Prison Meditation

Last night I was back in the ACI (Adult Correctional Institute) for the first time in over 8 months. A buddy was asking afterwards if it affects me, entering such a constricting place, but I realized that this particular time had been strangely comfortable. I never thought that walking out onto the yard could satisfy nostalgia, or provide security. Gosh, what strange contradictions. The prison is supposed to be secure, and is supposed to make us feel secure, but only when we are on the outside of it, when it lurks off and distanced. Instead I am striding across the yard, seeing the horribly beautiful landscape of tall fence, tan shirts and pants, and Rhode Island sunset. I don't think that we are meant to want to enter prison, that is the whole point, but I was definitely excited last night.

That being said, I must note that I am free, and that entering prison for me is totally different than for most of the people in there. Even the word enter means a different thing. For me it implies an entrance followed by a quick exit. For the inmates it indicates finality, in the same way that one enters college, the workforce, or retirement. It is a movement on the scale of a life. Despite all of this, I wonder if repeat offenders ever feel the comfort of returning to an entirely predictable and simple place. I think that would be awful. "He's not cuttin' it on the outside, let's put him back into an absurdly simple and horrifically oppressing environment, maybe then he'll learn."

The real excitement, though, was the prospect of seeing J. I knew that I could count on him to be participating in the meditation workshops. "Bring in anything and I'll be there," he once told me. He isn't Jewish, but attends services just 'to see what other people have got going on'. You can always learn something. Always. I was right, and J was there, along with most of the white men in the facility (I hyperbolize, but really...). He told me he'd thought of me because he performed a spoken word piece at a group therapy session. I didn't tell him that I thought of him, and many of the other guys I've gotten to know, very often. I see us in a strange, illusionary mirroring relationship. Each inmate has a very clear, very necessary, and very distant image of the outside. I, conversely, have a very clear image of the inside, and I often think of the spaces we have created in the classrooms of the Education Wing. (Foucault argued that the 'outside' can only constitute itself with the help of the 'inside' - the self with the help of the other). The space produced by the creative workshops seems to be somewhere in between these two theoretical places. Maybe it lies in between the lofty, arcing imagination of the inmate, his toss landing always-short of 'real' life on the outside, and the way we throw ourselves inside, with romanticized pictures of 'prison'. In between those two humanly erring trajectories is something pretty good, I think.

J has been mostly writing song lyrics recently, but I'm pretty sure he can do anything. He is one of the most fundamentally creative people I have ever met. "Doing good," he said, "as good as you can be in here, you know." I really have absolutely no idea, but I also felt full of good, and said so. Mostly because I was seeing a friend I hadn't spoken with in a while.