The gates close behind Julia Enright with a sound she will never forget. She is 21 years old, a college student and aspiring phlebotomist from a small Massachusetts farm town, and she still believes she is going home. She is wrong.
Four women. More than a century combined inside America’s women’s prisons. And one question none of them can escape: At what point does a prison sentence stop feeling temporary and simply become life?
Julia Enright was weeks into her incarceration when this interview was recorded. She had not yet gone to trial. She still believed the investigation would clear her.
She still believed she would return to her old life, to her job drawing blood at a doctor’s office, to the scholarships and minimum wage shifts that paid her way through college.
“I’m 21 and I’m from a little town in Ashburnham,” she says. “It’s up on the border of New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
I was definitely probably lower class technically, socioeconomically, only from growing up on the farm, my dad’s trades and things.”
Julia describes herself as organized, logical, overly scientific, and hugely ambitious. She paid for college entirely on her own.
Weeks ago, she was studying, working, and building a future. Now, she is awaiting trial for the murder of her boyfriend, Brandon Chicklis.
The other inmates are curious about her case.
“The girls are very curious for what I’m here for. I’ve had some girls straight out ask me, and I’ll just say, you know, I don’t want to get into the details and they drop it.”
One girl recognized her from a newspaper.
“So they think I killed my friend. So, murder.” At first, Julia still believes the investigation will eventually clear her.
“They have to do their job. I have to be a suspect and this is routine. But once I was sitting in the jail, I’m like, where did it get so messed up that I’m suddenly in a cell?”
Days later, she is moved into general population. The transition is jarring. New arrivals walk in wearing civilian clothes, a stark reminder of the world outside.
“It’s weird to see someone, you know, out of oranges, cuz they bring them in and they’re still in their civilian clothes, you know, they just got here.”
Rumors begin to spread about her case almost immediately. “Almost any girl you talk to will say she’s innocent.
Rumors get twisted so fast. It’s insane.” Julia stops talking about her case and starts drawing for other inmates.
Art becomes her icebreaker, her currency, her way of learning the rules.
“I was lucky that one of the first girls that traded with me, she said she’d give me a full bag of coffee, a full bag of our cream, and then a bar of soap. A nice soap though, not the ones that we get for free.”
Weeks into jail, even small reminders of the outside world begin to hurt. “We can see the highway in the distance. It makes you really sad, cuz you can see all of these people that are free, and they don’t realize how free they are, and then it’s like, I want to be driving down the highway.
That would be excellent.”
Visits become her only connection to life outside. She makes lists in her head of things to talk about, but she always forgets.
“You’re so emotional when you walk in. After all of that’s out of the way, the important things are just being able to talk like real people, you know? Cuz we don’t get to anymore.”
She can see her father. She can speak to him. She cannot leave with him.
“You hug someone, but you have to let go, and you see them, but you have to walk in the opposite direction. That’s always the hardest part.”
Weeks pass between court appearances.
Before her first pre-trial hearing, Julia packs her belongings, just in case she isn’t coming back to the same unit. “No one told me to pack my stuff up, but I always see the other girls do that, so I’m going to assume this would be the proper time to do so, on the off chance that someone doesn’t come back.”
She has come to terms with two years at most.
“I’m putting my bets on one, and I’m putting my hopes on the next court date that they’ll figure out enough to not even indict me.” For the first time, Julia begins considering that she may be in jail much longer than she expected.
“Girls always say you need to try to accept the absolute worst case scenario, and if you can come to terms with that, you’ll be at peace with everything.”
Weeks turn into months. Every court hearing ends the same way. Another date.
Another wait.
Her lawyers give her an estimate. “Months.
Maybe a year or so.” The weight of it finally hits her. “Suddenly, I understood the death sentence.
Like, I would rather die than spend my entire life in prison.”
Julia Enright never went home. On November 29th, 2021, a jury found her guilty of second-degree murder.
On March 4th, 2022, she was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years. As of August 2026, she remains incarcerated at MCI Framingham. Her earliest parole eligibility is expected in 2047.
For others, life in prison begins before adulthood ever does. Amber Wright is 15 years old when she helps lure fellow teenager Seth Jackson to a house in Central Florida, where he is killed by a group of teenagers. She is convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in a Florida women’s prison.
Five years later, Amber is 20 years old. For the first time, she begins to understand what a life sentence really means. “I deserve this.
Yeah, it has. And if we want to speak about the truth, I’ve contemplated suicide. I have.
I’ve told my mom several times I won’t make it that long. I won’t.”
