Malevolent or merely misbegotten, there is no distinction behind bars. Avarice prevails and evil almost always wins. Where is the justice?
By Susan Creamer Joy - Wednesday 21 Sep 2011
Yesterday I made the last of my long drives through the Kansas flatlands to a rural, Dairyqueen-town and to the dilapidated detention center where my son had been a resident for several months.
The sun was high and seemed to rally around my subdued consternation with an early fall display of buttery light. Even the scattered bunches of Lazy Susan’s stacked in wiry clusters among the high and faded jade grass flagged my passage along the highway with a cheery, yellow reception of felicitous regard.
Had my destination been of another sort, this would have been a splendid seasonal homage to perpetual optimism and one I would have wholly appreciated.
But yesterday I was neither going to visit my son nor to reclaim him. I was simply going to collect what personal possessions were mandatorily left behind when he was transferred to a maximum security prison some time ago.
The institution housing him presently is run by the State Department of Corrections. In addition to being used as a reception and diagnostic unit where every inmate received into custody is evaluated and processed before being sent to another facility to serve out his sentence, it is also where they house those inmates facing capital punishment before sending them to another facility where they will be put to death.
Whether a prisoner is to be remanded to another penitentiary to serve time on earth for his crime or to be summarily banished to another dimension altogether, is of little consequence to the system itself. Either way, each man will commence his earned castigation from within that same violently indifferent fortress.
I am told by a former guard that provocation is a necessary tool and liberally employed by those in power there. It identifies the potentially violent offenders from those whose fragile psychology limits their destruction to the bewildered contents of their own souls. Shamefully, this eclectic mix of criminal dysfunction is handled the way the human species always handles the detritus that is necessarily a part of our lives through the balance of light and dark: it is separated and contained. In these facilities evil, ignorance, addiction, avarice, the weak and the misbegotten are all treated to identical doses of disdain and cowed into subservience by guards with a brutal and detached mastery that has been years in the making.
Within the cycle of a 24 hour day, 23 of those hours are spent solitarily in a small cell. In that way, I am advised, the risk of cross-contamination from or injury to one inmate by another is greatly reduced. I find this confusing. These are not mold spores. These are men.
It is also a fact that because compassion and consideration are no longer extended to those whose choices have led them to this constructional purgatory and because their loved ones are regarded as merely an extension of the bane and burden the imprisoned have become, no notice is given to the family when an inmate is moved. It has been only through the two letters I received from my son three days ago that his whereabouts are now known to me, yet he has been there for nearly three weeks.
What I now also know and wish I did not is the harrowing demographic of this type of facility. I learned this through my own exploration, and did so after his letter revealed that upon orientation on his first day they were shown a video on how to avoid prison rape as well as being asked to sign a “corpse release form” against the possibility of an “untimely prison demise.”
From the high, narrow window in his cell, he writes that he can see only the “razor white walls topped with gleaming coils of barbed wire.” He writes that the facility is massive and that the noise level becomes almost intolerable towards the end of a long, restless day of pacing, ruminating and regretting. He tells me that he is terrified and although I polish my routine days with a varnish of relative calm, so am I.
This is not like anywhere he has ever been. It is not summer camp or boarding school or college or a protracted stay at a youth hostile. This is not even the blackened but tolerable inconvenience of a county jail. This is hell.
Whether it is from desperation or from some benign reflex I find myself unable to purge my reality of its ugly contents and I am drawn to think of the sun. However brazenly, the same sun that shone down upon me as I drove along the highway also shone upon the docile fields of thriving crops and the vibrant wildflowers peddling their organic nobility just as it does upon every free individual who has brokered a better arrangement with life; and I mentally stagger over the realization that even this great solar light is not able to penetrate the thick walls of my son’s prison cell nor alleviate the rattling instability of my own apprehension and abiding despair over both his broken psychology, as well as his immediate safety.
My son is a drug addict, not a psychopath and while the progressive moral erosion of his sorry condition inspired him to seek his bounty through the illegal and unethical practice of prescription fraud and the concomitant thievery and deception against those known to him, it did not permanently erase the original character of the decent young man he once was; the man whose recovery will not be aided by years sequestered among rapists, murderers and soulless impenitents but will require dedicated submission to extensive drug rehabilitation and counseling – something quite unavailable to him in these places, although he desperately wants that help.
This was not what I wanted to be writing today. I would have liked to have written an entirely different narrative, one that surveyed a more confectionary landscape of normalcy with gleeful injections of humor and I tried repeatedly, but the potency of these images and complexity of my emotions were insistent and unwilling to step aside until I gave them their due.
Right now I believe that my best hope might lie in the telling, that if I write about these baleful passages as they unfold, I might one day reach a point of great strength and acceptance and that beneath the sobering fibers of this dark cladding, a new and resplendent tapestry will unveil itself; a tapestry that will hold together under the revelatory beams of the sun and reflect the successful conclusion to our lives, spotted as they have been, by challenge and imperfection.
