On the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision website, there is a section titled “Incarcerated Deaths.” Click it, and you enter a digital resting place for the people who have passed away in DOCCS custody. There are no photographs and no mention of who they were before prison, or who they became inside. There is only a list of names with ID numbers, dates of birth, dates of death and where they died.
One day soon, my friend Donald “Jack” Reitano’s name may be added to that ever-growing list. He’s dying of liver cancer, and for months I’ve been searching for the right words to sum up more than 60 years of a man’s life. As his friend, I’m grieving. Yet as a writer, I keep returning to the same questions: If I don’t preserve his legacy, who will? And how can I capture someone I’ve come to love like a brother while he is still very much alive?
Over the past 12 years, I’ve had dozens of men die around me. Depending on the circumstances, within hours of their deaths, nearly every trace of them disappears from the fabric of our daily lives. Officers remove their possessions from their cells, which are then cleaned and prepared for the next occupant. Their names linger in conversations around the facility for a few days. Then, as the days pass, those names begin to fade.
I won’t let that happen to Jack. At 64, my friend has a charismatic personality and the restless energy of men half his age. Among his peers, he is known as a peacemaker, quick to crack a joke when tensions rise. I suppose it is one of the skills he has developed during his 45 years in and out of prison.
When Jack isn’t smoking a rollie — a hand-rolled cigarette — or drinking a cup of coffee, you’ll usually find him tucked inside his cubicle, working on one of his many paintings. Though his living quarters are cramped, he uses the limited space with precision. His plastic mattress becomes a worktable covered with paints, stained washcloths and handmade brushes. His feet remain planted as he works at his easel in complete focus.
“I’ve always been able to do people, places and wildlife,” Jack once told me between brushstrokes. “I’ve always loved doing wildlife.”
Jack discovered his artistic ability in the late 1970s, while incarcerated in California. He began by sketching cards and portraits, then taught himself how to paint. As he refined his craft, he earned a reputation throughout the prison system as one of the state’s top artists.
His work has been sought out by prison administrators hoping to bring some life to blank facility walls. He’s also been hired by men trying to surprise their families with holiday gifts, and by people outside of prison who respect his talent.
It’s hard to say how many lives Jack has touched with his art over the years, though I would guess the number is close to a thousand. Still, I worry that soon none of it will matter. He will be gone, and not long after, so will much of what people remember about him.
I first met Jack roughly nine years ago at Clinton Correctional Facility. I was young and still trying to make sense of prison. Jack was a seasoned veteran. We connected almost immediately. We both came from traditional Italian families, battled addiction and ended up incarcerated.
“At first, I wanted to fit in,” he told me of his drug use. “But I realized the drugs helped me accept my problems. I was never into the violent stuff — burglaries mostly, to finance my addiction.”
The biggest difference between the two of us was that I was beginning my first prison sentence, for felony murder, a charge resulting from my presence at the scene of a crime. He was starting his seventh stint behind bars that began with an attempted robbery.
For the next two and a half years, Jack and I worked beside each other in the prison tailor shop. We also cooked together and talked about everything from our families to the decisions that brought us to prison. More than anyone else, he understood where my head was.
Eventually, I was transferred, and we lost touch.
Then, in the summer of 2023, I arrived at Eastern Correctional Facility and spotted a familiar face with a few fewer teeth. Jack and I laughed and picked up our conversation as if no time had passed. We spent the entire recreation period catching each other up. Before long, we were living in the same dorm.
I will never forget the first time Jack told me he was dying. Earlier this year, I had just washed dishes in the bathroom sink and was toweling them off when he walked in and lit a cigarette. He had just returned from an outside appointment with an oncologist.
He had been rushed to an outside hospital after suffering severe abdominal pain. Doctors discovered late-stage liver cancer. He underwent emergency surgery, and he lost a large portion of his liver.
At first, the doctors sounded optimistic. But follow-up testing showed that the cancer was aggressive, and that further treatment would likely make little difference.
“It spread too far,” he told me between deep drags. “The doctor says I got about a year left, two if I’m lucky.”
In the weeks that followed, a facility doctor told Jack that an application for compassionate release — also known as medical parole — had been filed on his behalf.
In New York, a person seeking medical parole must be permanently incapacitated or terminally ill. The state parole board considers the person’s criminal history, institutional record, medical evidence, release plan and risk to public safety before deciding whether to schedule a hearing.
Jack’s application was denied.
“I never even received proof of it being filed,” he told me after receiving the decision. “Just this paper saying I’ve been denied at this time.”
Most people, incarcerated or not, think about what they will leave behind. For people in prison, that question carries a particular weight because our public identities often remain trapped in old newspaper articles about our crimes. Those clippings preserve the people we once were while ignoring everything that came after. An obituary may be our last chance to be seen as more than our crimes, our failures and our worst moments.
Yet I don’t know of a single prison system in the country that writes obituaries for the people who die in its custody. The omission exposes a painful contradiction: Prisons meticulously preserve records of punishment while rarely preserving records of personhood.
The more I speak with Jack, talk with the families of incarcerated people who have died, and study DOCCS policies, the more clearly I understand what I am doing. I am preserving the memory of a man in a way the state never will.
Recently, Jack and I were separated again when I was transferred to Coxsackie Correctional Facility, a smaller prison in New York’s Capital Region. We stayed in touch.
Not long ago, I was waiting for an escort to take me to the medical clinic when a mural caught my attention.
It stretched across the wall in a vivid wildlife scene: Trees and flowers surrounded a valley and a brook with deer moving through the landscape and hunters dressed in camouflage sitting in a tree stand.
“Nice, huh?” asked the officer. He stood beside me for a moment, studying it. “That’s God-given talent right there,” he said. “Reitano was the guy’s name.” Then he walked away.
All I could do was smile.
Long live Donald “Jack” Reitano.
Devin Giordano is an incarcerated writer and Bard Prison Initiative student whose work examines mental health, felony murder, accountability and the human cost of incarceration. His writing has appeared in Inquest, HuffPost, and The Progressive, and he is also the co-founder of You Are Not Alone, a nonprofit focused on addressing violence against women and how men engage with it.