“It’s sunk in.
I’m here. I’m here for life. I’m not going anywhere.
I can’t change that. Can’t take that back. I can’t make them change my life sentence.
Just like his mom said, an eye for an eye, life for a life, right?”
In prison, Amber meets women who have spent nearly three decades behind bars. For the first time, she sees what her own future could look like.
“I’ve only been locked up for five and a half years, but it’s my third prison I’ve been at. I’ve been with several older women that have been down 28, 30 years.”
“These women are amazing.
People change. People do better. People accept what they’ve done.
And they make it a point to change and to love and to grow and to make something of themselves, whether it’s in here.”
Amber says prison changed the way she sees her own role in Seth Jackson’s death. “Makes me disgusted with myself.
Makes me wonder what am I really doing? Like, what type of person am I really? I was the person that didn’t care about anything but having fun.
I was a selfish person. I was very manipulative. And I got what I wanted.
I’m not evil. I’m not.”
For Amber, women serving 30 years are still a glimpse of the future.
For Jacqueline Montanez, those 30 years become reality. Jacqueline enters a maximum security women’s prison at 17, a member of Chicago’s Maniac Latin Disciples gang, sentenced to life without parole for a double murder committed when she was 15.
“Gave me life in prison and they took me straight to Dwight Correctional Facility in Illinois.
I was 17 years old, the youngest in prison. I remember my first day in prison, I knew nothing to expect from this place. Here I am a gang leader, and instead the girl in me came out, the little kid came out, and I was scared to death.”
Older lifers approached her on her first day. “They brought me a big old bag of clothes and TVs, and I was like, oh no, these people trying to make me their girl. But they explained to me who they were, and they told me that they were lifers, and they told me, prepare yourself.
You’re going to see a lot of things, and they’re going to try you. So you have to stand your ground.”
Inside, even basic necessities had their own economy.
“They do give us state pay, but state pay is like $15 a month. Nothing. $15 won’t get you nothing.
When it comes down to your personals and food, they got to have a family. My family still buys me. None of my gang members did.
I never received not a dollar from either one of them. But my mother did.”
For those without family sending money, the consequences are brutal.
“People’s robbing people’s boxes. You’ll go to school and come back and your lock box is popped, and you lost all your food.” The only job that paid real money was industry, making clothes, and approval was hard to get.
“Not just anybody can work there.”
In women’s prison, violence was often tied to relationships. “The women’s maximum prison is more about relationships.
They fight about relationships. Girl on girl, you messing with my girl, that’s my woman. You got domestic violence in there.
You got girlfriends beating on girlfriends. I cut a girl up for having 𝒔𝒆𝒙 with my girlfriend.”
Weapons are improvised from ordinary objects.
“We’ll take the mop stick, the metal piece, and we’ll sharpen it up on the cement outside. And that becomes a shank. I’ve had a toothbrush shank.
You shank it up, and it becomes a shank. You take the blade off the razor, you put it on the toothbrush. Becomes a shank.
It’s rough when it comes to that.”
“I could say that my years in Dwight Correctional Center was the hardest, and it became my home. And I got to accept that I was going to die there.
Those were going to be the same walls I see when I take my last breath.”
The danger did not come only from other prisoners. “The women ran the prisons in Illinois.
We ran it. But in Florida prison, I was fearful. I didn’t even want to tell them where I was.
I didn’t want to tell them what my gang name was. Because when I saw the way that them people were being treated, you end up dead, beat, and all types of stuff.”
“I watched one inmate go up to the gate to ask an officer a question, and she got tasered, maced, and slammed on the head.
They don’t care. They think that when we’re sentenced to prison, that we become their slaves.”
Over time, the women built replacements for the families they had lost outside.
“Having life in prison was not a bother for me. I was okay with having life in prison. Prison is not an issue.
This is the world inside of another world. You still have 𝒔𝒆𝒙. You still look good.
You still wear clothes. You still wear shoes. So there was nothing I was missing out here in the free world.”
“It’s family orientated in there. We try to find our family since we don’t have our family with us. I had a prison mom.
I had a prison dad. I had prison kids, aunties, uncles. They love you for real.
Like they really are your family member.”
For years, Jacqueline lived as Loca D. Her mother’s death changed everything.
“16 years later, my mother passed away, and I went back and I said, I wanted to so bad prove to my mom that I can do this. I begged my teacher. I said, Ms.
Reed, can you please let me come back and get my GED? She said no. They don’t want you in school.”
