Halfway to Nowhere Good

So: I’ve got my arm fully extended through my cell door’s feeding slot. The only way the screws could close it now is if they amputated it at the shoulder. Which is pretty much what Officer M- is screaming he’s going to do to me rightfuckingnow if I don’t getmyselfupouthisdoor posthaste. Officer P-’s lips are flapping, too, but I can’t really parse his words because my neighbor on the right is kicking his door like some kind of diabolically amplified metronome and screaming about his toilet paper – and anyways, at this point, I’m too busy pretending all I hear when the cops speak are muted trombones: mwa-mwa-mwa. The Necessities Boss is arguing with I Give You Only What Yer Supposed To Have Joe, one of the inmate workers – the rat who started this whole disagreeable business in the first place. At least half the section is bellowing about what is going to happen to everyone in a gray uniform plus their collateral descendants, yea, unto the third generation, should they even think about gassing me: all the bowls of wrath would verily be dumped upon their noggins, the grapes tread in the winepress with excessively pointy shoes, the dogs of war loosed for a nice trot around the block, and so forth (only with quite a bit more moderately amusing profanity than I am indicating).

Sergeant C- arrives. He takes one look at the scene, does that whole Texan thing where he confuses familiarity with expertise, and strides in, all a-seethe, snapping his fingers and pointing at me like some kind of deranged diva – which of course gives the artillery a new target for their derision; rightfully so, rightfully so. I’m sitting there, half out the door, unable to get a word in edgewise even if I’d wanted to, four red faces turned my direction, ballistic spittle tracing arcs in the yellow sodium-vapor security lighting – and I feel next to nothing. I’m barely listening, really. Instead, I’m feeling the beat of the pulse in my arm, where the veins are pressed up against the steel, and it’s only slightly elevated, right above 70bpm. I stare at the faces, searching for some kind of limbic resonance waveform alert signal to wash over me and maybe clear its throat a few times before it shuffles its feet a bit and starts tapping on my central amygdala or BNST, trying to wake me the hell up, and I think: man, I don’t even feel bad about any of this anymore; that can’t be good.

It took me seventeen years to get to this point. All things considered, I think I must be very slow.

The circumstances that produced this unfortunate confrontation are tedious to report, largely because they are so typical. Since we are locked behind very heavy, very expensive doors, it appears to some of the more naïve inmate workers from gen-pop that we are easy marks. So when they, say, decide to steal hygiene items to sell to their buddies in the dorms, they have to make up the deficit somewhere, and that tends to mean admin-seg. I Give You Only had stolen some of E-Pod’s stuff the previous Tuesday, so I’d been stalking him. When he tiptoed through at 4:45am and didn’t put toilet paper rolls or razors on the doors of any cell in F-Section, I knew the play. I noticed the Necessities Boss standing up by the control picket chit-chatting, instead of actually supervising. I called out to him and let him know that I needed to speak to him. He ignored me. I informed him we were being skipped. Again: no response. I mentioned the possibility of vague consequences. I Give You Only shot me a nasty look. It didn’t fit, so I gave it back along with a bit more than my two cents. Several of my neighbors overheard this exchange, crawled up out of whatever oneiric cesspools they had been wallowing in, and became spear-carriers in my little chorus.

Now the officers roosting by the picket were having to strain particularly hard to pretend they couldn’t hear us; selective hearing only works up to a certain point, after all. I Give You Only was starting to get nervous: the caged animals weren’t supposed to be awake and feeling frisky, and now his little rat brain was scurrying about, trying to find a damned exit from this maze without losing the cheese. Officer P- decided he didn’t want to be involved in whatever this was turning into and grabbed the trash can, thinking he could partially immunize himself by instead slopping the breakfast trays that had been sitting in our cells for ninety minutes. He entered our section first, surprisingly, instead of moving to one of the quieter sections. Big mistake. That was my actual thought, and I admit I got a little live-wire frisson over his miscalculation; I will try to develop the implications of what this means below. For now, I will just say that I’m not particularly proud about what this says about my current psycho-social trajectory, but I’m not really sorry for it either. (Maybe. It’s complicated.) I’m in the third cell from the left, the third enclosure P- would arrive at to collect the trays. Since the preceding two currently house a pair of spineless wastes of carbon mass, the genuine convicts in the section knew that they were not going to participate in our little mutiny. I was up. I took advantage. A deep hit to left field!

