information on DME, supplies and living with a disability. Several inmates told me that without the magazine, they never would have known about or been able to ask for contemporary equipment that has helped them survive.
The more I’ve learned about their world, the more I’ve appreciated that their needs and struggles on the inside share more similarities than differences with ours on the outside. We fight the same battles for supplies, access and equality, and face the same emotional and physical obstacles that come with disability.
Of all the inmates I’ve corresponded with, one in particular stood out for his candor, insight and willingness to answer my (possibly annoying) questions. Donavan Bryant is an L1-2 incomplete paraplegic from the Brooklyn borough of New York City, serving a 12-year sentence for illegal gun sales, conspiracy, and weapons possession. What follows, in his own words — edited from years of emails — is a look at his life in Walsh Regional Medical Unit at Mohawk Correctional Facility in upstate New York.
— Ian Ruder, Editor-in-Chief
by Donavan Bryant
I was born in Brooklyn, New York City, and raised in the inner city during the crack cocaine epidemic of the mid-’80s and early-’90s. My grandmother was one of the few people in my family who wasn’t engaged in criminal activity or hooked on drugs. She worked at Brooklyn College in the mail room. She kept a roof over my head and my young self from starving. She was the most stable person in my life.
We may not have had the best, but we made the best with what we had. Unfortunately, my grandmother died of cancer in 1992 when I was 8. After her death, with no one to provide a buffer, my life moved into the streets. I witnessed a lot, and once I was old enough, I started in on a lot of criminal activity.
I eventually ended up in the child care system: foster homes, group homes, juvenile institutions. I’ve done the homeless teen thing, sleeping in abandoned buildings. I’ve done the homeless adult thing too. I received my GED when I was 17 and went to a community college. I majored in computer networking for a few months but didn’t finish. Before my injury, my life basically was me having a lot of sex and engaging in criminal pursuits for financial gain.
When I was 18, I enlisted in the Army in hope of avoiding a life of crime. I had taken the test and was a physical away from shipping out when I got shot in the back, injury level L1-2 incomplete. Being in a wheelchair didn’t stop me from engaging in criminal activities. To be honest, it gave me the drive to go harder. I had a family member come visit me in the hospital and he started making statements like, “Whoever heard of a guy in a wheelchair running the streets?” I got angry. Angry at the world. Angry at the doubters. Angry that people no longer saw me for who I was. I made it a goal to prove them wrong.
And up until my arrest I was doing it. I had my own vehicle, my own place in Brooklyn. I sold a lot of guns. Since I was a child, I’ve had an infatuation with firearms. I’m extremely pro-Second Amendment. When I was coming up, guns were abundant and carried around like an AMEX card — you know the saying, “Don’t leave home without it.”
I didn’t know anything about [lawful] careers, like being a gunsmith or acquiring a license to sell or import guns, until after I started selling guns illegally. If I would have seen the movie War Dogs about how people were entering into contracts to legally sell guns to the U.S. military, I would have surely looked into going that route. In 2015, when I was 29, I got arrested. The charge was illegal gun sales, conspiracy, and weapons possession. I was sentenced to 12 years in prison with no possibility of parole.
Disability on the Inside
I’ve been in prison for almost 10 years now. First I was sent to Rikers Island, where I spent 18 months, going back and forth to court. At the time, I had a Quickie 2 manual wheelchair and the bearings in the rear wheels were going bad. Out on the street this would have been a simple problem to get handled. But being in jail, it was a whole different animal.
Wheelchair maintenance did not exist. In the gym, there was what we called the wheelchair graveyard. I saw at least three dozen power chairs of all makes and models sitting around, abandoned, covered in dust and mold, and slowly rotting away — it was a place where wheelchairs went to die. My original Quickie is probably there. These days I roll in an old junker that has broken down on me a number of times.
Getting assistive devices was really hit or miss, and would take some back and forth haggling with the administration. At times, this back and forth would take weeks and months. But I would give Rikers’ administration credit on one thing: They stayed on top of your medical appointments. No matter what specialist you had to see, they made it happen in a very timely matter.
Once I entered state prison, it was like things did a total flip. There was slightly more attention to wheelchair maintenance and assistive devices, but the system for setting up medical appointments was horrendous: If you weren’t dying, you could expect to wait months and sometimes years.
