On Sundays this fall, Robert Bryant and 70-some other inmates at Lancaster Work Camp in Trenton, Florida, gathered in the facility’s dayroom around a 50-inch Samsung flatscreen television. They had to share. They shared everything. They slept in rows of bunk beds with no separation, and took turns using four showers and four toilets that had no stalls and no walls.
But on Sundays, Robert demanded the TV be tuned to whatever game the Denver Broncos were playing. And demanded nobody change the channel. This was his window into his best friend’s journey, some 1,750 miles away.