Note - This has been copied over from my Substack, so formatting may be wonky.
Amanda Cisco is a natural storyteller, a TikTok sensation, and a convicted felon. Creating content as @Prison_Story on TikTok, she’s one user in a small but popular niche on the platform, called “Prison Tok”. She has amassed millions of viewers for speaking candidly about her experience behind bars, sparing no detail, from the “squat and cough” to bi-weekly boiled beef liver dinners.
I hopped on the phone with Amanda and was immediately struck by a powerful, “deja vu” sense of familiarity. This is in part thanks to our shared Carolinian homeland (North for me, South for her) that makes her accent immediately recognizable to me, but it’s also her effusive warmth. Before I begin interviewing her, she lets me know she’s already read through my entire writing portfolio, which is a remarkably kind gesture and an impressive act of due diligence that I’m genuinely touched by.
Amanda is like a hybrid between a Faulkner heroine and Piper Kerman from Orange is The New Black. She’s a beautiful, privately educated white woman brought up in a supportive home environment, defying many of the commonly-held expectations about who does or does not belong behind bars. She’s so sweet that at one point during our interview she says in total earnest, “Gah, I’m sorry, I’m talking too much.” I can only laugh and assure her that that’s kind of the point. She is also an example of how anyone, regardless of upbringing, can wind up incarcerated under the right (or very wrong) circumstances. She was swept up in the tides of the heroin and opioid boom of the early aughts that would metastasize into a full-blown epidemic by the 2010s that continues to rage on today.
“People in addiction develop a sixth biological need in the form of their drug or alcohol,” she tells me. “And that need becomes more important than anything else- food, shelter, water, sleep, sex. It becomes a compulsion.” That compulsion would lead her to make an especially desperate mistake.
“I’m going to tell you the crime that I did that got me sentenced to prison, and I just want to let you know that you very well may hate me after you hear this,” she says in a TikTok from 2021 that remains pinned to the top of her profile. She recounts the story of how she, her boyfriend at the time, and his brother, all “heavily addicted to an array of drugs and alcohol” and desperate for money conspired to carry out an armed robbery. Amanda acted as a femme fatale, tasked with finding a man in a bar to chat up and lure out to a parking lot where the boyfriend and brother would be waiting. Amanda picked out the unlucky gentleman and brought him outside, her long hair piled into a ponytail to serve as a signal that this was their guy. They held a gun to his head and robbed him while he begged for his life.
The trio was arrested almost immediately, later that same evening. Amanda accepted a plea deal and was sentenced to five years in a South Carolina state prison and ended up serving two and a half, from 2007-2009.
Think about the worst thing you have ever done. What do you feel guiltiest about, most ashamed by, what makes you writhe and cringe at the thought of it when you’re trying to fall asleep? Try and imagine if tens of millions of people knew in detail what that thing was and had carte blanche to pass judgment, often anonymously. Imagine putting yourself in that situation willingly- that is precisely what Amanda has done. She put her own head on the chopping block, but was surprised to find she was rewarded for doing so- she has been met with more forgiveness and understanding than she has vitriol.
She, like so many of us, downloaded the app at the onset of the pandemic out of sheer boredom. Her primary goal was to entertain and give viewers a window into the taboo of having been incarcerated.
“To make videos on there, I felt like I needed a niche. I thought ‘What’s the most interesting thing about myself?’ and thought to start telling stories about my time in prison,” she tells me.
She uses the app to share “Prison Hacks” and tidbits from the inside that others would probably never begin to think about- how to exfoliate your face with coffee grounds (facial soap and moisturizer are unavailable), curling your hair with toilet paper rolls (this one’s pretty obvious- no hot tools), and a live demo on how one might Macgyver a sanitary pad into a tampon (tampons are only available for purchase at the commissary in most prisons, while pads are provided). Aside from these quirks that come with adjusting to a lack of basic toiletries, Amanda also touches on the grave, heartbreaking realities of incarceration. Her story generates a seemingly never-ending barrage of questions from inquisitive viewers.
