Transcending the cell
Coppedge spent 12-14 months of his incarceration in a Special Housing Unit (SHU). Each cell is about 100 square feet and each prisoner is confined in his cell for 23 hours a day. In 2019,
The Altamont Enterprise, an Albany, New York, news outlet, editorialized:
It takes a rare person, like Damion Coppedge, to come out of an SHU sanction with his humanity in tact [
sic]. It looks to us like the things that sustained Coppedge in prison — a session where he was first introduced to Buddhism, mail that allowed him to play chess, a radio through which he heard poetry — are what will make him a productive member of society now that he is out of prison.