You think about getting out every single day. That never stops. But what that thought looks like changes significantly over the course of a sentence.
In the beginning, the anger dominates everything. You are angry at the system, angry at the circumstances, and if you are being honest, angry at yourself. That anger is loud and it crowds out almost everything else. Over time, if you do the internal work, it starts to quiet down. Not disappear, but quiet. And in that space something more useful starts to take shape. Plans. Goals. A version of what comes next that you can actually work toward from inside a cell.
The inmates who do the best time are the ones who figure out how to set realistic goals and find genuine satisfaction in achieving them. It does not matter how small the goal is. Finishing a book, getting your GED, running a mile on the track in under a certain time. The goal itself is almost beside the point. What matters is the structure it gives the day and the sense of forward motion it creates even when everything around you is static.
That routine and that forward thinking are what make reentry possible rather than just theoretical. People who spend their sentence planning and preparing come out with something to walk toward. People who spend it waiting come out with nothing but the absence of incarceration, which is not the same thing as a life.
On solitary, I have been there, thankfully only for a couple of days. The best way I can describe it is that every minute feels like an hour. The silence and the sameness close in on you in a way that is genuinely difficult to articulate to someone who has not experienced it. It is maddening in the most literal sense of the word. Even a couple of days leaves a mark.