How I See Prison

Prison is a world of bitter loss and irony. Prison is a kind of hell, a place of rage, pain, and despair. Prison is terror, drama, and drudgery. For inmates, prison is isolation and loneliness, camaraderie and competition. Prison is banishment, hunger, shame, embarrassment, wanting, and loss. Prison is internal and communal crisis, numbing boredom, repetition, endurance, and routine. Prison is failure, opportunity, hilarity, stagnation, and growth. For all its horror, in prison you can’t help but marvel at human resilience, adaptability, and power to reinvent. To witness this inspires wonder. Prison startles, frightens, and commands your attention for what you see that is beautiful and horrible in each of us. At its core imprisonment serves as a kind of death, which paradoxically inspires a kind of intense living. In the midst of all that seems so negative, you want to be your best, to grow and see yourself in another light, maybe as more loving, caring, and honorable. There is a kind of largesse to it, like war, and a rich spiritual texture pervades the place where those who are confined within the walls seek to love what is best in themselves and others and in the outside world they remember with such sweetness. Love is hard aching in prison. Right spills into wrong, savagery into civility, scarcity into ingenuity, waste into transformation, piercing frustration into simple satisfaction. Prison is the quintessential manifestation of paradox, a reflecting mirror for what’s best and worst in our world.