After Rikers, I was transferred to a prison downstate for about three weeks, before being transferred to Walsh Regional Medical Unit in 2017. I’ve been here ever since. This facility is supposed to be a temporary rest stop, where you come to die or get treated for whatever your medical problem is and then get sent back out into the general population. The only reason I’ve been here so long is that I have chronic pressure ulcers — it seems as soon as one heals, another opens. I also have really bad, chronic [urinary tract infections]. When they flare up, I’m damn near on the verge of death, with my temperature hitting 103.
Despite this being a medical unit, we don’t get any choice for what kind of supplies we get. I have a suprapubic catheter, and I basically roll the dice, cross my fingers and hope for the best when it comes to keeping things sterile. There is really no such thing as sterile in prison, not even in a medical prison.
Wheelchair maintenance did not exist. In the gym, there was what we called the wheelchair graveyard. I saw at least three dozen power chairs of all makes and models sitting around, abandoned, covered in dust and mold, and slowly rotting away. — it was a place where wheelchairs went to die.
The regional medical units are built more like hospitals. The cells are bigger. The bathrooms are bigger, and they also have grab bars and emergency call buttons. There is a 24-hour medical staff on hand, or at least there is supposed to be. There are PTs and OTs onsite as well, and a gym with a recreational therapist. Ironically, the first accessible scale I encountered in 20-plus years as a wheelchair user — after visiting probably a dozen doctors in four different states — was in the prison I’m currently at. Go figure, right?
I would give the overall accessibility a passing grade for the most part — if you are a wheelchair user with most of your upper-body strength. Then, you would have little problem transferring in and out of the shower, bed, etc. But if you can’t transfer independently, you are in trouble.
Daily Life
Every day starts at about 6:30 to 7 a.m. with the nursing staff coming around to take vitals, give meds and ask if you need supplies or a change of clothing. Since we are in a medical facility, we don’t wear the regulated state green uniforms: a green button-up shirt and khaki pants. We wear green pajamas and a red and white striped robe. Picture a candy cane hanging from a Christmas tree. Plus, I’m a Black guy so I look like a chocolate-covered candy cane on a Christmas tree. It’s not as bad as it sounds, but it sure isn’t pretty either.
I take a full cup of pills — thankfully they’re mostly vitamins — then I begin the talk to my body that all of us wheelchair users have when it’s time to get up and moving. “OK body, how are you feeling today? Do you feel like playing nice or are you going to be an asshole?” Once I shake off the typical wave of aches, pains and cramps, I make up my mind whether I’m going to make it to breakfast by 8 a.m. Sometimes I do, but most of the time I don’t. That leaves me eating a piece of fruit or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to start my day.
The day-to-day meals are terrible. I live on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, plus what I can get from food packages — a lot of tuna fish and oatmeal. Boiled eggs and toast are one of my better meals. It’s hard to mess up a boiled egg. On holidays, they’ll give us a couple of burgers and a hot dog for either lunch or dinner. On Thanksgiving, the meal is sliced processed turkey like you put on a sandwich, with “stuffing,” which is just soggy, seasoned bread. [We] prisoners usually pool our resources and make our own meal with some of the food we get in packages from people on the outside. It’s not great, but it’s better than the usual.
After breakfast I do all the required hygiene rituals. I may or may not have wound care depending on the schedule of the medical staff. By 9 a.m. I’m in the school program where I’m the inmate program assistant, which is basically a teacher’s aide. Here IPA is the only way to earn money legally. I only make pennies on the dollar, but I can also earn time off my sentence. If you ever saw the movie Blow with Johnny Depp [where] he was in prison teaching the class to get some time off his sentence, well that’s me.
School ends around 10:30 a.m. and at that point I come back to my unit where I’ll get wound care done or receive any meds I haven’t taken yet. Lunch is around 11:15 a.m. Afternoon programs run from 12:30 to 3:30 p.m., but I only work mornings, so I will either go to the library (if it’s a Monday) or to the rec therapy room. There I socialize with individuals from the other units, work out, play card games/board games, watch movies or just engage in whatever activity they’re offering that day.
