Cancer for the Cure

Featured Artwork: El sueño de la razón produce monstrous — Francisco Goya (c.1799)

This morning I met a woman with a golden nose. She was riding in a Cadillac with a monkey in her arms. Her driver stopped and she asked me, “Are you Fellini?” With this metallic voice, she continued, “Why is it in your movies, there is not even one normal person?”

                                                — Federico Fellini (from Damon Galgut’s The Promise (2010))

The Christians used to chant every evening at six. First came prayer call, wherein each man in the section had his name called out by Jubilee, the erstwhile holder of the occasionally rotating position of B-Section’s spiritual tank boss. Each participant could, if he so chose, petition his coreligionists to pray for a certain family member or for spiritual assistance on some issue they may have been going through. Some took the occasion to share some perceived wisdom they came across in a daily devotional, or maybe a bit of exegesis of a scriptural passage that felt relevant to their current struggles. The number of contributors fluctuated a bit. Some days only three or four of the guys pitched in, on others you might hear from six or seven. Then came a guided recitation of the Lord’s Prayer: Jubilee shouted a line, the chorus repeated it, each man apparently competing to see who could sound the most like Batman badly in need of a lozenge.

Next came the chants:

            Jubilee: (shouted) Our prayers go up!

Chorus: His blessings come down! (Follow with hearty, androgyny clapping and whooping: the louder you are, the larger your spiritual manhood.)

Just in case the denizens of Corpus Christi or San Antonio didn’t hear this the first time, the theme was then repeated twice more.

Next chant: 

            Jubilee: Jesus is alive! Who’s alive?

            Chorus: Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! (More applause, grunting, etc.)

Then came the finale:

            Jubilee: God is good!

            Chorus: All the time!

            Jubilee: And all the time!

Chorus: God is good! (Exchange “great” for “good” if suitably motivated, then boost previous levels of applause.)

The popularity of prayer call waxes and wanes as people arrive and depart from the God Pod. We are currently in a phase where it isn’t happening in B-Section at all. And lo, there was much exultation amongst the people, and they did rejoiceth, for the constant wearing of earplugs did produceth irksome calluses within the auditory canals and caused much gnashing of teeth and the production of sarcastic comments which the people didst force to die upon the lips. Erm, well, at least one of the people didst rejoiceth. Verily.

A-Section has never conducted prayer call. (Unbelievers! Apostates! And so forth!) C-Section is still doing it, which has caused considerable annoyance in Jubilee’s faction regarding the level of internal strife we are experiencing over here. One bloc — once aligned with Jubilee but now in schism — whom I will call the Super-Uber-Mega Pharisees, doesn’t want to have anything to do with the rest, who, to use the vernacular, are still battling the demons of sin, especially the ones dealing with the copious smoking of dope. The considerable irony inherent to the situation seems to be lost on the S-U-M Pharisees, as it so often is when it comes to the fundamentalist crowd. I could probably explain it to them, but I’m in this period of my life where I’m debating a great number of topics internally, especially the question of whether society can continue to permit ignorance under the guise of freedom or free speech, and I’d rather not get ahead of myself until I’ve worked some things out. In any case, as the recently discovered Gospel of the Even Doubtier Thomas tells us in chapter 4, verse 16: When thy opponents doth seek to slaughter their own, grabeth thou thy popcorn and enjoyeth yon spectacle. Selah.

I enrolled in the Faith Based Program a little over a year ago. In the seventeen years I’ve spent in solitary confinement, this was the first opportunity I’ve had to participate in any sort of formal programmatic option. Even so, I was not amongst the first to sign up. Obviously, as a philosophical and ontological materialist, this wasn’t my natural flock. Which is fine, really, most of my friends are theists, except I didn’t want to be perceived as disingenuous or end up having to spend my days debating people about the number of angels capable of twerking on particular pinheads. Some of that is obviously going to be inevitable when you are living in a once-religious nation that is growing increasingly secular, but some people seem to have far more bandwidth for argumentation than I do. Also: there is a sort of general feeling people have about the chapel crowd, which has been present at every institution I’ve lived in, which is that the church is the place where child molesters, snitches, and catch-outs congregate. This is the last in-group available for such people, who are generally excluded from other associations in the prison world, or so the argument proceeds. The degree to which this is true is not at the moment entirely quantifiable to your correspondent, but the impression — ah, that is widespread and at least partially verifiable at a mere glance, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be included in it.