This story actually has a happy ending, or what passes for such in Tartarus. It took the sarge a few minutes to fire up the Crays, connect the dots, compare the p-values, calculate the area of the smallest Pythagorean quadrilateral and the 67th Mersenne, integrating this product with an 11-dimensional insight into how a Lagrangian is constructed from quantum field theory, subject, naturally, to the global Poincare symmetry, before he finally noticed – hey, whatayaknow? – none of us had any bloody toilet paper on our doors. He managed to pause his discourse into all of the ways I sucked the big one to ask the pod officers if they had given them to us. They said no, despite the looks they were getting from the Necessities Boss, who, by this point, had already figured out exactly what had happened and was merely trying to compute how to slide his slimy carcass out of the situation without mucking up his sinecure. On a dime, the sarge began yelling at the officers for wasting his time on a “bullshit ICS”, who then promptly dragged I Give You Only directly into the bus’ path, being officers. He tried to lie his way out of his predicament, being an inmate. This didn’t work; this never works, as inmates cannot, according to the rules, ever actually be right, ever, ever, ever. We got our TP. It took another similar incident later in the afternoon to remind the sarge to bring us our weekly razor. So, a successful settlement, yes?

Before you answer that, consider again the means of this resolution and the moral lessons a casual observer might derive therefrom. Because that’s what we are here for, right? To correct antisocial behavior and produce a more obedient, law-abiding citizen, yeah? To teach us to be able to analyze and deconstruct our actions in the moment and choose to be more ethical than we were before all of these judicial sanctions, non? Just making sure. Because I have to admit, sometimes it sure seems like the only lesson they teach us here is that if you don’t like what someone in authority says to you, responding with violence or the threat of violence tends to ensure that you get your way in the end. In other words, might doesn’t just make right – which is cynical – but might is always right – which is evil.

I wish I could say that this was the first occasion that I’d ever hijacked the door to my cell. My friends on the Row might be surprised to hear that over the course of the past four years, I’ve become something of a connoisseur of this sort of thing, because I wasn’t really known for this at Polunsky. Frankly, I was generally opposed to any use of force by prisoners, because I felt it sacrificed whatever hard-won moral superiority we might have gleaned due to the harshness of the standards of confinement we were subjected to.

What noble bunkum. (Maybe; again, I am seriously conflicted at the moment.) At any rate, I can only recall a few instances where I ‘jacked the run and refused housing over eleven years on the Row. Every one of those instances rose to a certain level where I found it acceptable to demand redress rather than merely asking for it. I surpass that number in a matter of weeks these days, on average. Why? Because this is perfectly normal in admin-seg, or “Restrictive Housing”, as the TDCJ’s Department of Doublespeak has recently renamed our living conditions. Along with the setting of fires, the rigging of doors, and the launching of pointy objects, this is how one solves problems. So long as the rank calculates that giving you what you want is cheaper than fighting, they fold. None of them wants Huntsville doing yet another audit. So unless there’s blood on the run, oftentimes they don’t even write you up for your actions. When in Rome, right? (Hold onto that thought, as you may regret your present answer shortly.)

Some of my peers on the Row who had served previous sentences in the TDCJ had told me that Polunsky was like an adult daycare center compared to “real” prison. I always (quietly) scoffed at this. Inmates have a tendency to inflate the degree to which other facilities are “stomp-down” (i.e. violent, which is deemed to be a positive thing) or “live” (i.e. really swell, in the sense of having tons of contraband or dope available). I’ve heard this sort of nonsense at every single unit I’ve been housed in. I think this sort of thing serves multiple functions. For one, it gives the speaker a little street cred by allowing them to craft a narrative that elevates (mostly falsely) the degree to which they are tough, gangstah, genuine sociopaths, etc.: See how big my fangs are, listener? How sharp my claws? Don’t mess with me.(An unfortunately real example heard not so long ago by one of my esteemed peers, a recent arrival from the Stiles Unit: “When I ran that ten-man team, I had a banger [shank] in each hand and a fan motor in a sock in the other.” (If I’d thought for one second he’d had any idea who Sir Boyle Roche was, I’d have responded that I should have called a big stinking pile of bullshit a fortnight ago, but I only received his story that morning…) These stories also weirdly serve a convenient excuse for why these apex killahs aren’t quite so ferocious today: there was just something about that other unit that allowed this quality to emerge – and in any case, they are just trying to chill now, after all that action (or some such tommyrot). It also allows the listener to participate in a “grass is always greener” illusion that promises a better future, if only they could get themselves transferred to a new unit. And by “better”, I of course mean something like: a life more replete with cell phones, meth, heroin, and friendly female guards. (Again: who benefits from this?) In my experience, prison is pretty much intentionally dehumanizing and soul-destroying everywhere and at all times, but I do have to admit that the Row really was quite a bit softer than anywhere else I’ve inhabited since my commutation – you know, so long as you ignore that whole bit where they eventually cart you off to Huntsville and put you down with shadily procured pharmaceuticals. I think there are at least three reasons for this.

