CONVICTION

About the Book

What if everything you believed about justice collapsed, and you had to rebuild your identity from a jail cell?

Conviction: Essays of Incarceration is a searing prison memoir that explores the inner world of a man who loses everything in a courtroom and must find meaning behind bars. Michael N. Kelsey, once a respected public servant, recounts his descent into the U.S. criminal justice system following a 2016 criminal trial that ended in conviction. Over five months in an upstate New York jail, he confronts the full force of anguish, shame, and isolation while turning inward for strength.

From a small jail cell, Kelsey revisits the wisdom of Boethius, Pascal, Sartre, and Tolstoy, and he weaves their philosophical insights into raw meditations on suffering, justice, and the human condition. Through essays that examine false accusation, spiritual reflection, and the search for redemption, he reclaims his voice and identity in a system designed to strip both away.

More than a personal memoir, Conviction is a philosophical reckoning and a call to empathy. It speaks to incarcerated individuals and their families, scholars of ethics and justice, and anyone who has wrestled with despair and still hoped.

For readers of prison memoirs, wrongful conviction stories, or those seeking spiritual and philosophical truth in the face of injustice, this book is both mirror and lantern.

Explore Conviction and rediscover the human spirit behind the walls.

About the Author

Tapping into his education in law, liberal arts, government, and against the backdrop of a turbulent childhood, Michael Kelsey writes interconnecting essays in a prison memoir that strives to make meaning out of the incarceration and social leveling that follows from a criminal conviction. An attorney, three-term county lawmaker, college philosophy adjunct professor, and candidate for State office when allegations against him arose, Kelsey stood trial and lost amid questionable circumstances. His time in jail was thereafter spent writing of the legal processes that he underwent, and their toil upon the human psyche. He writes with an insider perspective alongside an empathy that only an inmate can muster.