For the most part, I’m treated fairly by the other incarcerated individuals. Of course, just like in the free world, you might encounter an asshole here and there. When I was at Rikers there were about 20 of us who used wheelchairs, all as a result of gun shots. Have you ever seen two guys in chairs engage in hand-to-hand combat? They chase each other until one falls out the chair and the other tries to run him over. Eventually they both end up on the floor, wrestling, scratching, biting and trying to do whatever they can to hurt each other, until a couple of nondisabled prisoners get them in the chair and clean up the mess before the officers realize what happened. That happened pretty regularly at Rikers, but not so much here, where we have about a dozen other wheelchair users at any given time.
I don’t have a large circle of friends in wheelchairs, but I didn’t when I was on the outside either. Most wheelchair users I encounter here are so down and depressed in their situation they just want to escape reality. Not only are they fighting the day-to-day wheelchair life battle, but they are also dealing with being incarcerated. I can relate. I’ve done the angry/depressed phase, learned from it and moved on. As my uncle put it to me as a child, “Ain’t nothing to it but to do it. Ain’t nothing wit’ it but to get it.” Of course, it isn’t always easy, I have my good days and bad days.
No later than 3:30 p.m., I’m back in my dorm, waiting for dinner to be called at about 4:15. There are another two med runs, plus general wellness checks. After 5, we can come back out of our rooms and spend time in the day room watching TV, socializing, using the phone, getting emails and just killing time. Or you can just stay in your room. I try to balance my time between staying off my behind long enough so my wounds can heal and socializing enough so I’m not a complete stranger around here. I do a lot of reading on different subjects. I play a lot of chess, and I do a lot of periodic meditation to make it through each day without going crazy. There is a saying that hell is repetition. If that is true, I’m living in a realm of hell — or I like to think of it as the twilight zone or bizarro world where down is up and up is down.
Looking Forward
I will say that incarceration has opened up a new chapter in my life, one of self-discovery. Who am I? And most importantly, what makes me happy? Taking away all the distractions forced me to seek inner peace and balance within myself. Now I’m not saying I’m a leopard who has somehow learned to change his spots, or that I have become Gandhi himself. But I will say that I’ve discovered a new part of what makes me who I am. Being in a situation like prison, you’re either going to have some serious personal growth or you are going to go mad, simple as that.
With good behavior and taking part in prison programs, I should get out in 2025. When I get out, I want to connect with the wheelchair community. I never did this prior to prison — I don’t think I even knew there was a community. For me, it took incarceration to learn about New Mobility, the resources, the community and all the networking possibilities.
I have nearly 10 years of life enjoyment to make up for when I get out. I’d like to jump out of a plane at least once. I want to travel. And, seeing as I’m single, I will surely be looking to mingle. I’m interested in getting into the jeweler field when I get out, being a broker selling and buying diamonds. I’ve done some research from here and came across the Gemological Institute of America, but my access to information is very limited. It dawned on me that I might not be the first wheelchair user to work in this field, and I’d love to talk to someone who knows more about what it’s like.
Ironically, I would say, more than anything else, the wheelchair prepared me the most for doing prison time. When you first get injured and realize that you and your body are no longer on the same page with each other, that’s one of the most dramatic and traumatic experiences anyone can go through. But if you can cope, adapt and evolve, you will come out the other end mentally and emotionally stronger. And that’s the knack to doing prison time: The physical part is easy, but it’s the holding on to and strengthening [of] your mental and emotional state that’s the real battle.
If the wheelchair life — with all of its low moments, “my world is coming to an end” moments, “if only I wasn’t in a chair” moments — hasn’t broken me, then there is no way I’m going to let prison break me.
Letters from Inmates
Envisioning a Better Life
I’ve been reading New Mobility for a few years. It’s comforting to see that life in a wheelchair is possible on the outside. Reading about stories of travel, ordinary activities and the many other hacks people have figured out for themselves is truly encouraging. I read some stories of people working, traveling, going out on a date, and I can’t imagine being in my wheelchair eight hours straight or 12 hours for a whole day! The last seven years I’ve spent five to seven hours in my wheelchair every day. That’s not even in one sit, but broken up through the day and [lying] down in between.