Here’s the thing, though: alongside all of the religious courses, the field ministers — inmates who run the entire show — claimed that the program also made available a smattering of state-sanctioned ones that the administration supposedly approves of very much, classes like Life Skills, Voyager, and Bridges to Life. To get access to these, one has to join the God Pod, as everyone refers to it in the argot. After monitoring developments for nine months, I eventually enrolled in July of 2022, and formally made the move from E-Pod to C-Pod in September of that year. Same isolation cells, same view of a concrete wall outside my window, same infestation of mice and roaches and spiders — but, I hoped, maybe a different vibe. I’ve already penned a number of essays on this subject that are currently preening themselves in the literary equivalent of short skirts and fishnet stockings in the inboxes of certain editors in the free world, so I don’t intend for this current offering to be an exhaustive analysis of all things program-related, editorial sensibilities about multiple submissions being what they are. The following are a few general descriptions of what I’ve found in this strange, strange sliver of a strange, strange world, little gremlins of prison weirdness that deserve to run free in digital pastures rather than sitting in my notebook causing me irritation. As always, they’re your problem now.

Let’s start with demographics and statistics. The average age of the 42 guys in the program seems to be a bit higher than my old pod. This means it is moderately quieter over here, though whether this has to do with the constellation of personal habits we call maturity or the religious leanings of the participants is unclear to me. Either side could argue its merits successfully, I think, and, in any case, neither side is mutually exclusive of the other. The overwhelming majority of the guys are Protestant Christians (n = 35). There are 42 varieties of Baptists in the US at last count, and I’m pretty sure we have most of them over here, or at least what you get when you graft those beliefs and Pentecostalism together. There is a small group of Catholics (n = 6), who, interestingly, have somewhat separated themselves from the others, and with whom I find myself associating with more and more. (I actually had a polite debate about Aquinas’s answer to the problem of theodicy with one of the guys, which has to count as one of the more memorable moments in my life the past few years. If nothing else, prison keeps providing me with characters for stories, even if they are so kooky I’m not sure any of you actually believe they are real.) We had two Muslims, one a Sunni-ish sort and the other a Five Percenter. Both left the program within a matter of weeks, the first by choice, the second due to a disciplinary violation.

It definitely skews whiter and tanner over here: there are only three African-American participants at the moment, and that has held steady for the past year. Of the remaining enrollees, 17 are Hispanic and 22 are white, at the time of writing. I’m not quite sure what to make of that. It seems likely that culture is partially at work here: the whole “church crowd = chomos and snitches” rumor is most prevalent in the various groups most in synch with street subculture, so maybe the Bruthas have stronger reasons for keeping their distance. Or, maybe, it has something to do with the particular type of conservative Christianity preached by the field ministers and followed by the vast majority of the flock, a point I will return to in greater detail in a moment. So: politics, in other words. This sort of thing was probably inevitable, given that politics is the point in the Venn diagram where the little circles of religion, culture, and epistemology bump into the edge of the paper, beyond which reality lurks. This tends to mean that the entire program has a decidedly MAGA-ish flavor to it. You can see why this might cause certain demographics to keep their distance. I haven’t done any scientific polling on this point or anything, it’s just my attempt to make sense of the available data. And also: the rate at which I have to walk away from conversations and grumble to myself about how indifferently equipped with the skeptical instinct my neighbors seem to be. I keep telling myself: Dude, just observe. I didn’t come over to spend my days scampering about lobbing doubt like antipersonnel mines. I try to imagine myself partially hidden in the bushes, brass eyeglass pressed to my face, maybe wearing a floppy tweed hat and a Norfolk jacket, carefully monitoring the natives. Jolly fine day, what? 

I try to do this, I said. I don’t always succeed. I really do need to get better at coexisting around people who possess views I can’t help but to feel are ignorant, outdated, at times egregiously stupid, and — here’s the important point — regularly socially dangerous. Why? Beyond the obvious benefits that accrue from mastering the governance of the tongue, the simple fact is that the TDCJ is attempting to Christianize the population. The effort is not subtle, and I will touch on some of the dimensions of this mission in this article and others. For now, just accept that the endeavor is widespread. In practical terms, this means that all rehabilitative programming flows downriver from the chaplaincy. If my life is to have any meaning, it will almost certainly have something to do with influencing other inmates in positive ways so that when they go home, they won’t recidivate. It’s harder to track non-events: you notice the killer or rapist on the news, but nobody is reporting on the ex-con who spent his day going to work — there’s no tally of triggers notpulled to weigh one’s life against, the way there is for those who spend their days cleaning up the messes left behind after a crime is committed. Still, it’s something I’ve thought about for a very long time. If I’m wrong about the ontological existence of karma or god, I guess it or they will have to do the bean counting. In any case, what this means is that I will have to get better at interacting with fundamentalists without aching to club them over the head with EO Wilson or Karl Popper tomes. We have some similar goals, even if our methods differ. If the right occasion for civil discourse presents itself, I’m happy to test my beliefs against theirs. But to even be allowed in the door, I have to exist in their world. I hope that changes over time, but for now, at least down here in Texas, the religious hold most of the levers of power.

