Yesterday I made the last of my long drives through the Kansas flatlands to a rural, Dairyqueen-town and to the dilapidated detention center where my son had been in residence for the past five months.
The sun was high and seemed to rally around my subdued consternation with an early-fall display of buttery light. Even the scattered bunches of Lazy Susan's stacked in wiry clusters among the high and faded jade grass flagged my passage on either side of the highway with a cheery, yellow reception of solicitous regard.
Had my destination been of another sort, this would have been a felicitous seasonal homage to perpetual optimism, which I would have wholly appreciated.
But yesterday I was neither going to visit my son nor to reclaim him. I was simply going to collect what personal possessions were mandatorily left behind when he was transferred to a maximum security prison last weekend.
The institution housing him presently is run by the State Department of Corrections. In addition to being used as a Reception and Diagnostic Unit where every inmate received into custody is evaluated and processed before being sent to another facility to serve out his sentence, it is also where they house those inmates facing capital punishment before sending them to another facility where they will be executed.
Whether a prisoner is to be remanded to another penitentiary to serve time on earth for his crime or to be summarily banished to another dimension altogether, is of little consequence to the system itself. Either way, each man will commence his earned castigation from within that same violently indifferent fortress.
In this facility evil, ignorance, addiction, avarice, the weak and the misbegotten are all treated to identical doses of distain and cowed into subservience by guards with a brutal and detached mastery years in the making.
Provocation is a necessary tool. It identifies the potentially violent offenders from those whose psychology limits their destruction to the bewildered contents of their own souls.
This eclectic mix of criminal dysfunction is handled the way the human species always handles the detritus that is necessarily a part of our lives through the balance of light and dark: It is separated and contained.
Within the cycle of a twenty-four hour day, twenty-three of those hours are spent solitarily in a small cell. In that way the risk of cross-contamination or injury to one inmate by another is greatly reduced.
Because compassion and consideration are no longer extended to those whose choices have led them to this constructional purgatory and because their loved ones are regarded as merely an extension of the bane these men have become, no notice is given to families when an inmate is moved. It was only through the two letters I received from my son three days ago that his whereabouts were made known to me.
What I now also know and wish I did not is the harrowing demographic of this particular facility. I learned this through my own exploration but did so after his letter revealed that upon orientation on his first day they were shown a video on how to avoid prison rape as well as being asked to sign a "corpse release form" against the possibility of an "untimely prison demise."
From the small window in his cell, he writes that he can see only the "razor white walls topped with gleaming coils of barbed wire." He writes that the facility is massive and the noise level becomes almost intolerable towards the end of a long, restless day of pacing, ruminating and regretting. He tells me that he is terrified.
This is not summer camp or boarding school or a protracted stay at a youth hostile. This is not even the blackened but tolerable inconvenience of a county jail. This is hell.
And the sun that shone down on me, however brightly, as I drove along the highway and that shone down on the docile fields of thriving crops and on the vibrant wildflowers peddling their organic nobility and on every free individual who has brokered a better arrangement with life, is not able to penetrate the thick walls of his prison cell or to alleviate the rattling instability of my own apprehension and the abiding despair over both his broken psychology as well as his immediate safety.
I was planning on writing another narrative today; one that surveyed a more confectionary landscape of normality with gleeful injections of humor. I tried repeatedly, but the potency of these images and the complexity of my emotions were insistent and unwilling to step aside until I gave them their due.
I suppose my best hope is that if I write about these baleful passages as they unfold, I will one day reach a point of great strength and acceptance and that beneath these sobering fibers, a new and resplendent tapestry will unveil itself; a tapestry that can hold up under the revelatory beams of the sun and reflect the successful conclusion to our lives, spotted as they have been, by challenge and imperfection.
I am on the outside now. But like the sun, I will do my best to hold the light and to process my startled maternity until it resembles a bright orb of resolute promise.
My son is depending on me, and I am not going to fall from the only sky providing him some measure of daylight.
And on it goes.
The institution housing him presently is run by the State Department of Corrections. In addition to being used as a Reception and Diagnostic Unit where every inmate received into custody is evaluated and processed before being sent to another facility to serve out his sentence, it is also where they house those inmates facing capital punishment before sending them to another facility where they will be executed.
Whether a prisoner is to be remanded to another penitentiary to serve time on earth for his crime or to be summarily banished to another dimension altogether, is of little consequence to the system itself. Either way, each man will commence his earned castigation from within that same violently indifferent fortress.
In this facility evil, ignorance, addiction, avarice, the weak and the misbegotten are all treated to identical doses of distain and cowed into subservience by guards with a brutal and detached mastery years in the making.
Provocation is a necessary tool. It identifies the potentially violent offenders from those whose psychology limits their destruction to the bewildered contents of their own souls.
This eclectic mix of criminal dysfunction is handled the way the human species always handles the detritus that is necessarily a part of our lives through the balance of light and dark: It is separated and contained.
Within the cycle of a twenty-four hour day, twenty-three of those hours are spent solitarily in a small cell. In that way the risk of cross-contamination or injury to one inmate by another is greatly reduced.
Because compassion and consideration are no longer extended to those whose choices have led them to this constructional purgatory and because their loved ones are regarded as merely an extension of the bane these men have become, no notice is given to families when an inmate is moved. It was only through the two letters I received from my son three days ago that his whereabouts were made known to me.
What I now also know and wish I did not is the harrowing demographic of this particular facility. I learned this through my own exploration but did so after his letter revealed that upon orientation on his first day they were shown a video on how to avoid prison rape as well as being asked to sign a "corpse release form" against the possibility of an "untimely prison demise."
From the small window in his cell, he writes that he can see only the "razor white walls topped with gleaming coils of barbed wire." He writes that the facility is massive and the noise level becomes almost intolerable towards the end of a long, restless day of pacing, ruminating and regretting. He tells me that he is terrified.
This is not summer camp or boarding school or a protracted stay at a youth hostile. This is not even the blackened but tolerable inconvenience of a county jail. This is hell.
And the sun that shone down on me, however brightly, as I drove along the highway and that shone down on the docile fields of thriving crops and on the vibrant wildflowers peddling their organic nobility and on every free individual who has brokered a better arrangement with life, is not able to penetrate the thick walls of his prison cell or to alleviate the rattling instability of my own apprehension and the abiding despair over both his broken psychology as well as his immediate safety.
I was planning on writing another narrative today; one that surveyed a more confectionary landscape of normality with gleeful injections of humor. I tried repeatedly, but the potency of these images and the complexity of my emotions were insistent and unwilling to step aside until I gave them their due.
I suppose my best hope is that if I write about these baleful passages as they unfold, I will one day reach a point of great strength and acceptance and that beneath these sobering fibers, a new and resplendent tapestry will unveil itself; a tapestry that can hold up under the revelatory beams of the sun and reflect the successful conclusion to our lives, spotted as they have been, by challenge and imperfection.
I am on the outside now. But like the sun, I will do my best to hold the light and to process my startled maternity until it resembles a bright orb of resolute promise.
My son is depending on me, and I am not going to fall from the only sky providing him some measure of daylight.
And on it goes.
