There are many things in life you can’t understand until you’ve lived through them to experience the feelings associated with those moments. With this in mind, I cast no judgment upon the hopeless souls who chose to end their misery rather than continue to exist within this hellish landscape known as the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
Between us, I must also confess to a great number of suicidal fantasies… almost daily. Most people on the outside, without any real knowledge of prison life, would believe that most deaths on the inside are violent in nature when, in fact, a large number of the deaths are prisoners taking their own lives, rather than each other’s lives. It has become quite a big problem within the Texas prison system.
Years ago, a guard questioned me about how I dealt with serving a life sentence. Being open and honest with him, I explained, “I try not to think about it – it’s like walking in a pitch black unfamiliar room, you’re only worried about where that next step will take you.” It’s been a number of years – over a decade – since I was asked that question, yet, I replay it in my mind ever so often.
Possessing a better grasp of the answer now, due to being imprisoned longer and gaining some emotional maturity, the basis of the answer remains the same: to survive the prison experience, one must not think to the future or revisit the past; you must live firmly in the current moment because time outside of that moment is haunted by past memories and a future that certainly is only misery along with an inability to make new memories that could compare to the specters of the old ones. Is it any wonder the suicide rates in prison are so high?
A few years ago, this prison – Ferguson – had one of the highest suicide rates of any Texas prison. It seemed like every other day prisoner movement was stopped for a person to be wheeled out on a stretcher to an awaiting ambulance. It was a good thing the guards began to do something about it, which was to place suicide prevention boxes in the pickets to help those hopeless prisoners that were trying to end their pain of being caged.
What’s that you say? Oh, the contents of the box: a large can of pepper spray, along with a gas mask for the guard. After all, there’s no better way to stop a person from slitting their wrist or hanging themselves than to gas them so they can barely breathe and their eyes feel like twin chunks of burning coal aflame inside their skull. I don’t know about you, but there’s nothing that makes me want to live as that does.
I’m sure that some sadistic guards enjoy all this, though.
I once overheard a male and female guard enjoying a good belly laugh over a prisoner’s attempt at ending his life. You see, a person that hangs themself in their cell can’t get enough height to snap their neck in the traditional manner. So hanging the noose – fashioned from a bedsheet – only strangles them to death. This guard walked up during the middle of this horrible ordeal.
The prisoner had decided better of his choice, but he was too high to get any footing and the noose had too much tension on it to be removed. This left the hopeless man with one option: to claw at the wall to find some purchase, so much so that he snapped his from their beds in the life-or-death effort. And this is what the guards found so funny: a person struggling for their life after regretting their choice. Unfortunately, while we fellow prisoners don’t find humor in this, we can’t allow ourselves to feel too much empathy, for them, either.
If a prisoner allows themselves to feel empathy for every act of violence and death in this nightmare, we’d all be an emotional mess. So feelings and emotions must be closed off in order to survive to spotlight another prisoner’s condition spotlights our own and to do that would drag us down to the end of our own bedsheet noose.
All that said, the prisoner is an emotionally closed-off people due to their surviving this environment. No hope for the future. No joy from the past. No empathy for other prisoners. What does all that mean? To see the next sunrise behind razor wire and bare… no feelings allowed.
2 Comments
This is truly insightful writing about how people do (or don’t) cope with life behind bars. Despite each individual’s rightful and unique perspective on incarcerated individuals, surely this reading makes for some kind of empathic understanding of others’ suffering—regardless of the suffering they may have caused themselves in life. I, for one, enjoyed it.
Signed,
a non-bleeding-heart-liberal :)
Ya know, on one hand I do get the Hard Time argument, Mize is doing LWOP and while yes the deep south, they throw that out like candy and assuming there’s a good reason for atleast a couple decades of a life, or even his whole life should that entail having sadists as supervisors?
My issue is “Retired Gaurd”, you and at minimal are a borderline sadist. By your own admission (if you could even understand why because your just a turn key). You enjoyed being a guard. Clearly. You spent a career laughing and adding to the hard time sentences of human beings which is not any guards job. No one should like being a guard in a jail or prison. Myself, aving done only short county sentences for dumb alcohol related offenses but no prison time I’ve seen plenty of that kind of attitude from turnkeys. You never should’ve ever been in a position to be a guard and what goes around comes around.
If not in this life, but the next.
From your simple paragraph, are a clear cut case of the wrong in the Standford Prison Experiments.