It was important for me to let people know my general stance on religion once I arrived on C-Pod. I did so immediately, explaining that I had a ‘High Profile’ tag placed on me by the administration. If Parole seemed to be impressed by these classes, I reasoned that they might also be helpful in convincing Huntsville that I was not actually selling highly enriched uranium to the mullahs, or whatever it is they seem to think I am up to on a daily basis. I admitted to everyone that I was essentially here for the certificates. I figured my peers could make up their own minds about me once they understood that point. I’m almost certainly not the only person over here for exactly this reason, though I am perhaps the most openly honest about it.

Who are the others?

There are, of course, the true believers: men who came to the God Pod to practice their religion, to try to become better people and to associate with others similarly minded. I figure this group currently makes up around a tenth of the participants (n = 4 or 5). Whatever else I may say here about religion or superstition, I’m not talking about these people. I happen to disagree with them about a bunch of stuff, but I respect genuineness and decency, and these few souls generally have enough of both to immunize them from my whole cri de coeur for a second act of the Great Enlightenment thing. They’re trying. That’s my bar. If it seems a low one, you don’t know much about prison. Also: these guys have at least one criticism of the God Pod that is weirdly in line with my own. Namely, we both dislike fake-ass people claiming to be changed. Anyone can quote the Bible, or otherwise assimilate the idiom of the Christian Prisonwork Industrial Complex. When the true believers quote a passage, they mean it, they’ve thought about. When some of these other guys do so under false pretenses, it debases the currency of their faith. My problem is that someone could spend twenty years working through all of the major works of moral philosophy and the system wouldn’t care, because they couldn’t define “consequentialist ethics” to save their lives. Authenticity, in other words, is the problem for both of us: how we figure out how to identify the sincere, and how the State can’t seem to do the same. Why is this a problem? Because the fakers ultimately self-destruct, and then they make us all look like we’re pathological liars. 

In addition to the truly faithful, you’ve also got people that are running from something: gambling debts, a reputation for snitchery, cowardice, etc. Maybe they actually wanted to try to be better, too, but their main reason for enrolling in the program was to evacuate their sorry carcasses from their old cells. The number included in this crowd ticks up every few weeks as the whisperstream inexorably flows from wing to wing, carrying along sordid tales of scandalous behavior. As I wrote earlier, I can’t give you an exact number of these folks, but it’s certainly not lower than twenty percent of the total (n = 8). Do they find absolution here? Not really. The Christians talk behind each other’s backs as much as the rest of us. There’s probably less direct confrontation — but then, there’s a lot of glass houses over here, so, you know, maybe not the best place to be picking up stones, first or otherwise.

There’s also a large chunk of guys who enrolled out of boredom. As I said, this is the only game in town. Maybe they had good intentions, too. Why not? Intentions are easy. Conscious, deliberate, intentional change, however, is really hard, and the classes are nearly as boring as watching the paint flake off the walls. So, I’m not sure how much genuine effort these guys are deploying. The practical and predictable effect of their presence is to dilute the percentage of guys who are trying to transform themselves. Our environment matters, especially the people we surround ourselves with; when one’s peers display certain norms or behaviors, it can impact our own. Life is hard enough, for instance, if you are an addict. It’s a lot harder when one or both of your neighbors are using. 

There are at least a couple of guys who have admitted to enrolling because they’re up for parole consideration. Smart move, says I. Their job is to get the hell out of this place. If faking religious conversion helps with that — and it certainly appears to, make no mistake — why wouldn’t you pretend to drink the Kool-Aid? Finding Jesus in prison may be the clichéist of clichés, but that’s because it works. Call these people disingenuous if you like, but you are only doing so from the comfort of your own homes. If you too lived on this side of Dis’s gates, you’d probably play the same games. I can anticipate taking some flak for writing the above. It will no doubt provide a useful foil for some of the very people I’m talking about. Of course, you are sincere, right? So knock yourselves out, brothers. If there really is a Big Man Upstairs and He is as vengeful and petty as He is reputed to be, you might end up crisping in an even warmer oven than me. After all, what self-respecting despot would truly prefer a feigned faith in search of reward to a principled and informed skepticism in search of empirical truth? Something to ponder, I guess. Or not, as the case so often seems to be.