“What are the toilets like? Do you have to use the bathroom in front of everyone else?”
“What is prison like if you’re pregnant? What happens when it’s time to give birth?”
“What happens if you die while you’re in prison?”
“Do prisoners get to celebrate their birthdays?”
She answers each question with total honesty, relying on anecdotes from her own experience and things she witnessed while serving her time. With every story, she is bringing millions of people, who may be uninformed or perhaps even a bit judgemental, closer to understanding life inside our carceral system. There is an element of sensationalism, but the viewer receives just as much (if not more) an education as they do a spectacle.
A 2019 Cornell study found that 45% of Americans have had a family member jailed or imprisoned.1 That means 45% of Americans have at least some idea of what life is like for those behind bars, and around 55% probably do not. By sharing her story, Amanda and other “Prison Tok” creators are filling in the gaps, in a way more radical and meaningful than many people realize.
In one video, Amanda answers the question of how the process of giving birth works for pregnant prisoners. When an incarcerated pregnant woman enters labor, she is forced to perform most of her laboring in her cell, without assistance, until the moment it’s time to push. When Amanda was in prison, she explains, the modus operandi was that the mother would be handcuffed for the duration of her delivery. This was a fact entirely unbeknownst to me before seeing her TikTok about it, and I have to imagine the same is true for a great many others.
Thirty-nine states have passed legislation banning shackling during delivery, and the practice was banned in federal prisons by The First Step Act, signed into law by Donald Trump in 2018. Despite those protections, in practice, adherence to the law is highly inconsistent, and shackling during labor continues commonly and without penalty.2 Almost immediately following birth, the child is removed from the mother’s arms. Ideally, the infant will be passed off to a family member. If one is not available, the child will enter foster care, leaving the birth mother highly vulnerable to losing her parental rights entirely.
By sharing examples like this, Amanda is taking on a much greater task than just storytelling. She’s highlighting major flaws and cruelties within the U.S. prison system that even fairly engaged citizens would have otherwise neglected to consider deeply. She is encouraging her viewers to become more curious and perhaps more critical of the way our country treats our enormous prison population without ever explicitly telling anyone what to believe.
Furthermore, the ability of a formerly incarcerated person to log on to an app with over a billion users and provide an opportunity for a tremendous amount of people to forge empathy and understanding for someone they’ve never met is an extremely rare case of social media working as they way we’ve always been told it was intended: to foster connections and bring people together over common ground.
I once got a man on my For You Page who had just been released from prison after fifteen years, documenting himself trying out all of the things he’d missed out on. He was on his way to try gelato for the first time. I thought about what a funny thing that was- the thought of whether or not prisoners could have gelato had never crossed my mind. It’s a very silly thing, but it made me think about how devoid prison is of the usual comforts or little joys that it renders going for gelato a significant milestone in this man’s life.
The For You Page levels the playing field- for many of Amanda’s followers, she may be the only formerly incarcerated person they “know”, even if they do not truly know her. People in prison are intentionally removed from society, and that ostracization continues well after they are released. TikTok allows them to reenter the conversation and regain control over their own narratives. They have the rare opportunity to tell us exactly who they are, rather than the other way around.
The proposed ethos of our justice system is that it takes “bad” people and makes them “good” again. Or, the ones deemed too “bad” to safely reenter society will ride out the remainder of their lives in prison. However, we don’t have faith in our system to carry out that rehabilitation effectively and remain squirrely about interacting with those who have been released from the system. That distrust makes it damn near impossible for former inmates to gain employment, and housing, or engage with their communities to resume normal life, keeping our recidivism rates uncomfortably high.
Upon her release, Amanda applied to work at a local chain restaurant seven times before the manager, impressed by her persistence, offered her the job. “I think it’s much more difficult for people of color to rehabilitate. I was a preppy white girl- I definitely had some advantages,” she said. And I agree- Amanda’s outward appearance, lilted voice, and friendly demeanor make her the last person you would ever expect to have been in prison. She knows that, too, and it’s a big part of why she does what she does. She wants people to understand it could just as easily have been them.