The first is relatively simple, though I did not appreciate the degree to which this impacted the atmosphere of Death Row when I was still one of the condemned: the average DR prisoner has far better economic support than regular inmates. Prison is awful. Seg is worse. You have a toilet, a sink, a cell light (and, with luck, at least some of that trio might actually be functional simultaneously). You get a thin plastic mattress, bedbugs sometimes included for free. They give you some soap, a towel, two threadbare sheets, and a blanket made out of some monstrous synthetic felt-like material that seems to have been scientifically engineered to both smell like an open latrine on a blazing summer afternoon and to abrade away the upper epidermis every time one manages to brush against it. That is all. I am going to repeat that, because while I am confident you understood the words I used, I am not entirely certain you really had time to think about what it would mean for this paltry list to encompass the sole material possessions of your existence for years, or even decades: that is all you get. No classes, no church, no phone, no television, no knowledge of goings-on in the world, no human connection, no instruction or guidance: that is all you get. You will always be hungry. You will always be bored. In winter, you will always be cold. Always.

In the midst of this, you will observe other inmates receiving large bags of goodies from the commissary every couple of weeks, books and magazines from friends. You will hear these other prisoners talking about songs or programs they listened to on their radios. These people – are they worth more than you? Is your suffering not like theirs? What makes them so much better that they do not feel hunger, or cold, or boredom – at least to the degree that you do? My point is that without external support, life is a dismal vortex of deprivation, envy, and the sort of low cunning that inevitably develops in order to alleviate these feelings. I know you might be tempted to blame the inmate who observes their surroundings and then begins to act dishonorably – and that’s fine. I have no interest in condoning the behavior of assholes. We should all attempt to be dignified, even in hell. But also try to understand that this is nowhere near as easy as it sounds, and, if you are honest with yourselves, you will realize that when faced with a similar situation, you too would more than likely do whatever was required in order to better your circumstances. You too would more than likely turn into someone you dislike. Now move that up the register from the individual to the level of the prison society, and all of that multiplies out to become a zone of immense hostility. Everyone is on the hunt. Everyone is prey. And Leviathan? It’s not asleep. It just doesn’t care. Sometimes, it finds all of the carnage amusing.

On the Row, very few people were completely indigent. I know there were some, but most of these people had serious mental health concerns that prevented them from taking advantage of the myriad and diverse international support networks that exist for the death sentenced. We have nothing like that here. Nobody seems to want to write to lifers in seg. (I can’t imagine why! said nobody ever). Widespread poverty creates an environment where trust is almost entirely non-existent. There are no escrow accounts in prison, no authority to appeal to if someone screws you over on a deal, no decentralized blockchain consuming gigawatts of electricity solving proof-of-work computations. The only thing that keeps people situationally honest is the fear of bloodshed. This isn’t hyperbole. In 2020, I witnessed two inmates defeat their doors’ locking mechanisms and nearly murder an inmate worker for the property officer due to a deal that had gone sour. One had a shank, the other a fan motor. The poor fool only survived because his assailants thought they’d killed him. One of the perpetrators of this act managed to recently escape justice – by overdosing on dope. This happened. These are not merely words on your screen. This is what “justice” actually looks like, behind all of the pretty words politicians say on your televisions. Say it with me now: Cui bono?