The administration further waters down the good intentions by housing regular, non-programming prisoners on this half of the pod. These inmates aren’t interested in the classes and don’t want to be here. There is no reason for them to be present. Someone in the Major’s office simply isn’t paying attention to the advisory from the Chaplain’s office taped to the wall about placing approved individuals only in cells 1 to 42. Right now, a quarter of the guys in the program aren’t in the program. One recently went to F-Pod for assaulting another guy. His victim was asleep, so when he was being returned to his cell, the perpetrator told the officer the wrong cell number. The fool of a guard didn’t check her paperwork and stuck him in there, with all of the attendant messiness one would expect. Another likes to light fires when he engages in his daily temper-tantrum. The Five Percenter I mentioned earlier liked to scream out passages from The 120 Degrees every time someone wanted to talk about the Bible over the run. Another is high priest of the Libationarians, who, uh, definitely have the missionary zeal when it comes to spreading their creed, as well as a rather developed form of one half of the Eucharist that has found wide acceptance amongst my neighbors. If they sometimes seem to be auditioning for leading roles in Dionysius’s Kômos, well, that’s certainly annoying, but at least they seem to be occasionally happy. That’s more than I can say about some of these gray people. All of this, naturally, catalyzes behavior from actual program participants that isn’t ideal and wasn’t desired. Yes, yes: it’s on us to make good decisions and not get distracted by our contexts. I know, I know. But I also know that in the early phases of rearranging your mental house, it helps to be around neighbors who have the same goals. That’s the point of the program, after all, and the administration is actively complicating matters by placing these people over here.

Lastly, you have the S-U-M Pharisees. I already mentioned the believers, and this group certainly fits that description, except instead of a humble acknowledgement of a shared brokenness, these bigots have self-righteousness in their cores. They may talk about their past sinful behavior, but only so they can better illustrate how morally superior to the rest of us they now are: self-accusation as a rhetorical pivot to better accuse everyone else. They seem to believe in sin a great deal, but have little room for grace. The main reason this section doesn’t conduct prayer call anymore is that the S-U-M Pharisees refuse to associate with the infies that don’t pretend perfection. They don’t even talk anymore. Their leader seems to be pretty much always pissed off about something: Democrats, the Israeli military for not replicating in northern Gaza what was once done to the cities of Hormah or Bashan (or Heshbon or those of the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Amorites, Jebusites — hell, you get the picture), Larry Fink[TO1] (don’t ask), which does tend to happen when you move through your existence searching for things to be pissed off about. He’s really the only person I’ve had words with over here, but I figure I was really just giving him what he was looking for. He so wants to be hung up on that cross of his, after all — just so long as everyone has a perfect view of how much more he’s suffering for his beliefs than they are. Back to the irony: although he openly hates the addicts, his right-hand lackey is a known pedophile. I suspect he’d put up with all manner of –philia, so long as the bearer licked his boots in the preferred fashion. 

This probably won’t be popular with some of you, but I think the specific type of religion taught over here fosters the development of characters like those found in the S-U-M Pharisees. This isn’t a nice version of the faith; this isn’t even a form of the religion that understands the difference between history and myth. This is literalist, fundamentalist, individualistic, heavily marketed, neo-Calvinist, conspiratorial, paranoid, and very, very conservative: think red trucker hats with little tinfoil halos attached with coat hangers. Why? Because the churches funding everything are so constituted. Where are the liberal congregations? Presumably dealing with their own dissolution, I suppose, given the statistics on those trends. Whatever they are up to, they aren’t involved in the prisons. 

If it seems suspicious to you that only conservatives are involved here, this is how it works, I believe. Start with the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free expression thereof.” You may have noticed there’s something of a contradiction there. Over the past five decades, the federal courts have largely hewed to a line of not interfering in the management of the prisons, i.e., they tend to side with prison administrators on just about every issue. The practice of religion is one of the very few areas in which the courts have carved out some minor rights for prisoners. Prisons grudgingly accepted this, but this didn’t mean they were going to spend money on what they obviously considered to be frills. They did, however, open the door for churches to get involved. Imagine you are a director in the TDCJ. You live in the rural town of Huntsville, where the prison administration is based. You’ve been told you have allow some churchy types in past the razor wire. Who are you going to approach? Certainly not those churches in the cities, which have suspicious views on human rights. No, you are going talk with the same kinds of churches you yourself attend. When the State set up the four-year seminary to train the field ministers, it, too, was designed to promote a conservative version of the faith. When the field ministers graduate and are disseminated throughout the penal archipelago, they are vectors for these memes. In addition to the concepts they carry, they then reach out to local congregations of similar theological inclinations as funders of their ministries. It’s not a conspiracy or anything complicated like that, it’s really rather simple: by promoting a certain type of religion in the beginning, the rest of the steps in the chain are forged. We, the participants in the Faith Based Programs, are supposed to be next links, carrying the message from the field ministers and local churches to the rest of the population. I sort of suspect the process mostly breaks down at this level, but the attempt clearly has the support of parts of the administration. And why not? It’s a program they don’t have to pay for, and it looks really nice to the system’s GOP overlords in Austin. If it doesn’t work, well, that’s the fault of the loser inmates, right? It’s nobody’s fault but our own if we are too stupid to accept the blessings of this or that god.

