What Makes a Prison? A Poem.
I watch my hand drop the letter
Watch my hand that can hold hands
Watch my hand that can create worlds
And destroy them
And wonder at the depth of my disgust
Yet another letter
From yet another man
Same story from a new hand
The ending’s got a twist this time
Bit it’s all about crime
Written by a man
Incarcerated by a system
That teaches that the only way to beat the system
Is to be the system
He writes
“I should’ve had a 25 to life.
Cost me $45,000 to get it down to ten”
And I can see him grin
I stare at the letter as it falls
Stare at the stripes that slash through his scrawl
Like the blood of a victim
Too tough to die
I stare at the writing on the wall
And I know that he knows
This society’s reality
I’d like to say it doesn’t touch me
Because then of course it couldn’t hurt me
But why are we so terrified of the pain of empathy?
I’d like to be one of these people who simply believe
That the men behind bars are bad
I’d like that Manichean duality
Good vs. bad
And I could know which side I am on
But it’s a fallacy
It is a construction of a capitalistic society
Bent on profiting off of other’s destruction
You can read it; it’s history
It’s always only about money
Education breeds social awareness
I ache with the awareness of divisions
Generated by education
Generated not so much by those who care
As by those who don’t
I won’t
Believe in the criminality
Of a generation or a social class or an individual
Who is never innocent until proven guilty
In a system where fragility is poverty
And power is money
And povery is crime
And power is money
And money buys power
And clout
And clout buys opportunity
And immunity
And the truth is that if I was arrested
Rightly or wrongly
The first thing I’d do is invoke my Miranda,
Wrap my hand around the
Pulse of the game
The stacks of green pages
And buy myself a lawyer
Buy a judge
And a jury
And a life
(and less time)
It’s always only about money and not about crime
Razor wires slit the throats of men who have cried out
All their lives
For a chance
In a system that doesn’t believe in chances
Until it’s way too late
The poor get by by getting by
The only way to escape poverty is escapism
We all try to find a way out
But there is no penance but pence
Prisons are a business
Florence, Arizona
Razor wire glints in the sunlight
Like a sharpened blade
And across it the blood of a logo
CCA
Corrections Corporation of America
America
The land of opportunity
And immunity
If you have the money
The red sign drips across the lives of people
Whose lives are deemed valueless
By those who do the deeming
Red
Like the color of blood hitting air
Like rage, if rage were hued
I rage
I rage, and yet as I age
I fear that the passion will fade
That “radical” notions
Become the college diploma
See, I’ve never committed a crime
But I’ve done time
Time confined by wasted space
Of believing that because I have
The luxury of an education
I know something
Parents pushed too hard to push me forward
Bought my opportunities (and immunity)
Elitism pounded into my crowded brain
With each step pounded across campus pavement
It’s insane
To know it
Yet not escape it
To believe
That I can read
And I can write
So I am better somehow
Though I’d deny it if I asked myself what I thought
I do read
And I do write
And thus I persuade
My opinion laid out for scrutiny
I’d inspire a mutiny
With “I” at the center of it all
I believe that we are all valuable
Because I believe I am valuable
I think my thoughts are worthy
And in so thinking, create a prison
Of my own training
Of ego and education
Of believing myself exempt
And yet believing I can empathize
With the angry eyes
On the opposite side
Of the slashing fence
Simply because I can intellectualize
The pain
Incited by years of degradation and repression
And societally induced depression
I can philosophize
About the possibilities of the cause of the situation
But it’s all recreation
I write my papers
I dream my big dreams
And when the cell door slams shut
I shut my books
Tuck myself and indulge
In the illusion of exemption
Though we are not exempt
Putting people behind bars with unjust laws
And impenetrable, corrupt systems
Based on class divisions
Puts bars around each of us
There’s always a revolution
Power changes hands and next time around
It could be you or I in there
And so I think
“25 to life or out in ten”
What does it matter when
The prison you’re in
Is a prison of your own making?
When the prison around you
Is the prison of 2000 years of history
Compressing itself into this one single moment
When this one moment
Is all the time served combined
And you are all the people
Who have been behind prison walls
You are all the people
Who have lived out life in a cell
And you are all the people
Who believe
That this is not about you.
When I was in college, I did a significant amount of work with social services, specifically working with adult inmates. It was frustrating for me to feel like “the system” was this unfair thing that treated people differently based on class and yet to be learning about that unfairness in “the system”. This poem is about that difficulty that I experienced. It’s about empathizing with the inmates and thinking that the justice system should be overhauled and yet realizing that there were a lot of things I didn’t know about how to solve the problems in the system. It’s about empathizing with the inmates only because I was afraid of what it would be like if that situation were mine.
