Kevin Light-Roth is a freelance writer and journalist currently incarcerated in Washington State since he was 19 years old. He organizes his community within prison around legislative bills. His work has been published in The Guardian, The Progressive, The Seattle Times, The Appeal, among other outlets. Follow him on X at @KevinLightRoth.
Kevin has survived a total of nine years in solitary confinement, and wrote about his harrowing experiences in Ending Isolation: The Case Against Solitary Confinement (2025) by his friend Christopher Blackwell, with Deborah Zalesne, Kwaneta Harris and Terry Kupers:
You will begin to understand that recovery from solitary is an illusion. A lie necessitated by the perceived loss of the person you imagine you could have been. You can never go back to what you were, and where you could have been will always be out of reach. The version of you that might have come to be without solitary confinement – without disadvantage, without all the destructive decisions and cruel luck and tragedies you with you could undo – is not something that can be reclaimed. It’s something that never existed, and never will. You will come to accept, after extensive struggle, that to mourn its loss is to mourn nothing at all. But from time to time, you will mourn it anyway.
We connected Kevin to Inmate Tea with A&P to speak more about his experiences with incarceration since being a teenager, and the realities of solitary confinement in Washington prisons. Hear Kevin speak with April and Cierra from the Black Light Mass Incarceration Show in this new episode below:
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