Or — and this is really just a suggestion, gentlemen — maybe it’s simply very, very difficult to try to convince people that they are loved and have value when absolutely everyone else in their environment goes to great pains to say the exact opposite. Maybe it’s just very, very difficult to instill prosocial beliefs when you live in a solitary confinement wing architecturally constructed to sever these very concepts. Maybe, just maybe, even we stupid losers can detect when someone isn’t honest or genuine, and respond to that in all of the myriad ways one would expect: by wholesale rejection, by swallowing down anger until it erupts or festers, by becoming jaded of people who talk of love and forgiveness but then vote for a party that regularly passes laws mandating lower prison budgets and longer sentences. Maybe, just maybe, when you strip away all of the things that normally define a human being, what is left becomes deformed. 

I wrote earlier that paranoia was one of the defining features of the religion taught here. I’d like to focus a little on this aspect because I think this has been instructive for me in trying to understand some of the currents of grievance and suspicion that seem to be the defining features of the political right today. There is a real sense in the program of a population being hounded by relentless pursuers. You know how people with weak self-esteem can be particularly sensitive to perceived criticisms? It can feel a bit like that back here, writ large. They installed a television in the dayroom in April of this year. This is the first time many of us have seen a TV in ages and ages. We only have a small selection of channels, but they’re apparently all in cahoots in designing an anti-Christian schedule, at least to some of these guys. That gay couple on Modern Family? A plot to destroy traditional marriage. Those reruns of House? A dark horse for “scientism”. I’ve heard really angry discussions about these sorts of things on a regular basis. It can all seem a little silly — Christians are a majority in this nation, somewhere in the two-thirds range, last I checked. To hear the way some of my neighbors talk, though, you’d think the percentage was much lower, and that men wearing dark trench coats and fedoras were sitting in vans pointing big aerial antennas in their direction. Why? I’d like to pretend that critical thinking is at the root of this, injecting regular spurts of cognitive dissonance into their daily stream of consciousness – that, on some level, these men are aware that some of the things they believe just aren’t so. That isn’t it. It’s the media they are listening to; media which is transparently designed to foster a sense of impending doom.

Beeville, Texas, where I currently reside, is smack in the center of the void found between the San Antonio and Corpus Christi media bubbles. Which is to say: we’re in the middle of nowhere, y’all. It isn’t sufficient to merely state that the content of the airwaves tilt to the right. There are more than a dozen deeply conservative religious stations on the low end of the FM dial, most of which make the nutzos on American Family Radio seem like a dialogue at Chatham House or the Brookings Institution by comparison. I mean: enormous, gas-guzzling land yacht vehicles for all aspects of Southern culture, with Jesus as a hood ornament. There is one station that plays positively ancient country music during the day and then crackpots like Wayne Allen Root and Alex Jones at night. My peers seem to think this is news. Counterbalancing this is a single, poorly-funded NPR station, and me.

I’d like to inject a bit of nuance here — or subtract some, perhaps. Before I dove into the God Pod and immersed myself in the world of conspiracy theories, my impression was that the right wing talk radio folks didn’t really tell their listeners what to be angry about. I figured they’d simply done their research and already knew what the base was pissed off about and were just selling them in concentrated form what they were demanding. I think that is a fairly typical view, which means the problem is really broad and difficult to solve: something like fixing all of the economic and social problems of the South. Of course, some of that is true. There are always feedback loops working like this in culture. But the reality is more often the opposite: for the most part, these entrepreneurs of error are teaching new concepts or vocabulary and providing entirely novel points of attack or criticism that my neighbors would never have come up with on their own. There is a massive industry out there providing “evidence” for this worldview; name an issue, and there’s a think-tank or a publisher pumping out talking points. It’s not hard to listen to a program, and then sit back and observe how the ideas expressed therein flow around the section, shifting slightly as each bearer distorts the original. It happens every day, literally. I don’t imagine it’s much different in your world. 

