There is something uniquely special about long prison sentences. And knowing you’re going to die in prison. Something indefinable that sets the prospect of decades, continuous decades, in a concrete and steel cage apart. The realized experience is something still more.
When I started my almost century-long sentence, I did what the majority do: try to reckon with the reality of circumscribed liberty. “Circumscribed liberty” is the most emotionally neutral way of saying that you would, one long, distant day from now, die in a concrete box. While correctional officials and criminal justice professionals might disagree, that is exactly what my punishment would mean. Whether consciously or not, everybody staring down the ever-darkening tunnel of decades of imprisonment confronts this same reality and tries to survive life after death.
Survival takes on many guises. Most common are drug-induced or inebriated escapisms and varying degrees of mental breakdown. I pass no moral judgments. Almost no one outside of these walls can understand what it is to actually exist in prison.
In all honesty, I doubt many people can imagine the choice between starving and eating food they would never feed to their pet. The apathy of employees delivering this fare, their callousness in saying out loud to their coworkers, in front of you, “My dog wouldn’t eat this crap.”
The daily subordination of your mental and physical well-being to the convenience of those tasked with your guardianship. Prison is a place where rules apply most stringently when they restrict a prisoner’s already circumscribed liberty. Otherwise, in general, rule application is pro forma, as is attention to detail.
This is not to say that all correctional employees are irredeemably apathetic, because I have been lucky enough to encounter some true and genuine hearts in and among this sea of jades and cynics; but these are the anomalous exceptions to the norm. The sentiment that prisoners, being criminals and therefore scum of society, should be grateful to get anything at all only serves to deeper entrench apathy.
To be fair, prisoners as a whole do very little to contradict this perspective. Generally speaking, we prisoners do everything imaginable to validate the very prejudices we struggle against. We lie, sometimes compulsively, steal, scheme, and manipulate, and have recourse to every underhanded maneuver in order to get one over. We lash out and project our frustration and rage at being sepulchered, injure others and ourselves, and in avoidance of reality, harm ourselves worse. Prison — a closed society that devalues virtue, celebrates vice, dismisses social values and norms, and denigrates those who do not conform.
If there is a general apathy among correctional employees, there reigns a particularly tenacious species of counter-apathy among captive populaces. When empathy and altruism are considered weaknesses and summarily preyed upon … where truth is based in a tortured subjectivity and sincere conversation is omissions and falsehoods —
How do you find any sense of humanity? In a place so hostile, how does anyone maintain their humanity? And this is the question every lifer must eventually face.
For most incarcerated people, a certain kind of cowardice (psychological self-preservation) compels them to run the other way. Just imagine trying to get as far away from yourself as possible while being stuck in a six-foot-by-ten-foot bathroom. Preposterous, but no less factual. No one can call life in prison living proper. At best, it can be termed a pallid forgery, but essentially it is mere existence.
Conversations dance around real life like a hummingbird, only touching topics such as children, loved ones, aspirations, love, loss, pain, and related emotions for the briefest of moments before flitting off to safer subjects like complaining, drugs, gambling, television shows, sports, gossip, backbiting, reminiscences of prison misadventures, past criminal follies, plotting future illicit enterprises, and inevitably the fabled “when I get out.”
That is the paradox of surviving life after death. You must live for the illusory mythic tomorrow while acclimating yourself to the reality of being relegated to a perennial yesterday. Some might see prison like purgatory, a sort of waiting room before hell or heaven. For my part, I view prison as arrested animation.
During my carceral exile, I have had the misfortune of experiencing the workings of two different Departments of Correction, Colorado’s and Indiana’s, over half a dozen facilities, and three times as many changes in operational and administration approaches. The only common denominator, other than institutions perpetuating their raison d’etre, as Clay Shirkey has said, is that everyone on the inside talks around a sentence of Life in Prison. The subject of Life is taboo, almost like discussing a partner’s infidelity in polite company. How does anybody accept the actuality of being a living corpse?
You are supposed to find meaning in the suffering, purpose and function in making amends to the society you offended. But, pray tell, how does one go about this rehabilitation and consecrate this reconciliation when the means negate the very end your punishment is meant to accomplish?
I once told someone I was trying to build a life worth living. It may sound mundane, unimaginative even. After all, every life is the things held dear and dearest: friends, careers, family, legacy, children, dreams, partners, and whispered hopes. In prison these are the very things you must hide away, smother, and strangle every day or go mad. Such things rarely survive the vicissitudes of long-term, uninterrupted imprisonment. To avoid the pain of missing your twin daughters’ fiestas de quince; your son’s first day of high school; guilt at not being able to help care for your ailing grandmother and dying uncle; inability to actualize your vision for helping your community and changing politics; and constant vexations at being disappointed, betrayed, abandoned, you have to kill the humane part of yourself: your very humanity.
After awhile, you view everybody with a studied skepticism. You painstakingly build support networks, knowing that two or three years later (or if you are abnormally fortunate, several years), they will vanish and you will have to begin anew.
Although devastated on some innate level, you recognize it is not the others’ fault, no insincerity or disingenuity on their part. Simply the nature and natural order of serving a lengthy sentence. Physical intimacy, in general, is a foregone exclusion which makes amorous relationships unlikely, though you still hunger for the acceptance and connectedness of requited love. Parenting is a bittersweet wound daily inflicted. Friendship in prison usually ends with a knife in the back — often literally. So much more works against life in prison beyond the isolation, distance from human contact, regulatory strictures and physical bulwark.
For lifers, prison is where individuals who once were people go to exist until they are no longer extant. Multi-decade sentences (i.e., virtual life) are unique, because there remains a mythic tomorrow despite society turning its collective back on the coffin that now represents your future. You die when you enter prison; a certain death, yet you do not die properly. You must continue, present in this world.
Disheartening, in a word, but how does one achieve the impossible? To build a life worth living–with all the societal and social import a life implies–from behind bars is merely improbable, not so much an impossible feat. The impossibility is to survive life after death.
E.C. Theus-Roberts #285512
Pendleton Correctional Facility
Pendleton, IN