Jacqueline pleaded with her. “Please, Ms. Reed.
My mom is dead. I got to show her I can get it.” The teacher finally agreed.
“If you graduate, I’m going to be the one to give you a certificate.” Jacqueline earned her GED, then studied restaurant management, dog grooming, dog training, and computer tech. But when Dwight shut down, lifers were no longer allowed to attend school.
“It was only for people who had an outdate. And that was the messed up thing about it, cuz I used to tell them, I was like, I’m going to go to court and I’m going to get an outdate. So you’re not going to let me finish restaurant management because I’m a lifer.
But lifers get out, too. Laws change every day. This should be rehabilitation, but it’s not.”
When Jacqueline was transferred to Lincoln, she cried like a baby. “I felt like I was being kicked out of my home. And it was a hard pill to swallow.”
What had changed her life was her mother’s death. “I knew that I had messed up and forgot to make it right before my mom died. I wanted to change up.
I wanted to bury Loca D. I wanted to become Jacqueline.”
After 31 years, Jacqueline was released.
But the rules she had learned inside followed her home. “When I first came home, I put bars on my window. I was scared.
For the first year of my freedom, I was still adjusting. I didn’t want to go outside. I was scared.
I didn’t even use metal spoons. I was still using plastic forks. I was still getting up thinking it was count time.
I was still in fear.”
Jacqueline Montanez walks free today after changes in US law allowed people sentenced to mandatory life without parole for crimes committed as juveniles to be re-sentenced. The former inmate now speaks to young people about gangs and violence, volunteers in her community, and is building a non-profit that teaches children dog training and grooming to keep them away from gangs and crime.
Not every life sentence ends the same way. Some women eventually walk free. Others spend decades hoping they will one day.
Judy White enters prison in 1979. She is 33 years old, convicted of first-degree murder, sentenced to life without parole. More than 40 years later, prison is still her home.
Before prison, Judy spent years caring for other people’s children. She was a foster mother to more than 100 babies. Now, she says the hardest part is being separated from her own.
“Being away from my children. That’s the worst. I have five children, 11 grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.”
Judy explains how she became involved in the murder that led to her life sentence. “My friend and I were sitting around her kitchen table, and she’s just like, Oh God, I just wish Eddie was dead. And I was laughing, and I said, well, this crazy man that came to our house, I said he’d probably do something like that for $50.”
They took that and hired the man to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her husband. “I knew that they had planned to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 him, yes. And I didn’t do anything to stop it.
So therefore, they say I’m just as guilty as the person who shot him. Yes, I should do time in prison, absolutely. I don’t think I should have went free, no.
But I don’t know that I should have got a life sentence, because I didn’t 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 him.”
Judy believes she should have gone to prison. She just does not believe she should have spent the rest of her life there.
“Well, I don’t know, maybe 25 years, you know.” Every 10 years, Judy can ask the parole board to reconsider her sentence. She has already been denied twice.
Now, she is waiting for another hearing.
“I get depressed every now and then, and I’m like, I can’t do this another day. I’m just done.
And I just want to stay in bed and not even move. But then I have to get over that, because I probably couldn’t survive like that. I couldn’t survive with no hope.
Not me. Every day begins with hope. Most of them end without news.”
“We checked at 9:11 too, and this is it for today. No messages from nobody. I can’t believe my kids haven’t messaged me yet.
Like, mother, what’s happening? Tomorrow’s another day.”
After decades of waiting, the moment Judy has hoped for finally arrives.
The warden brings her a letter. She is granted a parole board interview. “Thank you.
Thank you. You, Mama. I’m so happy.”
Her daughter shares the joy. “I told you there was hope and miracles happened, didn’t I?”
The letter is not parole.
It is only a chance to appear before the board. Judy calls her daughter immediately. “Honey, the warden just came and gave me a piece of paper that I get to see the board on March 5th at 1:00.
Are you excited?” Her daughter responds, “I am excited, but I’m just, you know, I try to temper myself. We went through this so many times.”
“I love you, Mama.” “I love you, too, precious. Keep thinking about you coming home and me laying on your lap.”
The letter Judy waited years to receive was only the beginning of another chapter. As of August 2026, she remains incarcerated at the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women. Her hope remains the same.
Four women. Four different lives. One question that none of them can escape.
At what point does a prison sentence stop feeling temporary and simply become life? The answer, for Julia, Amber, Jacqueline, and Judy, is written in the decades they have already served and the decades still ahead. Some will walk free.
Some will never know the day. But all of them must find a way to live inside the answer.
