Do you hear the rain in prison? The wind? Does it get so damp that the chill permeates through the bars and walls and you think perhaps your soul is rotting? Since you can’t go outside, are you confined all day to your cell?
Here’s the thing of it. They are not cells, they are cages. I've seen dog kennels with more room. And since the men have no choice, they adapt to what they don’t have. The walls keep things out more so than hold them in. Razor coils on the horizon - and "No," they don’t hear the rain.
I ask the inmates:
Do you hear the fog horns in prison? Do they bellow below you in an omnipresent cadence you can barely hear? Like, why you’re here…
When was the last time you saw the leaves change color? Or saw a baby or a child play. Or fell in to a comfortable bed with a comforting other. When’s the last time you felt cashmere against your skin, took a bath, woke to the smell of bacon and coffee?
Or threw a ball for a dog or had to choose which cut of steak you’d have for dinner or felt anything other than the concrete hardness of life.
How do you breathe in a claustrophobic environment that is strangling your every breath; when the smells of stale air and stares of vacant eyes show lost souls of forgotten and defeated men. You tell me you can tell which men have given up. There is nothing there, they are gone.
I’ve seen it as I walk through the mainline, you can sense it in the way they hold themselves, so lost they don’t even know where they aren’t. They have slipped so far through the cracks that they no longer can escape with the one thing that can keep them going, hope.
Many people are working on prison reform but like everything that has to do with prisons – it’s going to take time. In the interim, they should follow San Quentin’s lead. The rehabilitation programs and classes and groups and support of so many volunteers sustain their hope. More than once an inmate has told me prison saved their life.
An arsonist explains he wanted to stop, but didn't know how. A frail young inmate in his early twenties says his cellie is the first person that ever cared about him. Several men tell me they would have either killed someone or gotten killed if they hadn’t been incarcerated. They find mentors in older inmates or a volunteer in a literacy program that encourages them to keep writing or tutors them for an upcoming exam.
When the purpose of prison is more than about punishment, when it doesn’t take a celebrity to exonerate a prisoner, when society questions just what the hell is a sentence of life plus twenty-two years and four months – when we stop ignoring and start questioning the circumstances that contributed to their behaviors, we can educate parents and schools and people that in order to have compassion, you have to experience it. The one rule that the men have to come to grips with is the golden rule.
If we want them to do unto us as we are doing unto them while they’re locked up – we only perpetuate a cycle that so desperately needs to be fixed.
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