When everyone has economic means, however, that atmosphere of predation simply doesn’t exist. Instead, people have the security needed to be generous, to step into empathic modes of interaction. Although I am no longer religious, I am not ignorant of the need for certain kinds of rituals that promote prosociality, ones that religion has been quite adept at co-opting for its own purposes. I figure if some behavioral trait has persisted over evolutionary time, despite energetic or material costs while possessing a certain level of complexity, it’s bound to be evolutionarily adaptive. Eating communally fits this description. Since we can’t exactly sit around a campfire and bond, and since most rituals humans engage in to live normal, healthy lives have no prison analog (indeed, they are often explicitly forbidden, for exactly the reasons that they are necessary), the sharing of food may be far more important for us than you freeworlders could ever understand. A large proportion of my favorite memories of my eleven years at Polunsky center on meals I cooked with my friends, shared experiences via the help of the intercom system we designed and deployed that allowed us to communicate as if we were in the same room. The difficulty we had transferring the food across barriers of stone and steel was our ritual. There’s been little of that for me these past four years. You see a certain level of camaraderie between gang members, I guess, but hardly anyone else. On the Row, there was enough money floating around that a hustler selling speakers or fishing lines (or ThomasBars – remember those, brothers?) never had to work very hard to meet some minimal level of subsistence. The only thing that sells here is dope, especially K2. I suppose some kind of bonding ritual could center on the sharing of a drug; this exists in certain cultures, though I’ve never experienced such a thing. In practice, at least in this world, it would be easier to get one of these fiends to give up a limb than his fix, so you really never see this, just a cycle of need-greed-feed chasing its tail into imbecility and a well-deserved grave.

The second reason for the comparatively relaxed environment on the Row deals with the size of our social world. Here in regular admin-seg, the cast rotates: people go to the disciplinary wing, they come back up, often to a different pod; some go to programs, some fail out and return; some head to Jester IV so they can pretend to be mentally ill for a while and ogle the nurses or watch television; some discharge out and go home. And some, increasingly, decide to commit suicide: in the past ten months, we’ve had at least nine suicides on 12-Building here at McConnell, and maybe as many as eleven, depending on whether one trusts the word of convicts or guards. (Whatever the number, Huntsville has been sending auditing teams to try to figure out what is going on. I don’t know, guys, maybe the complete and total lack of hope that exists back here? Just a thought.) Relationships, in other words, are temporary, transient, ephemeral. On the Row, on the other hand, you are stuck on three pods with the same characters for the duration. What this means is that reputation matters, and everyone knows it. A lousy inmate can act like a fool here and then start all over again at a new facility, perpetually deferring vengeance/justice/whatever, knowing that eventually he will get to discharge or parole out. On the Row, you can’t run from your reputation – there’s literally nowhere to go. Although I can’t quantify this in any way, it certainly seemed to me that some of the least reputable prisoners on the Row were at least partially constrained by this – that even they realized that one can burn only so many bridges before all doors would be shut against them.

The relatively static nature of the population on the Row (again, minus the executions, obviously) means that one has potentially many years to get to know people, to bond with them, to allow civil discourse to become friendship to become brotherhood. The downside of this is obvious, in that nearly everyone you have come to love is going to be murdered and there’s not a bloody thing you can do about it. But that hurt exists only because the other side of the coin is so valuable. There aren’t two sides of the coin here. There’s no coin at all. If there was, somebody would have stolen it long ago to buy some smoke.

That very sense of impending mortality is the third reason why life was so much more civil on the Row. Prison is a lot of things to regular prisoners: a timeout corner for adults, a training ground for future criminal activity, a whetstone to grind one’s hate and rage and prejudices against. For the vast majority, it is temporary. Very few of my current peers seem to be interested in using this time for any kind of positive personal development. Something about the approach of one’s demise, however, seems to supercharge one’s maturation process. You watch people die left and right for years, you realize that life is not a joke or a game, it is, as Henry James, Sr. wrote to his sons Henry and William, “…no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject’s roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.” You grow old fast, having this realization forced upon you. It doesn’t impact everyone evenly. But I think many of my friends down in Livingston would agree with me that living in the shadow of the gurney has had a remarkable effect on the complexity of their worldviews, their philosophies of life – that they have become strong in ways they wouldn’t have thought possible previously. They occasionally execute men who are so broken that little positive can be said for them, but I think the public would be surprised at just how many of the condemned have turned into men worthy of mercy – and I don’t merely mean worth of a life sentence, but worthy of freedom. Indeed, if you recorded some fifteen minute conversations from men on the Row and mixed these up randomly with some similar videos starring the men here in seg, I am confident that very few members of the public would be able to detect which were the condemned and which were going home soon. In fact, I’m pretty certain they would get this wrong far more often than they would get it right, and that you would select my current neighbors as being more worthy of the needle.

