Sofia ‘Candle’ Johnson is a non-binary trans woman and 25-year-old Egoist Anarchist currently in the custody of the Oregon Department of Corrections, confined at Coffee Creek, a women’s Correctional Facility. Her pronouns are she/they. Raised in the white suburbs of Broward County, Florida, Sofia is an anarchist who was born to much privilege, though she has been closeted until her early 20s and afforded little political discourse with anarchists prior to her chats with Manning. Sofia has been undergoing hormone replacement therapy since March 23rd of 2018, and expects to undergo vaginoplasty sometime-in-custody with appropriate support. Sofia is half-Venezuelan, and speaks some Spanish.

Sofia has taken large-responsibility for orchestrating a riot in Portland that placed her in the public eye. Due to an FBI informant in her inner circle, Sofia was arrested at the scene of the riot by being led into a honeypot while injured. She had smashed open multiple windows of a shopping district, the windows of a church, and destroyed an ATM. Sofia has accepted a plea-agreement for these charges, and is now convicted of ‘Riot’ and ‘Criminal Mischief in the 1st Degree’, owing some $11,000 in restitution.

Sofia’s sentence is largely driven, time-wise, by her conviction in relation to her robbery of a 7/11 in Beaverton, Oregon; she robbed the cashier at gunpoint for around-$860 and a handful of Backwoods cigars. Though she succeeded in fleeing from the police, she was later indicted while in custody pertaining to charges that arose from her squatting of a vacant veterinary clinic. She accepted a plea-agreement of the mandatory-minimum, 90-months, per §ORS 137.700.

All of her convictions run concurrently, meaning Sofia’s hard-release date is set as 12/22/2028. She has no remorse for her acts and holds the State in contempt. Sofia is an intellectual, and though her acts arose of necessity they were not born of impulse. She believes it is always time to act, even alone, that no act is more or less significant than another.

Sofia’s favorite book is Max Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum — she owns both the Wolfi translation and the older Cambridge Classic edition. She is similarly intoxicated with Friedrich Nietzsche’s work, and loves aphorisms. Her favorite aphorism is the French Le roi est mort, Vive le roi. Most of her time incarcerated is spent reading, writing, playing basketball, watching anime. She loves flowers and writing poetry. Her favorite commissary foods
are Chili-flavored Maruchan Ramen and FritoLay’s Cheetos.

Sofia’s favorite anarchist, other than herself, is the illegalist Luigi Galleani. Her favorite anime is the spin-off of JoJo’s bizarre adventure titled ‘Thus Spake Kishibe Rohan’. She loves Nihilism, Existentialism, Absurdism. She is on the spectrum, though she has declined formal diagnoses. Her favorite artist is Broward County’s Kodak Black, and she collects trimmings from every FritoLay product she eats in homage to his ‘Don’t Leave Me’.

Sofia is divorced, and identifies as pansexual. She is still searching for love. She believes in the ideal of communism, heavily distanced from any Marxist theories of a state or dictatorship. She is relatively opposed to civilization, and sees the evils of capitalist technology though finds it hard to damn a thing-in-itself of technology as a broader concept. Sofia grew up as a black hat hacker, starting in her early teens and distancing herself from the craft as an
adult-entering-college. Sofia is currently a student at the University of Oregon, after her scholarship essay on fucking the FBI was accepted.

Sodia plans to show her commitment to the Anarchist movement during her incarceration by continuing to create propaganda, furthering her intellectual studies, creating essays with her near-limitless time, staying devoted for her 90-month captivity, and, perhaps most importantly, continuing to set the standard of how-to-be-imprisoned: showing no remorse and giving no names or compromising into. After revealing the legal name of the informant in her affinity group, a well-seated activist who has had bail posted numerous times, Sofia is emboldened to dispel any idea of snitching being useful, in any
way, by example.

She likes her coffee as black as the flag. She writes fondly of bombers and robbers, assassins and arsonists. She won’t hesitate to quote Nietzsche or Stirner, maybe even to flirt. She’s immoral, a friend of murderers and drug dealers. Welcome the brave new insurrectionary enby of your dreams, someone whose pain has had to be the recipe, whom you can count on like-basketball to stick around.

-Candle