The Void of the Incarcerated

What happens to a human being
when he or she is systematically stripped of
all that identifies them as human?
They become the living dead.
Here are a few observations
from the grave known as Old Folsom Prison
from an old friend named Vern Robinson
who has disappeared into
The Void

Prison is like the living envision death; no one wants to be here, and no one understands what it is like to be here until they get here, regardless of how much they may have read about prison life, or how many prison movies they may have seen. On the other hand, perhaps death is a step above this kind of involuntary limbo. There are some here who eventually chose death as a way out of the madness of incarceration, despite the uncertainties which lie beyond the grave. At some point, the worst that could await a man on the other side of life seems better than the suffocation of life behind prison walls.

Although there are other situations in which men find themselves held against their will, prison life creates a singular type of melancholia. During times of war, men are forced to take up arms and slaughter one another, often against their will if not their better judgment. But there is usually an end in sight, however tenuous, to military service. Not so in today's prison system, at least for "lifers" like myself, men who harbor little illusion that, barring some dramatic and miraculous awakening of the general populace to what horrors have been created here in their name, we will remain here for the balance of our days on earth.

Recently I viewed a program on television called "Hard Time", a show which chronicled the evolution of prisons and prison life since early Roman times. One common feature of all prisons, regardless of their locations or cultural origins, is the isolation experienced by the inmates. A psychological expert on penology who was interviewed for the program claimed that, "it is a fact that isolation causes severe emotional and mental problems".

I witness the reality of that abstract psychological observation every day of my life along the tiers and in the prison yard here, as well as in the landscape of my interior life. Isolation is the ultimate form of deprivation. Each day that passes for a man or woman in isolation is another day during which they move further and further away from their human identity. The "emotional and mental" problems that result are actually symptomatic of the devolution of a person away from the higher functions of their cerebral cortex in a relentless march into the shadowy world of the limbic brain, a place of reaction and fear, akin more to the life lived by a lizard than that of a human.

Imagine what happens, for example, when an entire population of males is kept from any but the most cursory of contact with the opposite sex, if one can view the contact we have with female guards here as anything similar to a true form of connection between people. On the contrary, what little intercourse (and, of course, I use the word sardonically, in its social rather than its sexual context) we have with these women is quite dehumanizing and brutal, for they feel it is their duty to "out macho" even the most primitive of the male guards, in order to demonstrate their toughness. Not only are we deprived of the ordinary sexual release that men and women provide for one another in a relationship, we go for years at a time with no form of touching whatsoever. If the reader knows anything at all about the healing power of the human touch, then he or she can begin to conjure the consequences of its denial over vast stretches of times. Emotions back up like clogged sewers when there are no tender ministrations to provide release.

Voluntary celibacy, often associated with some spiritual or philosophical goal, can be uplifting if the practitioner is of sufficient strength, discipline and aspiration. That this practice requires the skills of a special, more evolved human than mere mortals is easily verified by witnessing the experience of countless priests and nuns within the Roman Catholic Church who, as we have had sadly verified for us again and again over the past few years in hair-raising media stories, were unable to live up to their vows. Scores of accounts of priest pedophiles and emotionally deranged nuns have moved from the tabloids to the front pages of the morning newspapers in recent times.

Imagine then, the seismic forces pent-up in a population of men who abstain only because they are forced to do so, and imagine further the eventual, inevitable explosions that occur when there is no longer any room left for the energies to be squeezed and suppressed into. The trauma of involuntary celibacy then begins to exhibit itself in strange mannerisms, obsessions and belief systems behind these walls. "Queens", those openly homosexual men who flaunt their feminine characteristics, exert a strong, in many cases controlling, influence on certain inmates, especially the young and impressionable. I recently met a likable young man who has been continuously incarcerated since he was 12 years old. He is now 22. His exclusive sexual experience has been with "pretty boys", gay men who are either forcibly turned-out or who volunteer to satisfy the sexual hungers of those who have no conventional outlets. His first adolescent sexual encounter was with just such a man while he was first institutionalized. That is all he has known. The only female body he has ever seen unclothed was in the pages of a girlie magazine.