The problem for me – and by this I mean: the way that this place has metastasized in me, the way it is hollowing me out – is that in certain moments of my daily life, I wouldn’t entirely disagree with the most skeptical of you that some of these people deserve to be unceremoniously shoved across an event horizon and pureed into degenerated matter, never to be heard from again. (I include myself in this category quite often; no hypocrite am I.) In my spoof of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, I had my version of Estragon claim that most prisoners should be killed off after having been used up. Vladimir says that he doesn’t think Estragon believes this, to which his comrade responds:

The hell I don’t. Everyone with more than ten, twelve years should get a bullet to the head. By that point we’re all too far gone to be saved. Remember what we were like when we first met at Diagnostics? Green as fuck, trying to look hard but all secretly terrified. We kept looking around in shock, going, wait, the public permits such a place to exist? Now look at us. Our hearts get blacker by the day. We never stop scheming. Every relationship is totally mercenary, purely transactional. We lie like we breathe. We know almost nothing about anything important but are somehow convinced otherwise. We see any uniform and instantly perceive an enemy. If something can be lifted, we steal it. Even some things that cannot be lifted. A woman walks by, we catcall, if not worse. We smoke anything we can get our hands on, because brain damage and an early death are better than the alternative.

I guess I don’t really believe that bit about the bullet on most days, but the rest of the description was entirely factual. If anything, I downplayed the general uselessness of the average prisoner I have encountered since my commutation. I simply cannot imagine what purpose some of these people are supposed to serve once they are released. They don’t seem to have any skills, no knowledge outside of random nonsense heard on AM radio propaganda programs or in rap songs, no civic sense: I feel very strongly that they have failed the central challenge of this place, to use regret, shame, and deprivation to become better human beings through suffering. We are supposed to feel awful over whatever rotten thing we did to land in this hell – that’s the entire point of the prison experiment. Rehabilitation simply isn’t a possibility unless the pain of law-breaking – the remorse, a deep feeling for the damage done – outweighs the incentives supporting such behavior. I’m not saying I absolutely never see a sort of quiet introspection in the men around me, but it’s damned rare. So uncommon that I’m confident that the previous half-dozen or so sentences would receive only blank, confused looks were l to read them aloud in the dayroom. Like: What do you even mean, dude? Shame? Regret? What century are you even living in, Whitaker?

I know that sometimes these ruminations of mine get printed out and mailed to prisoners inside the TDCJ, and I know that sometimes l write things that are not perceived to be “convict”, and by this these brilliant textual critics mean: “too honest or true for public consumption.” I guess I’m supposed to pretend that we spend our free time debating the finer points of the Pauline epistles and painting images of baby Jesus that we hawk for charitee, or something. I get it. I’m not trying to burn the spot, homies. But I was a human before I was a convict, and I have more loyalty to the former than I will ever have to the latter, especially when that latter consistently acts like a pack of rabid donkeys. Perform a little thought experiment for me, oh brothers-in-white: if you were released today, how many of the guys from your current wing/pod would you want living in the houses next to your family? We both know you instantly thought: very, very few of them. Whose fault is that? I’m trying to figure out the ratio of that blame. It seems obvious that mother prison bears a lot of the responsibility for this; we tend to end up operationalizing the lessons we learn daily in this jungle, after all – just like all other human beings in all times and places. But it also seems equally true that we, too, bear the blame. If you wouldn’t want these people interacting with your mother, sister, daughter, why would it be cool for them to have dealings with anyone else’s kin? That’s on us, it seems. Just look around, listen to what your neighbors are talking about in this very moment. We’re vile. I used to make a point of trying to put lipstick on this pig. I needed for this suffering to be massively didactic – for prisoners to be heroic in the sense of men climbing up from a deep pit towards the light. I needed this because that vision fit my humanistic ideals. Now? I’m damaged. The scales have fallen from my eyes. We’re climbing up out of the darkness, but we’re bringing the shadows with us. That pig? It’s fucking disgusting, and it’s hungry. The way we’re staring each other down, we both know this will only end when one of us eats the other.

