Still, that doesn’t mean he’ll get the chance to show folks on the outside who he’s become - unless he lives to see his parole date, at which point he’ll be 84 years old. “I have no desire to hurt, harm, or destroy anyone, or anything. “I have accomplished a lot being in here that is positive, and I believe that growing in here gave me another chance at life,” he says, ever hopeful. “I can only continue to try to be a better man than when I came here,” he says, a much-improved version of himself “than the twentysomething-year-old idiot” he was at the time of the crime. Today, he’s just trying to be useful: owning his actions and becoming a prison paralegal. When the death penalty was abolished in New Jersey in 2007, he was resentenced to life with a mandatory minimum of 30 years for two of his charges, meaning he’ll be up for parole in 2050. He tells me he spent two years on death row - what he calls “simply solitary confinement while awaiting an execution” - in the Nineties after he and an accomplice were convicted of murder. My friend Bobby Brown, 57, has been working on himself for decades now. Given our lot in life, my friends and I could easily just sit here and rot, becoming the animals the state already thinks we are. “I can only continue to try to be a better man.” I continued to stew - quite literally, as this summer saw record high temperatures and some areas of the building don’t have sufficient air conditioning, turning cells into ovens. He shot back, “Why should the Department of Corrections spend money in here? I mean, you guys ain’t going nowhere!” He laughed and walked away. I said that we should be offered more vocational-training opportunities and educational activities - otherwise, we’re just sitting around for hours with nothing to do, our brains atrophying. The other day, I got into an argument with a custody supervisor at New Jersey State Prison (NJSP) over how my fellow “lifers” and I spend the rest of our days behind bars. This is his first story for Rolling Stone. Their mission is to “normalize the inclusion of incarcerated writers and artists in mainstream venues by bridging the gap between them and harnessing this creative proximity as a path to de-carceration and public safety.” MaQbool - who runs his own site, Captive Voices - has been working with Rolling Stone’ s Chief Research Editor Brenna Ehrlich on his writing since June 2022. He is a member of the mentorship program Empowerment Avenue, which pairs writers with editors in the outside world to hone their craft and pitch stories to the media. Tariq MaQbool is an incarcerated writer serving two consecutive life sentences at the New Jersey State Prison.

Red door escape room confinement