Which is why these magazines are such a big business in prison. When inmates are not acting out their sexual frenzy with other men here, they are preoccupied with masturbation. To many inside these walls, self abuse becomes highly addictive, and some men are known to perform this act a dozen or more times a day. Conceive, if you can, the terrible sexual frustration that must be experienced in order to turn to such an addiction. There is never any real sense of satisfaction that results from these fantasy encounters. Why else would a man do such a thing again and again, day after day, unless he were striving for pleasure, for a connection, he could not attain?

The young man mentioned earlier strives mightily to compensate for these effronteries to his manhood by being overly aggressive, a real macho guy in the gang world in which he has risen to a position of leadership. He honestly believes he is not a homosexual. In fact, he passionately argues that point of view on a regular basis. To him, "the punk is the one on the bottom". He is willing, eager in fact, to back his contention with both fists. All his protestations don't change the reality of his situation, nor alleviate the continual emotional and mental trauma of a young man who has been forced into a lifestyle he hates. I suspect from observing him that he hates himself most of all. What do you suppose he thinks and feels about other human beings when he cannot possibly like himself?

There can be little wonder that violence is always under the surface of isolation and deprivation which define our lives here. Everyone is always angry. When a man laughs in prison (a sound heard often here, day and night), it is more the cackle of a deranged hyena than the mirthful sound of a human experiencing true joy or levity. These demented chortles are exaggerated, out of all proportion to the supposed source of the humor. Some observers might view this as a defining characteristic of the unsophisticated, the uneducated, the crude. Lower class folks, or perhaps for complete accuracy I should use the term "under class" people, generally exhibit loud, crude, tasteless behavior when amused. I suspect this is so because there is so much accumulated gloom and anger to escape from that they over compensate by means of such colorful displays. The contrast can be startling to the uninitiated. Close your eyes, and envision several thousand caged animals that are seething with rage, but who continually break out into long series of whoops, hollers, and overdone guffaws. This cacophony, along with a selected assortment of other noises like radios and televisions, as well as a collection of screams, profanities, and noises of varying ethnic significance, are a constant backdrop to life here. And the noise is endless, often around the clock, with no regard to the effect it may have on anyone at the receiving end of this aural mayhem.

The vile stew that is anger begins to brew when the sentence begins, and continues to boil and churn as an increasing amount of heat is applied to it every day. Even the guilty, who should perhaps theoretically feel more remorse than anger, seethe with rage. Because regardless of whether or not you've done the crime, prison is not conducive to repentance, remorse, and certainly not rehabilitation. This is perhaps the cruelest irony of all which your tax dollars hemorrhage away each day to support. If a man were to truly seek redemption and renewal here, it is he who is most likely to become buffeted by the greatest storms of ire, for renewal is the most elusive of states to achieve while in the bowels of this terrible system. Every rule, every person -- from the lowest paid guard on up to the warden -- are set in an intractable determination to frustrate the most sincere of desires and efforts that an inmate might make to initiate positive change in their lives.

As for the wrongly accused, the innocent, of which there are countless thousands within these walls, resentment and irateness are the stuff of everyday life. How else could a man maintain a modicum of sanity were he not to resist the unjustness of his incarceration with his anger? Anger, in turn, leads to a unique and terrifying brand of etiquette and social regulation. What everyday people on the outside consider normal becomes twisted, inverted and perverse in prison. Common courtesy, while also diminishing in the outside world I'm told, is virtually invisible behind bars. Quite the contrary, in fact, when courtesy is exhibited by an inmate, his fellows interpret this as an indication of weakness and fear. The axiom here is that "strong men speak when they please, not necessarily when they are spoken to". I leave the admonishments of the New Testament to better men than I. In this place, if you "turn the other cheek", you're liable to get it slashed open with a shank in short order. The display of such "Christian" sentiments is like an open invitation for the predators, of which there are many in prison, to fall fully upon their prey.

