Not long after his twenty-fifth year in solitary confinement, Billy Blake committed to writing the many deaths he’d have preferred to the torture of his prolonged isolation. “Set me afire, pummel and bludgeon me, cut me to bits, stab me, shoot me, do what you will in the worst of ways,” he wrote in a 2013 essay. “If I try to imagine what kind of death, even a slow one, would be worse than twenty-five years in the box — and I have tried to imagine it — I can come up with nothing.”

Eight years later, Blake remains in solitary, but he has some cause for hope now. This week, he announced his impending release to the general prison population through another essay for Solitary Watch, a nonprofit watchdog group.

Blake is serving a sentence of seventy-seven years to life in New York’s Mid-State Correctional Facility for shooting two sheriff’s deputies — killing one — in a botched attempt to escape a county courthouse, where he was being held on drug charges. That was 1987, when Blake was twenty-three. After he was convicted, the state designated him a threat to “safety and security” — a near-guarantee of indefinite solitary confinement and a form of double punishment meted out by a retributive prison bureaucracy.