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3025 Redefining AmericaListening to Taylor Swift in Prison Joe Garcia Javier Jimennez Joe Garcia is a correspondent for the Prison Journalism Project, a nonprofit organization that seeks to educate readers on mass incarceration by training incarcerated writers to report on reform in the criminal justice system. Garcia%u2019s work has also appeared in the Washington Post and the Sacramento Bee ; this essay was first published in the New Yorker . KEY CONTEXT %u201cListening to Taylor Swift in Prison%u201d began as a review of Swift%u2019s 2022 album Midnights , a draft of which made its way to New Yorker editor Daniel A. Gross through someone working for the Prison Journalism Project. The final essay is the result of months of correspondence between Garcia and Gross through the mail and phone calls, as Garcia has no access to the internet from prison. KEY CONTEXT %u201cListening to Taylor Swift in Prison%u201d began as a review The first time I heard about Taylor Swift, I was in a Los Angeles County jail, waiting to be sent to prison for murder. Sheriffs would hand out precious copies of the Los Angeles Times, and they would be passed from one reader to the next. Back then, I swore that Prince was the best songwriter of my lifetime, and I thought Swift%u2019s rise to teen-age stardom was an injustice. I%u2019d look up from her wide-eyed face in the Calendar section to see gang fights and race riots. The jail was full of young men of color who wrote and performed their own raps, often about chasing money and fame, while Swift was out there, actually getting rich and famous. How fearless could any little blond fluff like that really be? In 2009, I was sentenced to life in prison. Early one morning, I boarded a bus in shackles and a disposable jumpsuit, and rode to Calipatria State Prison, a cement fortress on the southern fringes of California. Tripledigit temperatures, cracked orange soil, and pungent whiffs of the nearby Salton Sea made me feel as though I%u2019d been exiled to Mars. After six years in the chaos of the county jail, however, I could finally own small luxuries, like a television. The thick walls of Calipat, as we called the place, stifled our radio reception, but an institutional antenna delivered shows like %u201cAccess Hollywood,%u201d %u201cEntertainment Tonight,%u201d and %u201cTMZ.%u201d I was irritated by the celebrity gossip, but it was a connection to the outside world, and it introduced me to snippets of Swift%u2019s performances for the first time. Here and there, I%u2019d catch her on %u201cThe Ellen DeGeneres Show%u201d or %u201cFallon,%u201d and was surprised by how intently she discussed her songwriting. I didn%u2019t tell anyone that I thought she was talented. In 2013, when my security level was lowered owing to good behavior, I requested a transfer to Solano state prison, the facility with a Level 3 yard which was closest to my family in the Bay Area. I got the transfer, but my property %u2014 a TV, CD player, soap, toothpaste, lotion, food %u2014 was lost in transit. I shared a cell with someone in the same situation, so, for months, we relied on the kindness of our neighbors to get by. Our only source of music was a borrowed pocket radio, hooked up to earbuds that cost three dollars at the commissary. At night, we%u2019d crank up the volume and lay the earbuds on the desk in our cell. Those tiny speakers radiated crickety renditions of Top Forty hits. Summarize Garcia%u2019s initial opinion of Swift. 11Copyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.