“Anybody could end up in prison. You could, Jax. And try and picture yourself there- because that’s who everyone else in there is. Just regular people.”
“Prison is you know, an industry. It’s more punitive than it is rehabilitative, so there’s a lot of that too. But that’s a whole other thing,” she said, retreating a bit. I wanted to push her to say more, but I don’t. We’re short on time, for one thing, but more than that, everything I’ve gathered from her tells me how much pride she takes in having taken so much accountability for her actions. I suspect her hesitancy to say more could be explained by not wanting her critiques of the system to be conflated with skirting responsibility, even though they’re certainly valid. After all, she attributes her recovery to her Christianity and the 12-step program, where accountability is king.
Step 9 calls upon participants in the program to make direct amends to people they have harmed. One day, after her release, Amanda is at work and compliments a customer on her engagement ring. She asks her the name of her fiancé, and the woman responds with the exact same name as the man Amanda had aided in robbing at gunpoint. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. The customer was not marrying Amanda’s victim, but she was marrying his son. Amanda bravely asked if it would be possible to meet this woman’s soon-to-be father-in-law and make amends to him. The woman returned to Amanda’s workplace the next day, reporting back that he had agreed to meet.
The two ended up sitting down, speaking, and establishing a plan for Amanda to pay back the amount of money she and her conspirators had stolen in installments over time. At the end of their conversation, the man gave Amanda a hug and assured her that he forgave her.
Amanda is thriving by virtually every measure. She’s been happily married for six years, has restored her relationship with her now-adult son with whom she is very close, and is working and helping others in her role as a Certified Peer Support Specialist. She’s such a success story, I think people who lean conservatively on matters of criminal justice would be quick to point to her as an example that our system does work.
I wouldn’t be so quick as to fork over that credit. Amanda is an exceptional person who has survived exceptional circumstances. Her mental fortitude, commitment to self-improvement, and devotion to God are awe-inspiring. Her character — and her systemic advantages— are more truthfully the catalyst to her success. She has a whole lot of grit and a whole lot of luck, too.
Expected outcomes for the majority of formerly incarcerated people are more grim. The Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics has estimated that nearly three-quarters of all released prisoners will be rearrested within five years of their release and about 6 in 10 will be reconvicted.3 Mental health issues are extremely common within the system, with 64 percent of jail inmates, 54 percent of state prisoners, and 45 percent of federal prisoners reporting mental health concerns.4 This is also often co-morbid with substance use disorders. Those issues are contextually inalienable from the crimes committed by offenders and should be treated as such, but are often only exacerbated by lack of care and additional trauma experienced while in prison. Even for prisoners without mental health issues or substance use disorders, the challenges that await them during reentry are often insurmountable.
It’s hard to say what effect the popularity of prison TikTok creators will have on actual policy or the betterment of the livelihood of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated Americans. If nothing else, Amanda has she has invited millions of people to ask deeper questions about incarceration. The most important being, “What would prison be like, if it were me?”
Enns, P. K., Yi, Y., Comfort, M., Goldman, A. W., Lee, H., Muller, C., Wakefield, S., Wang, E. A., & Wildeman, C. (2019). What Percentage of Americans Have Ever Had a Family Member Incarcerated?: Evidence from the Family History of Incarceration Survey (FamHIS). Socius. https://doi.org/10.1177/2378023119829332
Kramer, C., Thomas, K., Patil, A., Hayes, C. M., & Sufrin, C. B. (2022). Shackling and pregnancy care policies in US prisons and jails. Maternal and Child Health Journal, 27(1), 186-196. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10995-022-03526-y
James, Nathan. “Offender Reentry: Correctional Statistics, Reintegration into the Community, and Recidivism”, 2015. Correctional Research Service, RL34287. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34287.pdf.
Collier, L. (2014, October 1). Incarceration nation. Monitor on Psychology, 45(9). https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/10/incarceration