It’s difficult getting the help I need in here, but it sounds hard to get the right medical help out there as well. I’ve filed two habeas corpus writs just to see a physiatrist who understands SCI. I don’t know if there’s actually another specialist I could see who would look at my condition and see my posture, chair and cushion and be like, “Oh yeah dude, you need this and this to help improve your day-to-day life.”
A.V., Oregon
All Alone
No one comes here to assist us with maintenance for our wheelchairs. Showers have no control over hot or cold water. I’ve been scalded. I attend physical therapy twice weekly [but] there are no opportunities for emotional support. Other inmates see us as handicapped, yet will help when no officers are looking.
L.K., Arkansas
Help Getting Needed Equipment
In 2015, a fellow incarcerated disabled veteran shared New Mobility magazine with me, and I was amazed to find out an organization like United Spinal Association exists. During training for Desert Storm, I was seriously injured. My tailbone was fractured and my L5/S1 was twisted, impinging my spinal cord. My military career ended abruptly because I was falling a lot.
The police did not load my wheelchair when I was arrested. The sheriff refused to accept my wheelchair from friends who brought it to the county jail, so I arrived in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice stumbling and falling. My third day at the intake prison, I fell, fracturing my right wrist. With a swollen black hand, wrist and forearm, I was accused of faking. Five years later, an X-ray diagnosed the old fracture.
In April 2023, the prison senior warden responded to my request for a power chair. Thanks to Mr. Bob Vogel’s 2021 Power Chair Roundup, I was able to provide the warden with the information necessary for him to consider any security risks.
J.H., Texas
Shower Time
Showers vary greatly again by units you are assigned to. There are usually about 20 people in chairs trying to shower in only one shower. To describe this shower as a disaster waiting to happen is no lie. The showers have a plastic seat with metal leg chair which you approach from the rear. Once you transfer to the chair, you have a choice of a handheld or wall-mounted shower. Each one runs for about a minute each time you push the button. You have no control over the water temperature or the cold air conditioning blowing on your back.
I am [5 feet, 9 inches tall], but as I sit on the seat, the shower head is just below the top of my shoulder. To get my hair wet, I ease off the seat onto the floor and then have to climb back up onto the seat to add shampoo plus soap up. Then it’s back on the floor to rinse my hair with the top [third] of my body to climb back onto the seat and finish rinsing off. It’s a physical workout.
After the shower and drying, you dress in a flooded floor area at the bottom of the shower ramp. If 10:00 p.m. gets there and you’re waiting for a shower, sorry, you don’t get one. If you have an accidental bowel or bladder leakage, your options to clean up depend upon who the ranking officer on duty is. I once went 13 days before I got a shower one time in retaliation because I wrote an officer up for not doing their job.
J.R.T., Texas
Yelling Into the Abyss
I was a victim of a robbery and got shot. When I was arrested, the detective confiscated my wheelchair and left me inside my cell for five days, sitting on a metal slab, soaked in urine and feces. I became very sick, developed fevers, UTIs and an infection. Now I’m in a regional medical facility. My ROHO cushion was intentionally popped by an officer. It took several months to be replaced and in that time I developed another pressure sore. I’ve battled UTIs and bedsores for years. I complained to medical about lying on an air mattress that was too firm without any adjustability for months before I developed a bedsore. Complaints inside fall on deaf ears and you are judged for being incarcerated. In prison, you must learn how to take care of yourself in every aspect. You have to educate yourself and have family members fill in the gaps with Google and internet research.
W.S., New York
Afraid of the Future
There are quite a few of us in this institution and there are many things that we need, such as catheters, leg bags, cushions and other available options. We cannot get this institution to order things for us that we do not know about. People are suffering because the prison will not give us what we need. If we knew our options, such as better wheelchair cushions to prevent pressure sores, or the latest catheters, it would be different.
So many guys in here like myself develop numerous UTIs and we are told there’s no need to prescribe antibiotics due to the risk of us becoming resistant to the medication. But this does not seem normal. It’s hard because I can’t really refute their arguments since I don’t have access to knowledge or studies about UTIs, [and] I’m scared it may lead to future complications.
S.R., Pennsylvania
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