So, that’s the environment, what it is doing to me. When I am particularly in tune with its song, it seems very clear to me that people are about as good as their environment allows them to be, that fancy moralizing sermons sound quite impactful when one is at ease. In the trenches, though? (T)here, they are just so much empty air. They won’t stop a bullet. They won’t constrain a heartless, ruthless administration. In these moments, l think of Jean-Paul Sartre’s retelling of the Oresteia, The Flies, where the hero ultimately rejects guilt and repentance because these emotions serve the usurpers, and accepts the need to use violent resistance because this is the only language known to those in power. There are times when this has started to feel necessary, that when you acquiesce to power, you become a ghost. When I had my arm hanging out the cell door, I at least felt real, as if I had solidity and weight. The system certainly sees things this way. Ghosts are ignored. Terrorists, they get obeyed.

So, when in Rome, do as the Romans do, right? Stand up to these hicks when they do something reprehensible. See them as mere uniforms, cogs deprived of all human characteristics since this is surely how they see me. Remain safe by utilizing occasional displays of my fangs. Become one with the song, no daylight between the dancer and the dance.

How on earth could this be correct?

Albert Camus ultimately rejected Sartre’s book with his own, The Rebel, in which he became an opponent of political violence. For Camus, people who advocate violence as a means to social ends tend to view justice in purely abstract terms, and rarely see the reality of the thing in practical ones: they talk of blood spilled righteously but they seldom actually have it on their hands. A point I would suggest might be the truest I have ever written, though not many of you will have the experience necessary to verify that statement. Sartre’s road, he felt, led inevitably to an ever more desperate nihilism, the logic of which climaxes in the modern delusion that man can and should completely transform the world: that there are no limits for his goals, that there are no values other than those created by the revolutionary impulse. This ends in a path littered with justifiably murdered people, humans killed by objective necessity. Sound familiar?

In my Godot, I had my Vladimir claim that no one could force a person to give up their virtue without them first granting consent. How many times have I written the equivalent? How often have I talked about learning to wedge a buffer between stimulus and response? It feels so right when I do, especially since I know that the system would be only so happy for me to evolve into someone violent – it would justify what they’ve been saying about me all along. So is that the answer? It certainly seems to be, until one realizes that they are trying to keep me in solitary confinement for the rest of my life. Am l to merely accept this? Turn the other cheek, as madness sets in? Would you? Does evil get a hall pass, free to roam unopposed? That can’t be right, can it? Tell that to the Afghanis. Tell that to the Ukrainians.

And so I spin around and around, flowing from certain conclusion to its antithesis, sometimes multiple times in a single day, trying to be better than this place, wounded and reeling from the fact that violence seems the only answer to every question posed by the prison world, wondering what kind of society would be so rotten that it would allow such a state of affairs to exist.

A concrete example to help illustrate these points: Over the course of the week or so it took me to write this essay, my section flooded the pod and central hallway, and lit a few bonfires. By this I mean: we stuffed objects into the outflow pipes of our toilets, and then continually jammed down on the flusher. Water rushes into the basin and then overflows onto the floor. Do this for long enough, and it covers the floor of the dayrooms, the atrium space, the hallway. Water is the perfect criminal: silent, it finds its way in through every crack, keeps its surface even and flat. If the guys on Two­Row participate in such events, it can also be kind of pretty. For about twenty minutes, l had the kind of waterfall effect in front of my cell that some rich shmuck would have envied for his pool. I participated, though I initially tried to dissuade everyone from this course, mainly because I believed the problem we were experiencing (the heater on E-Pod has been broken for years, and it’s like an icebox in here as I write these words in early-February) could be handled more efficiently via different tactics. Once it was clear to me that this was not going to be a good day for the voice of reason and that I was the lone dissenter, I put on my jersey and got in the game. Sure, there were smart political reasons for doing so: fitting in has always possessed more fitness value than independent thought, and in this world, “fitness value” means something along the lines of: not getting perforated with sharp objects. This is my world, until I die. I will never have another home to go home to. My reputation is therefore my bulwark against future aggression. I have to worry about this sort of thing because clearly no one else is, and because the whisper-stream has a very long memory. While abstaining from a trip to the lake would not have immediately culled me from the herd, it would have been a black mark. Since I don’t readily fit into any in-group in the prison world, I can’t really afford to have any of those on my name. I didn’t write the laws, norms, mores of this place. I have never liked them. But they do exist, and violating them has real consequences. Once more: who benefits from this?