I am on the outside now, dismayed and whirling over these current changes and have no other choice but to do what I can to hold the light for him and to process my startled maternity until it resembles a bright orb of resolute hope. Quite simply, I cannot afford to fall from the only sky providing him a measure of daylight.
And on it goes.
The sun was high and seemed to rally around my subdued consternation with an early fall display of buttery light. Even the scattered bunches of Lazy Susan’s stacked in wiry clusters among the high and faded jade grass flagged my passage along the highway with a cheery, yellow reception of felicitous regard.
Had my destination been of another sort, this would have been a splendid seasonal homage to perpetual optimism and one I would have wholly appreciated.
But yesterday I was neither going to visit my son nor to reclaim him. I was simply going to collect what personal possessions were mandatorily left behind when he was transferred to a maximum security prison some time ago.
The institution housing him presently is run by the State Department of Corrections. In addition to being used as a reception and diagnostic unit where every inmate received into custody is evaluated and processed before being sent to another facility to serve out his sentence, it is also where they house those inmates facing capital punishment before sending them to another facility where they will be put to death.
Whether a prisoner is to be remanded to another penitentiary to serve time on earth for his crime or to be summarily banished to another dimension altogether, is of little consequence to the system itself. Either way, each man will commence his earned castigation from within that same violently indifferent fortress.
I am told by a former guard that provocation is a necessary tool and liberally employed by those in power there. It identifies the potentially violent offenders from those whose fragile psychology limits their destruction to the bewildered contents of their own souls. Shamefully, this eclectic mix of criminal dysfunction is handled the way the human species always handles the detritus that is necessarily a part of our lives through the balance of light and dark: it is separated and contained. In these facilities evil, ignorance, addiction, avarice, the weak and the misbegotten are all treated to identical doses of disdain and cowed into subservience by guards with a brutal and detached mastery that has been years in the making.
Within the cycle of a 24 hour day, 23 of those hours are spent solitarily in a small cell. In that way, I am advised, the risk of cross-contamination from or injury to one inmate by another is greatly reduced. I find this confusing. These are not mold spores. These are men.
It is also a fact that because compassion and consideration are no longer extended to those whose choices have led them to this constructional purgatory and because their loved ones are regarded as merely an extension of the bane and burden the imprisoned have become, no notice is given to the family when an inmate is moved. It has been only through the two letters I received from my son three days ago that his whereabouts are now known to me, yet he has been there for nearly three weeks.
What I now also know and wish I did not is the harrowing demographic of this type of facility. I learned this through my own exploration, and did so after his letter revealed that upon orientation on his first day they were shown a video on how to avoid prison rape as well as being asked to sign a “corpse release form” against the possibility of an “untimely prison demise.”
From the high, narrow window in his cell, he writes that he can see only the “razor white walls topped with gleaming coils of barbed wire.” He writes that the facility is massive and that the noise level becomes almost intolerable towards the end of a long, restless day of pacing, ruminating and regretting. He tells me that he is terrified and although I polish my routine days with a varnish of relative calm, so am I.
This is not like anywhere he has ever been. It is not summer camp or boarding school or college or a protracted stay at a youth hostile. This is not even the blackened but tolerable inconvenience of a county jail. This is hell.
Whether it is from desperation or from some benign reflex I find myself unable to purge my reality of its ugly contents and I am drawn to think of the sun. However brazenly, the same sun that shone down upon me as I drove along the highway also shone upon the docile fields of thriving crops and the vibrant wildflowers peddling their organic nobility just as it does upon every free individual who has brokered a better arrangement with life; and I mentally stagger over the realization that even this great solar light is not able to penetrate the thick walls of my son’s prison cell nor alleviate the rattling instability of my own apprehension and abiding despair over both his broken psychology, as well as his immediate safety.
My son is a drug addict, not a psychopath and while the progressive moral erosion of his sorry condition inspired him to seek his bounty through the illegal and unethical practice of prescription fraud and the concomitant thievery and deception against those known to him, it did not permanently erase the original character of the decent young man he once was; the man whose recovery will not be aided by years sequestered among rapists, murderers and soulless impenitents but will require dedicated submission to extensive drug rehabilitation and counseling – something quite unavailable to him in these places, although he desperately wants that help.
This was not what I wanted to be writing today. I would have liked to have written an entirely different narrative, one that surveyed a more confectionary landscape of normalcy with gleeful injections of humor and I tried repeatedly, but the potency of these images and complexity of my emotions were insistent and unwilling to step aside until I gave them their due.
Right now I believe that my best hope might lie in the telling, that if I write about these baleful passages as they unfold, I might one day reach a point of great strength and acceptance and that beneath the sobering fibers of this dark cladding, a new and resplendent tapestry will unveil itself; a tapestry that will hold together under the revelatory beams of the sun and reflect the successful conclusion to our lives, spotted as they have been, by challenge and imperfection.
I am on the outside now, dismayed and whirling over these current changes and have no other choice but to do what I can to hold the light for him and to process my startled maternity until it resembles a bright orb of resolute hope. Quite simply, I cannot afford to fall from the only sky providing him a measure of daylight.
And on it goes.