When Shawna Pierson was incarcerated at La Vista Correctional Facility, she thought she knew everything. “I was at a place where I was kind of indignant. Nobody could really teach me anything. I had it all figured out,” she told me in an interview.

She said she was “hurting people, breaking them down and destroying them and thinking the world revolved around me. That’s how I walked myself into prison.”

Once in prison, she immediately found herself in conflict with another woman inside. Her problems followed her in.

And then, rather randomly, she noticed a flier on the prison’s bulletin board for something called the Realness Project .

“It was talking about better relationships, being able to connect with other people. And I felt like, 'You know what, I don’t know if I do have that.

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