Both my case manager and my counselor have implied that prison has dehumanized me. They spoke more tactfully, and were polite, but I’ve thought about what they meant when they observed that I had suppressed my emotions for too long. As I was in the midst of my work today, I knew they were right.
Yesterday I spent time interviewing a man who served a four-month sentence for human smuggling. The name of the crime sounds more sinister than what he did, which was to make an attempt to bring a Mexican citizen into the country illegally. I wrote a story for the profile section of this blog, but as promised, I read the story to Ricardo before I sent it home. As Ricardo listened to me read, he began to cry.
I felt sad for Ricardo, though I didn’t really grasp the tears. He had been in prison for one month, and he would return home in three months. This was a 35-year-old contractor, weighing north of 200 pounds. He had life experiences, a wife, two children. The story I wrote was more descriptive of how normal citizens can make decisions that ensnare themselves in the criminal justice system through poor judgment. Nevertheless Ricardo could not withhold the tears as he listened to the story.
Prison no longer elicits such emotions from me. As a survival mechanism, I have conditioned myself to life with expectations of loss, sadness, helplessness, hopelessness, loneliness, and pending discomfort. I expect to face some type of conflict or assault on my sense of self every day. It doesn’t always come, but I expect it.
In retrospect, the tumultuous events that uproot my life come less frequently than they did earlier in my prison term. That may be because I have conditioned my adjustment, or because I have transferred to minimum-security. Still, during the six years I’ve served in camps, prison administrators have disrupted my life on numerous occasions without prior warning. They have transferred me twice, they have locked me in segregation, they have changed my job assignment. The interruptions have come because of my writing about the prison experience, as administrators would prefer to contain information about what transpires inside these boundaries. As an American, I feel more allegiance to people in society than to preserving what I consider the absurdity of prison cultures.
Prison administrators may disrupt my sense of peace, but they cannot elicit an emotional response from me. Too many years of trying to condition myself to live within this system has dehumanized me in that way. I expect administrators to make decisions that will determine where I live, how much contact I may have with my family and community, how the hours of my day pass, what food I eat, what clothes I wear, what I read, what music I hear, when I can feel natural elements and when I must exist within the confines of a concrete cage. I have to know that whatever privileges I enjoy today may not exist tomorrow, or in ten more minutes.
Whereas Ricardo feels the natural shock of imprisonment and loss of liberty, for me prison has become the only life I know. It is not punishment, it is my life and I have conditioned myself to live within the system administrators create. It means I don’t allow the institution to pull highs and lows or normal human emotions from me. Only my family can influence my emotions, though my conditioning has even tempered those feelings. I will have to learn how to live with such feelings again, because as a prisoner I’ve had to suppress them.
The exercise of will has taken precedence over feelings. Today I exercised that will by rising to begin writing at 3:13 AM, and adding another 10 miles to my running tally. I have extended my record of daily exercise to 136 days.
Monday, 27 April 2009
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