I’ve taken a few guys aside and tried to educate them, so I’ve seen what happens when normal people stop feeding on a steady diet of this filth. I’ve also seen weeks of progress wiped out because someone sent these people a book, or because they drifted back to certain ministers or programs. Rage is, apparently, highly addictive. The closest analog I can compare this work to is deprogramming someone from a cult. It takes lots of time and effort and empathy, as well as some authority. You’d better be someone the individual trusts and respects, or they will never value your information sufficient to outweigh what they are hearing on a daily basis. But that’s small-scale. I don’t have any good answers for how to solve this problem on a national-level. I used to identify as a member of the libertarian left; Victor Serge and George Orwell were my guys. Censorship doesn’t sit well with me — it trips every alarm in my bullshit detection apparatus. And yet: there sure seem to be some ideas floating around out there that are so discernibly false that it’s hard for me to argue against the idea of silencing the microphones of those promoting them, especially since these people almost certainly don’t believe themselves what they are selling and are simply trying to earn money by stoking division. We’d all be better off if we did this, though it makes me feel dirty saying those words. As I said, I’m trying to figure out the balance here. It seems senseless to me to pretend that things haven’t changed in a fundamental way, and that the old lessons learned from the fight against 20th century fascism still apply perfectly. The tools and tactics of disinformation are different, they’re far more targeted now. The remedy will also be different. If cancelling (or whatever you want to call it… “holding people in the media to account for the things they say?”) certain kinds of figures doesn’t work — if this produces more backlash than results — what does? Something like the Fairness Doctrine we used to impose on radio stations? How do we prevent normalization of this rot without sacrificing our ideals? Because the feeling I get from living over here is exactly like what I felt after the 2020 elections, when the lies were flying and the tension was rising, to the point where I wasn’t surprised at all by the events of January 6th. It’s like watching a train roll along towards a car stalled on the tracks. If you don’t believe me, go find some of these programs yourself. Listen for a while. Witness how they are trying to create an alternate world to the one we recognize. The tragedy feels inevitable.

Unfortunately, the radios are not the only source of this misinformation. The TDCJ has a single news channel on its cable package. You want to guess which one they went with? Of course, it was Fox. In addition to the televisions, in April, the McConnell Unit was connected to the Securus money-devouring singularity, i.e., they gave us tablets. For the guys in population, these devices provide a ton of options: movies, television shows, games, podcasts, newspapers — the whole works. For those of us in solitary, we are limited to the email system, the phone app for six hours a day, a set of propaganda videos produced by the TDCJ in collaboration with some inmates at the Polunsky Unit, and the Pando app, a collection of Christian sermons. The first two have been a great help for those of us that have been in isolation for years. The system isn’t perfect, but we aren’t quite so cut off from the people we care about. I’m less pleased with the latter two apps. Although population has access to a wide variety of podcasts on numerous educational topics, we are limited to Christian ones, another example of the administration attempting to press religion on us. One of the most popular offerings features a group of ministers sitting at a sort of ersatz media desk, talking about current events from a religious perspective. I’m not dignifying these people by providing their name, but everyone in the system will know exactly who I am talking about. They seem to be the source for some of the silliest and most paranoid memes I deal with on a weekly basis. For instance, after fires gutted part of the island of Maui, this group apparently spread a conspiracy theory involving space-based laser systems and 15-minute cities. Several of my peers are now convinced that anyone promoting walkable, livable cities is an unwitting dupe to a governmental plot to lock us all into ghettos. None of these guys could have invented such an idea on their own. This is a clear example of someone making money or prestige off of lies. This same group has fostered at least two (contradictory) rumors about the Antichrist. The first dealt with some Jewish dude who is reputedly “performing miracles” and claiming to be the Messiah. Since Christians believe the real Messiah made his appearance a rather long time ago, this man has to be false, and his powers must come from another source. The second story is a bit more interesting, in that I anticipated it a number of years ago in a few of my less-than-admired sci-fi short stories: AI will be the Antichrist. Who else could solve so many intractable problems facing us today, or bring the nations together? And so half of the true believers in the program are freaking out about ChatGPT, and making panicked phone calls home to no doubt very confused family members. 

Information is like an island on a sea of ignorance. Misinformation is the same. Each time someone takes one of these stories as truth, they feel more secure in their understanding of the world, and each gives a jumping off point for further explorations of the terrain — further explorations into even more falseness. Thanks to the fires on Maui, guys have been increasingly voicing skeptical views on the subject of climate change. Mostly this comes from a single person, but it’s spreading. I reviewed one of the books this dude was passing around. I don’t know exactly who is backing the Cornwall Alliance or the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, but if it isn’t the oil and gas behemoths, I’ll eat my tablet. The free market capitalism justifications for hating the environmental movement aren’t particularly new or even interesting. The theological one, however, is new to me, and goes something like this: Humans were given the mandate, prior to the fall, to transform the earth into a more blessed state. Nature, as idealized by the tree huggers, is actually the fallen state; mankind’s domination is the improvement. Which is, I’m sure, what we have all thought when we have come across a plastic wrapper as we walked through our favorite park. In any case, as I am told fairly regularly, it doesn’t really matter how messed up the world is, because Jesus is coming back soon, so it’s all going to burn to cinders anyway. Whew, am I ever relieved! Again, I do not believe these views could have sprung organically from the minds of any of my peers. They were taught this by people with vested interests, and we as a society permit it in the interests of free speech. I wonder what our grandchildren will think of such permissiveness, in that warmer, micro plastics-coated world of theirs; thanks to numerous interviews, I already know what many of the police officers working the Capitol Building on January 6th think about many of the media personalities spreading the Big Lie. You can see I’m wrestling with all of this. Dialog and debate: those were supposed to be the answers to the problem of misinformation. The problem is, these don’t always work. Truth doesn’t always win out. We are not rational actors, unless trained to be. How is the above all that different from screaming “fire” in a crowded theater?

