Everyone's Obsessed With True Crime. Even Prisoners Like Me.

New York Times

16-07-2025

In the early aughts, when I was waiting on Rikers Island to be tried for murder, I had to watch what everyone else in the communal day room was watching on TV: shouts of 'Jer-ry! Jer-ry!' and announcements that 'You are not the father.'
After I was convicted, in 2004, and sentenced to 28 years to life in prison, TV would occupy even more of my time. Prisons do get cable: Normally, the population pays via things like fund-raisers and the profits from visiting-room vending machines. At Clinton Dannemora, a maximum-security prison near the Canadian border, I bought a 13-inch television from the commissary, and it felt like a privilege to watch what I wanted, alone in my cell. In Attica, where I transferred in 2007, we had the Oxygen channel, on which everyone would watch reality shows like 'Bad Girls Club.' I enjoyed all the gossiping and scheming on 'Big Brother' and 'Survivor,' and when I put an ad on a dating website for prisoners I listed 'The Bachelor' as my favorite show. The women who wrote to me related. I eventually married one.
Her name was Danielly, and she watched a lot of true crime. It made her so paranoid that she hung a bell inside her front door to alert her to intruders. Once, while she was visiting me, I noticed her peering behind us — she had recognized another prisoner from an episode of '20/20.' This happens to me now too: I'll be in the mess hall or the yard and recognize someone from a true-crime show. He'll be scooping oatmeal or exercising, and I'll remember the re-enactment of his crime, the bludgeoning or the burying.
In 2016, I transferred to Sing Sing. By then, Oxygen had shifted from reality shows to true crime; the channel's logo was even redesigned to resemble police tape. It would soon be airing a seemingly nonstop run of shows like 'Buried in the Backyard.' For a few years I was transferred to a smaller prison in the Catskills, where we didn't have in-cell TVs — but when it closed and I landed back in Sing Sing, I found that true crime had come to dominate what felt like every station. NBC American Crimes ran reruns of 'Dateline,' 'American Greed' and 'Lockup,' which I once heard described as 'prison porn.' (It's strange to walk down the tier, look through the bars of someone's cell and see a TV turned to 'Lockup' — an inside look at prison for someone who is already inside a prison.) Merit TV had 'Crime Stories With Nancy Grace.' As I write this, Court TV is running a marathon of 'Interview With a Killer.'
More than half of Americans now watch true crime, according to one YouGov poll. (The F.B.I. reports that between 1993 and 2022, meanwhile, the rate of violent crime in the United States fell 49 percent.) We watch those shows in here, too. As true crime exploded in popularity, the demand for fresh content had producers searching for stories to tell, exhuming murder cases from years and even decades ago. This is how Danielly eventually found herself watching a true-crime show about me, a drug dealer in prison for killing a rival.
Some watch with the prison hierarchy in mind.
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