Life Underground (A Meditorial -- Meditation/Editorial)

Life is different on the other side of the electric gates, fences, dogs, and concertina wire. Time passes like thick syrup; a pervasive sameness pervades the days; and the yards are crowded. There are many more men than the writing workshops can accommodate, and, sometimes, the number of men who show up make them unwieldy and chaotic. We don't have the chairs, tables, materials, or time to hear from everyone. Men get frustrated. They walk out. 

I can't claim to know anything beyond the vaguest notions of what life is like outside the workshops on the yards and in the cells. I am not subject to dehumanizing treatment, the brutality, abuse, rape, or politics of predation and power. But I do see that there are more poor, more black/brown/red, more illiterate, and more mentally ill men in prison than I see in random scenes in Tucson. Prison seems a kind of holding bin for both the criminal and the outcast. And the numbers, by my count, are excessive. 

If we counted up all of the people currently under "correctional supervision" in the United States and made them a city, they would be the second largest city in the country. In other words there are more than six million inhabitants in our prison system. We are the world leader in locking people up. Of the people we lock up, too many are non-violent, poor, black, and addicted.

Prisons are also big business. More and more are privately run organizations with powerful lobbyists who buy state politicians. We are "bankrupting our states and creating a vast underclass of prisoners who will never be equipped for productive lives," according to Fareed Zacharia.

The cost for this underground society is one we pay for by cutting education and other social programs. Funding for schools goes down while funding for prisons goes up. Already poor schools in tough neighborhoods get less. More students fall behind and find ways other than school to get recognition, worth, community. Crimes, gangs, homelessness, addiction add up to a cycle that digs deeper into an already underground existence. 

These men and women serve as fodder for a hungry prison business that needs more and more people to sustain growth and keep investors happy. We exploit misery.

In spite of this, most of the men I encounter are bright and want to learn. They come to the workshops a little sheepish until they find their footing, their voices, and some trust in the truth of their experience. Many in the hopeless and stagnant world that prison can be find 12-step programs, some form of spirituality, or reading and writing. The thread they hang onto is so thin and subtle as to be all but invisible. 

It is a thread many of them follow in the dark, the subterrainian darkness that is out of sight, hidden in shadow, as dangerous as it out of mind.