I think I’ll save my notes on creationism for another essay, as this is already getting lengthy. The point I hope I’m making is: Does anyone not living in the 14th century really believe this sort of religious indoctrination is socially helpful? Even if most of the guys were buying it, are they any better off as a result? Any more moral? I don’t believe so, outside of that tiny group of true believers I mentioned. Even within this small subset, I have some doubts. The guy three cells down might not sell dope anymore, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to learn that he’d shot up an LGBTQ parade or bombed an abortion clinic. On a broader level, forcing people into the arms of paranoia cannot be useful in the long-term. Democracy requires strong social bonds of trust and the regular granting of good will to the intentions of others. Without those, the slide into authoritarianism is inevitable. It’s not an accident that Republicans today seem to be heading down this path, or that polls consistently show their increasing acceptance of political violence: the media silo they’ve been living in has been mainlining bullshit directly into the conservative body politic for decades, and now these people can’t even tell how sick they are. Just look at what happens when you try to administer some medicine: they’ve already been primed to think anyone contradicting them is a purveyor of fake news, or worse. Science is just another perspective, doctors can’t be trusted; these experts are just promoting a liberal worldview. When Little Enoch, one of the peripheral figures in the S-U-M Pharisees, made the point that I, an unbeliever, was probably the best behaved and maybe the most moral person in the program, I smiled — until he concluded his comment with: but you still can’t be trusted. Untangle that ball of yarn, if you care to. I’m tempted to say, well, ignorance is its own form of self-vengeance. Except, these people don’t go down by themselves, do they?

What does work, if this program doesn’t? I have a friend that was involved in a Faith Based dorm in population, and she seemed to get something meaningful out of it. So, maybe programs like this actually do produce positive, genuine change in the right environment, with the right sponsors. She certainly isn’t a fundamentalist, for example, and seems surprised when I mention some of the materials we have been given. Beyond god pods, education seems to work. Liberal arts, vocational, whatever: if it increases skillsets and builds self-esteem, recidivism tends to be reduced. This isn’t a perfect solution. It helps if the program directly addresses the criminogenic roots of each individual participant, which is sometimes easier said than done. Education certainly seems to have helped me. I don’t know if I would have survived my time on death row if I had not had those degrees to work on, both in the sense of surviving in good mental health, but also in literal terms, given how impressed the Board of Pardons and Paroles was with my file. But that’s just me; n = 1 isn’t a terribly useful sample size, and I simply have no other personal experience to base my position on. Maybe one day the administration will let me out of solitary confinement and I will be able to track things on a broader level. Heaven forbid these people actually give me something positive to write about.

Many of my peers are convinced that they won’t recidivate. They all have plans for when they get out. And yet, the statistics show us many of these men are wrong; that once the shackles are off, they will joyfully return to the embrace of whatever bad habits put them here in the first place. Not that it matters much, but I, too, am convinced I would never commit a violation of the law if I were to be released. I don’t spend a ton of time thinking about it, but when I do, these are the reasons I tell myself. First off, I don’t really want anything anymore. My dreams are simple these days: to find a job where I feel I’m promoting my vision of what I want the world to look like, to touch a tree again, to see the stars, to get a dog from the pound so there is at least one entity in my life that knows what it is like to have lived in a cage. After living in poverty for two decades, the American dream of material abundance simply doesn’t appeal to me anymore, and I can’t quite figure out why I ever bought into it in the first place. People matter, not stuff. In any case, I don’t feel that a person who has caused so much pain ought to want more than the basics. Why should we enjoy luxuries, when we have deprived others of them? That point, that memory of what we have done, seems to me to be the most important factor in why some people recidivate while others do not.