Here, an ordinary question is usually received with a blank stare if the man at the receiving end of the inquiry isn't in the mood to answer. A naive newcomer who persists in pursuing a response may be shocked when he is bluntly told to "fuck off". If he is lucky enough to survive his own effrontery, that is. If the man being pushed is angry enough, he might respond with violence, without every uttering a word. I work closely with a colleague at my prison job in the library. He is serving three consecutive life-without-parole sentences and, as you might suspect with that sort of time ahead of him, isn't often in the mood for conversation, casual or otherwise. More days than not, we work together in utter, stark silence. When I started my life sentence nearly a decade ago, the silence bothered me; now it is welcome. I don't wish to socialize with him any more than he does with me. After all, what would the normal pleasantries of life mean to us?

"Hello, how are you today?"

"Oh, just fine, thanks! And you!?"

"Terrific! How 'bout that great breakfast this morning?! I can hardly wait to see what's for lunch!"

I think that sort of banter is pointless enough on the outside, but at least it's reasonable to expect that an "ordinary" person will be of the disposition to allow the exchange of such banalities. Not so in this place. Talk, when you're engaged in some form of work you don't wish to do and elbow to elbow with people you don't wish to be with, is worse than cheap; it's meaningless, an unsoothing, unwanted invasion of the institutionally imposed isolation that, after a period of time, becomes a bizarre sort of defense mechanism.

Indeed, the forced labor we are required to participate in week after week, month after month, year after year is one of the more powerful progenitors of anger in prison today. Few Americans appreciate the growing trend towards viewing prisoners as a captive labor force. Perhaps we have learned this lesson from the Germans who employed it with such success during the Third Reich. Like them, our overseers mandate that we perform tasks we are likely to have no interest in, and we are made to work long hours usually without compensation, token or otherwise.

Ironically, away from our slave labor routines, talk suddenly becomes a cheap form of entertainment, a way to deal with boredom and fear. A "new fish", or any frightened man, is readily identified by the rate of his babble. New men sometimes try to impress the older cons with their patter, pretending to all variations of street savvy and insider knowledge of what prison is "really" like. To hear them blather, every new con was a millionaire criminal on the street, but at the moment happens to be just a little down on his luck.

On the "job" and off, an inmate's anger is fed by his sense of complete helplessness. Virtually all individual freedom is taken away once we pass through the gate. The consistent lesson from all that occurs here is that one must learn to tolerate every form of intolerable debasement in order to survive. It matters not how repulsive, irritating, humiliating, insulting or abusive the behavior is which is heaped upon us by our keepers throughout the day; we are to surrender to it, no discussion. The first lesson comes when you arrive and are stripped naked and made to bend over and spread your butt cheeks wide in front of a panel of strangers, a tawdry group of malcontents who seem to resemble out-of-work truckers, cowboys and circus laborers much more than professional penologists. From the moment you arrive, the only real distinction between the ignorance and lack of education of the inmates and that of the "corrections officers" is the uniforms.

Body odors, flatulence in a 7-foot-by-12-foot cell, loud noises of every sort (as mentioned earlier), men dressed in a pitiful parody of women, men trying pathetically to act like women, women (guards) trying to act like men, blacks who act like stereotypical niggers, Latinos who act like stereotypical greasers, and whites who accurately portray the affectations of trailer trash and Aryan race baiters -- these are just a few of the realities comprising this environment that fuel my personal anger profile. And I must tolerate all of it, minute by minute, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, without complaint or recourse. The result of this process of having to swallow every conceivable insult without resistance? One learns to detest everyone and everything, to react irrationally, most often with rage, without warning at a mere glance or ill-timed word or any number of random occurrences that ignite people here who find no other outlet for the continual debasements and dehunamization but their fury.

Is this what prison is intended to be, a place where humans are slowly, systematically stripped of all vestiges of their species? Where men who have measurable defects are turned into unrecognizable monsters, ready to unleash their pent-up frustrations on an unsuspecting world should they ever get the chance?

Beware America; you are creating a sub-genus of creatures who resemble humans in appearance only. If Jesus was right, remember that "as you sow, so shall you reap". Someday you will reap the whirlwind. And it will be a storm of your own making.