Vacaville, California, USA – On a windy evening, Sajad Shakoor is busy unloading cardboard boxes packed with Middle Eastern food onto a kerb outside of Solano State Prison, one of 34 facilities that make up California’s state prison system.

Shakoor, tall and bulky with a light red beard and a white kufi, the head cap worn by some Muslims, lifts one box after another out of the back of his truck, each packed with succulent bowls of lamb shawarma and rice, chicken burritos, and platters of sticky-sweet baklava.

When Shakoor enters this facility, just a few steps past a fence topped with spirals of barbed wire and a cinder block check-in building, he is stepping back into a world he once thought he would never leave.

He brings the boxes into a large room, decorated by incarcerated people with colourful murals of hot air balloons floating over the vineyards of the nearby Napa Valley and emerald waters of Lake Tahoe, a glaring contrast against the oppressively drab features of a prison interior.

In this room, Shakoor will address dozens of Muslim worshippers who have come to hear him speak, and enjoy the mouth-watering food that comes courtesy of Shakoor’s popular restaurant, Falafel Corner.

“I’ve been eating Top Ramen (a brand of packaged noodles) for so long,” Kali, a 69-year-old man at the event who has been incarcerated for more than 40 years on a murder charge, tells Al Jazeera. “So this food is so good.”

As the room fills up, with more than 100 people scheduled to attend, one of the most striking details is the diversity of age.

Young men in beanies and blue shirts with “CDCR (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation) Prisoner” in yellow block letters on the back sit side-by-side with elderly men sporting salt-and-pepper beards and shirts reading “mobility impaired”, digging into their food as Shakoor and others speak at a podium at the front of the room.

“My dad always told me that if success was about hard work, the hardest-working being is a donkey,” quips Shakoor. “All of this is from God.

“It’s a joy that’s extra special to come and serve food, because I spent time here,” he says.

Previously serving a life sentence that included a period in Solano and several other state prisons, Shakoor says he found solace in cooking and Islam – the religion he was born into, and that he became a devout follower of in prison.

The cooking passion that would become Shakoor’s profession, along with his faith, helped enliven the banal routines of prison life and offered a source of purpose and fulfilment that helped stave off despair.

“I thought I would die in prison,” he says. “That feeling that you’re never going to leave, that’s really tough to accept. It breaks a lot of people.”

As with many forms of ingenuity found within prison walls, Shakoor’s approach to cooking was shaped by scarcity.

“The halal (food prepared in accordance with Islamic law) meat alternatives they gave us, beans, rice, peanut butter, were so bland, so tasteless,” he says. “I had to come up with creative ways to cook our noodles or tuna or whatever we could get our hands on.”

In his cell, tinkering to put together makeshift cooking appliances like hot plates, Shakoor began to build up a repertoire of dishes that were hits among his colleagues as well as his jailers. For further inspiration, he sought out books and PBS cooking shows.

If the limited availability of ingredients was one factor in his creative approach to cooking, so too was the diversity of the state’s prison population. Shakoor’s dishes included elements of Mexican and South Asian cuisine – he’s of Pakistani heritage himself – alongside familiar staples like macaroni and cheese.

But his specialty, he says, were burritos.

“I was very famous for those, because the burritos had influences from Indian and Pakistani cuisine along with the traditional Mexican and a couple of different Chinese ingredients that made those burritos just party in your mouth,” Shakoor remembers.

In prisons, where food is notoriously dull and many rely on stores known as commissaries to meet their caloric needs, people were quick to take notice.

One day, Shakoor recalls passing out burritos to prison guards, a constituency he says you “always want on your good side”.

When a man descended from a guard tower demanding to know who had made the burrito, Shakoor expected trouble. But the guard had come down to offer his compliments to the chef. “He said ‘My family operates a food truck, but this is the best burrito I’ve ever had,’” laughs Shakoor.

But the resources he needed to build his cooking skills were not available with much consistency, with kitchen access varying from facility to facility. While some prisons encouraged cooking, others were more restrictive.

Some even required full strip searches before entering the kitchen to ensure that nothing could be brought to and from the cells.

Shakoor says things started to change during a period in San Quentin, the state’s oldest prison.

Sitting on the edge of the San Francisco Bay and, until May 2024, home to the state’s death row where condemned men await execution, it seemed like an unlikely location for a change in fortunes for the better.

But following a lawsuit on behalf of a group of incarcerated Muslims that bolstered accommodations for religious practices, Shakoor says that Muslims in San Quentin were allowed to set up a halal kitchen where he practised his cooking.

“I would say that, in San Quentin, I was able to really hone my cooking skills,” says Shakoor.

Just a few years later, those skills would be put to work in ways Shakoor had not imagined, when he was given an unexpected second chance at a life outside of prison.