And so we come to it, the main reason I dislike this program and everything it stands for. I do not know how many times I have heard the men around me talking about being “new,” “reforged,” “forgiven.” One of my neighbors shot and killed a guy during a dope deal that went south. When he gave his testimony recently, he claimed that he’d asked god for a blessing when he went to court, and felt that the thirty years he got was a result of this prayer. He is now a different man, he claimed, that he was “over his past life.” To which I responded, in my head, at least: Hey, dude, fuck you. You think because you spent a couple of minutes on your knees saying words inside your head you are forgiven? I bet that man’s family doesn’t feel that way. I bet they think about him and miss him every fucking day because of what you did. Your subjective feeling of being forgiven is just a brain state. It has no bearing on actually being forgiven, no bearing on objective reality at all. Nobody cares about your thoughts. Only your behavior matters. If you aren’t haunted by the specter of what you did to put yourself in prison, you aren’t changed, you only think you are. And I do mean haunted: you’d better be looking over your shoulder at yourself and your behavior every single day, because you are the dark shape in the alleyway, the monster under the bed. You need to stay permanently afraid of what you might be capable of.

I should get more explicit. I have dreams every week, not just about my mother and brother, but about my brother’s two kids — children he never got to have because of me. I know their names, the words to the songs the eldest learned in kindergarten. I see the gifts I gave them at Christmas, when I visit from out of state. (I always seem to be coming from far away, whatever that means in the oneiric calculus.) I awake with my heart rate in the stratosphere several times a week, and I have become a ninja at short-circuiting panic attacks. Once awake, several times a day, my mind connects something I’m listening to or reading to Tricia or Kevin. I had the protagonist in “Release” comment that if there was an inverse-square law for guilt, he’d never noticed it: my words in his mouth, on two levels. What I meant was that guilt doesn’t seem to dissipate for me as time passes. On the contrary, it seems to grow stronger, more inescapable. And not just for the big stuff. I am constantly finding myself mentally (and sometimes physically) wincing over some memory that decided to up and kick the front door open to my Cartesian Theater and force itself onto the stage. Things I said or failed to say to my ex-fiancé, things I did or failed to do to or for my friends; it’s not a mystery why no one from my former life has anything to do with me. It seems like the sufferings of the past two decades ought to have burned at least some of those comparatively minor items off the karmic balance sheet, but that isn’t my reality. Rather, everything hovers about, waiting, reminding, convicting.

And that is exactly as it should be. You will never convince me that vicarious redemption exists — that someone else’s actions can make you clean. Someone can work for you, sacrifice for you, even die for you, but they can’t remove your responsibilities, they can’t change the past. Call that what it is: your desire to feel less lousy about your mistakes: an SSRI for those born before psychopharmaceutical intervention existed. Even if such a thing was possible, why would you think it was moral? Carry your own cross, people. How dare you think you can foist it off on anyone else, that this somehow makes you clean? The dirt is still there, all you’ve done is throw some of it on the mirror. And in practice, I do not find such forgiveness to be truly redemptive. These people can say whatever they like about being new, but their behavior says otherwise. All that dope isn’t smoking itself; all those fights about what to watch on the television are hard to miss. Don’t tell me you regret raping that woman but can’t seem to find a way to be halfway decent to your neighbor. 

So, that’s my solution to the problem of recidivism: to be absolutely miserable. I’ll never win a contest against the crowd that sells the full spa package for the soul; spiritual booze is always going to taste better than my lifetime supply of daily bitter pills. What can I say? We aren’t here in prison to feel better, we’re here to get better. Any program that offers a shortcut is going to seem like a disappointment, and, indeed, I am deeply disappointed by my experiences in the Faith Based. Even with my minimal expectations, I have little positive to say about any of this mess.

Only during the writing of this essay did I stumble upon a kind of test that I think is a good indicator of which of my neighbors is truly remorseful. It came up during a brief conversation about Ukraine. On a whim, I asked the other thirteen guys in my section who would volunteer to fight in that war, if it meant being posted to the front line and the likelihood of not coming back alive. Three of us said immediately that we would sign up. I felt I knew ahead of time who would agree to the proposition: these were the two men who had spoken to me on a deep level regarding their confusion over how exactly they had allowed themselves to make such awful choices. All three of us are killers, or killer-adjacent; I don’t know if that is significant or not, but I suspect it is, something about knowing we ended a life maybe makes ours easier to let go of. Those prisoners in California that volunteer to fight wildfires? That’s exactly what I’m talking about, that’s remorse in action. Creon didn’t get much right in Sophocles’ Oedipus, but he nailed it when asked about the rite of purification: “by banishing a man, or expiation of blood by blood.” Yeah, our blood, oursacrifice, our effort — and nobody else’s. Show me you are willing to make radical sacrifices for others, and I’ll believe you won’t recidivate. Claim someone else’s blood or efforts give you redemption for free, and I suspect I’ll see you back in a few years. You can chant all day long, brothers, but if you haven’t embraced and internalized the horror of what you’ve done, there will never be genuine contrition. Everything else is mere placebo.