The above is not some species of post hoc realpolitik rationalization. Quite often I’m not even sure I feel much need to justify myself – that’s part of the change I’m trying to describe to you. Maybe; that’s only an occasionally true statement. It feels true when I look at my world from a certain angle; it felt true when I first wrote those words. But this entire essay has been an attempt to explain myself, so it can’t be entirely true. I wouldn’t feel ashamed all of the time if I agreed with this sentiment one hundred percent of the time. I had to toe the line, and for your edification I’m explaining the politics of this place, but that’s not why I went all Genesis 6 on the pod. Rather, I did so because I felt powerless and cold and miserable and angry and I am not allowed any opportunities to contribute anything to the world to pay down some portion of the mountain of guilt I carry around with me and because no PhD program will have anything to do with me and because my writings don’t seem to matter to anyone anymore and I don’t know why and because the opportunity costs for literally any other action are exactly zero – and because when you combine all of these things and a million others and fashion a lens out of them through which you observe a bunch of redneck thugs refusing to fix a heater, well, sticking it to them starts to feel like justice, like righteousness. I certainly enjoyed myself in the moment, just as I enjoyed the realization that on the morning of the great toilet paper debate, the officer decided to pop the slots open in the middle of the action. I need to state this clearly, so there will be no misunderstandings: my actions were not the result of some long-standing character flaw; I didn’t act like this – didn’t feel like this – when I was young. This is new. This is the result of a behavioral pattern that prison has trained into me. That I am conscious of this – that I am cognizant of how this mechanism has functioned and continues to function – matters little. These are effects. This is what a person becomes in this place. You see? We’re on the merry-go-round again, swinging back towards the Rome exit. And yet…

Very well. It was just some water, you say; it was just a hijacked cell door. Maybe. But every rotten act is “just” something when taken out of its position in the continuous, braided chain of cause and effect that makes up the world. What comes later may not be capable of being minimized so easily, and yet it could not have existed without all of the stepping stone events that led up to it. Where this road leads is what concerns me. Where it is leading so very many of us.

Which means what? Remove the suicides. Set to the side those who prison has cracked: the schizophrenics, the psych patients, those who spend their days smearing feces on the wall and arguing with themselves. Isolate the inveterate cowards, those who never come out of their cells because they know that first step onto the run converts them from the category of “conspecific/unsuccessful competitor” directly to “food”. Subtract the guys going home in a year or two. What’s left? N will be different for every pod/wing, but I’d guess it equals at least fifteen to twenty percent of the total – say somewhere between a dozen to two dozen on a pod like mine. Men growing harder, colder, crueler. I’ve sometimes wondered how it is that some men can get to the point where they are facing down the goon squad, covered in red CS/CNgas, men who don’t appear to be any more excited than they would have been eating an apple. I doubt I’ll ever really become like that, as I didn’t grow up dodging bullets and fighting gang wars in the youth system. But their dark gnosis isn’t merely an intellectual curiosity for me anymore. I’m tasting it, at least in parts. They are forcing me to taste it.

After his father was assassinated, Mithridates IV began ingesting sublethal doses of poison, until he managed to become immune. Sometimes taking poison produces a reaction in the body that actually makes the person healthier than they would have been otherwise; pharmacologists call this hormesis. That’s what prison is doing to this group. That seems to be the only thing it is doing. Will someone please explain to me how it could possibly be seen to be beneficial to society for its convicts to have become immunized against fear?

Heinlein was reported to have said that low Earth orbit was halfway to anywhere in the universe. Learning to ablate one’s fear of authority to the point where it no longer informs one’s cost-benefit analysis of any future action is halfway to committing any crime – and they are teaching this here. They are doing so even to those of us who are model inmates and who would have been useful to the State and the taxpayer if we’d been given half a chance. Most of these guys are going to return home at some point. You do understand that, right? I mean really, really understand that point? You are going to be sitting next to them on a bus, at a restaurant, in a theater; you might be interacting with them right now. How many of them are staring at you now through the lens of their experiences here, the lessons they learned in these halls? How many of them do you honestly think wrestled with issues of guilt, remorse, responsibility, change, and blame as I do? How many of them are just going to bypass all of that Sartre/Camus junk and skip directly to blaming you, the citizenry, for allowing the prison world to deteriorate to the point where human significance is entirely negated? How many of them would be right?