Setting the Stage - The Dungeon of Despair

Prison is a strange place to think of as “abounding in hope”. In fact, through all my experience working in prisons, I have been impressed with this single observation: Prison is a place which fosters, propagates, and encourages hopelessness. Men enter prison with the fresh and bitter memory of their crimes, arrest, trial, conviction, and sentence. They also bring with them fear and dread of prison, whether based on prior experience or hearsay. They are immediately, continuously, and relentlessly confronted with the fact of their failings and loss. Loss of freedom, yes, but also loss of relationships, privacy, citizenship, livelihood, property, dignity, choices – and loss of future, which is the essence of despair. It is, in effect, an incremental loss of life - a sort of emotional amputation in slow motion. The currently accepted term for a convicted felon is “offender”, to emphasize the act, or offense, that brought him there. As appropriate as this is to bring a much needed realization of guilt and responsibility: ownership of action and consequence, it freezes each of them in the past without any indication that there is “life after crime”. For the most part, this emotional pounding is weathered within a stiff exterior of purported innocence and undeserved mistreatment, the “tough guy” who rides it all out, no sweat! Beneath the hardened exterior, though, the cockiness of youth, the confidence of age, and the innate determination of the human soul are battered uncompromisingly. Facial expressions are largely those of guarded emptiness: “Don’t look at me – I’m not here.” The walls are gray, the walkways gray, the uniforms gray, and their hair slowly grows to match their surroundings as years creep past in monotonous succession. The singularly universal fixation seems to be the release or ”out date”. I’ve heard the phrase “Ten years and a wake up”, as if to say “My time in prison is like a bad dream from which I will be awakened the day I get out.” But even the thought of release carries perhaps more anxiety than hope, with the looming horror that, even getting back to “The Street” puts the likelihood of return to “The Pen” at greater than two to one. And each trip back is usually longer than the last.