For decades, the state’s prison population had surged to new heights as lawmakers passed a flurry of legislation mandating harsher sentences for a wide variety of crimes, a period known as the tough-on-crime era.

One of the most notorious was the state’s “three strikes” law, which meted out steep sentences for people convicted of several felonies throughout their lives.

In 1997, Shakoor, who had been involved in a number of burglaries as a teenager, instigated a fight between two of his neighbours. He turned himself in to the police, not thinking much of it.

He did not realise that under California law, a person who instigated a fight was held responsible for crimes, such as assault, carried out during the dispute, even if they had not participated directly themselves. Under that rule, Shakoor had committed his “third strike”, and was given a sentence of 25 years to life.

He was one of many people being swept into the criminal justice system in record numbers: between 1980 and 2006, California’s prison population would swell by sevenfold, with the number of state prisons rising from 11 to 33.

Calls to expand access to parole also struggled in an environment where tough-on-crime thinking was in vogue.

But over time, as deteriorating conditions inside the state’s engorged facilities brought legal challenges and costs began to strain budgets, calls for reform gained momentum. In 2012, voters passed Proposition 36, which reformed the three strikes law by allowing those convicted of less serious felonies the possibility of reduced sentences. .

Shakoor had become a prominent voice in support of the ballot measure, but also had come to terms with the expectation that he might never leave prison.

But after the proposition was passed, Shakoor applied for parole and was approved. He was released on May 28, 2013, carrying a small bag of books and letters out of Solano State Prison.

“Words cannot describe the euphoria, the fear of the unknown, the nervousness, the joy, the opportunity for a second chance,” he says.

Picked up by a group of filmmakers putting together a documentary on the reform effort, he had no hesitation when asked where he wanted to be taken first: the mosque.

“I understood clearly who was responsible for my release,” he says. “I wanted to show my reverence.”

A visit to the mosque was not the only thing on Shakoor’s mind after he got his freedom back.

Like many formerly incarcerated people re-entering society, there was a long list of needs to attend to, many complicated by his status as a person with a felony conviction: securing housing, catching up with loved ones, finding work.

He fared better than most, getting a job at a Bay Area Middle Eastern restaurant called Falafel Corner several weeks after his release. The skills he had fine-tuned with makeshift hot plates in his cell and prison kitchens were now put to work building a new career, and he quickly moved up to managing the restaurant.

In 2016, the restaurant opened a second location in Sacramento, and in 2018, Shakoor bought out the former owner. He says the business now has more than 30 franchises around northern California.

If cooking was one skill that Shakoor continued to build after leaving prison, his interest in criminal justice reform work was another.

In 2014, Shakoor, who had remotely obtained a degree from Ohio University while incarcerated, testified at the State Senate in support of SB 1391, which expanded access to college education for people incarcerated in California’s prisons. The bill was passed and signed into law in September 2014.

In 2023, he also became a vocal supporter of SB 309, which created universal standards applying to religious grooming and headwear across California’s detention facilities.

He drew on his own experiences of harassment for expression of religious devotion behind bars, recalling an incident in 2002 when he was sent to solitary confinement for seven days for refusing to remove his chitrali cap, important to his identity as a Muslim of Pakistani heritage.

But perhaps his favourite type of activism has come in the form of sharing food and worship with fellow Muslims in prisons across the state, a practice he began in 2017.

He says he typically does about five such visits per year, sometimes as many as 10. They are no small task, requiring hours of cooking and the even more strenuous ordeal of navigating the exhausting bureaucracy of the prison system.

But Shakoor sees the events as a source of fellowship and optimism for the prisoners in a situation that can otherwise feel oppressively hopeless.

During his time in San Quentin, when he still believed he would spend the rest of his life behind bars, he recalls becoming enamoured with a pair of flowers that had managed to sprout up from a crag of inhospitable rock.

“We can’t always change our surroundings, just as that flower couldn’t,” he says. “But we can learn to rise above the things holding us down and use our surroundings to cultivate us.”

Back in the room in Solano decorated with colourful murals, Kali, the 69-year-old man savouring his burrito, whom Shakoor has known since they were both incarcerated in Pleasant Valley State Prison, talks about the purpose and sense of peace that he has found through Islam.

He first converted in 1992, during a stint in solitary confinement, where he took what he called a “moral inventory” of himself by diving into the Bible and the Quran.

For many condemned to life in prison, religion offers a means of resisting, if never entirely escaping, the downward pressure of despair that comes with a life that is forever confined.

The physical proximity of the free world, often visible just beyond a window or a concertina fence, only adds to the tantalising sense of foreclosed possibility. In such circumstances, it seems miraculous that sources of warmth, creativity, and fellowship emerge at all.

It is a feeling that Shakoor deeply understands, and that Kali says he now helps others try to live with by leading anger management classes in Solano.

He quotes his favourite verse from the Quran: “Verily, with the hardship, there comes ease.”