Imagine you are arrested for a murder you didn’t commit. Bruce Bryan was.
No connections. No leverage. Railroaded through the system. Three years on Rikers. Sentenced to 37 years to life.
Caged in ultra-violent prisons. Sing Sing. Attica. Clinton Dannamoral. Stabbings. In and out of solitary. Fighting for his life, his freedom.
He raged. He fought the guards. Fought a system built to break him. Lurching from anger to pain to sadness.
Recently he was released after nearly 30 years in jail.
“After years of suffering, study groups changed me,” he says. “A light bulb went off in my head and said ‘I’ve got to change the way I am processing everything.’”
Like Samson in reverse, he found his strength by cutting off his long hair. “I cleaned up. I started asking myself these three questions: What do I want to do? What do I want to be? What do I want to have?”
He earned his associate degree, then his bachelors.
“Study and classwork was the easiest thing for me. The hard part was the inside job – the internal, the meditation, the shifts in my own mind. I realized that if I wanted to have a meaningful existence, I couldn't continue to serve time. I had to find a way to have time serve me. I had to find a way to live a life of purpose and meaning in the midst of the chaos. I felt that there was a way for me to thrive, and I was going to find it.”
He found that purpose witnessing to kids.
“For decades, I saw children cry and ask to stay in the prison with their fathers. So I studied the trauma, the impact on kids. Death has an end and a child can process that. But not knowing when they would see their parents again for years? That perpetuates the pain. In ways, it’s worse.”
And so Bryan self-published a book for children of incarcerated parents and began to be recognized as an expert on the subject. “When you change the way you see life,” Bryan reflects, “challenges can turn into moments of opportunity.”
It took several long years, but Bryan was finally given executive clemency, and his crooked former Queens prosecutor was arrested and convicted.
“I didn’t lose hope. Hope was the only thing that I had to hold on to. Where there's hope, there's life, even if it's a thin string.”
The day he left prison was like “walking out of hell into heaven, no purgatory, into my mother’s arms. I don't think I cried more in my entire life than I did that day.”
“People think they see me now and they say, ‘Oh, man, he's doing all right. He's home.’ But no one knows that journey, the deep depression, 23 hours locked in a cell for six months straight. I had to go into my head, strategizing, disciplining my mind, because it’s only changing your thought process that changes everything.”
Gaining wide recognition after his riveting appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, Bryan is now a vocal advocate for criminal justice reform. He likes to quote Nelson Mandela: “To be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others."
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