Love Letter-Part II

Working in prisons, both men’s and women’s prisons, was the most rewarding, profound work I have done. It was filled with heartbreak and miracles, reaching into vast realms of human emotion. My team and I worked in a place where we had to foster growth, warmth, and hope in an unwelcoming, harsh, ugly environment. We were witness to women coming to us with stories of male guards sneaking into their cells in the deep, dark night and raping them; women who had no voice, no power, no support. We were witness to women who started doing time on the wrong foot by perhaps saying yes to the wrong convict, and then becoming property - to be bought, sold, or traded for a pack of smokes. We were witness to the stories of women from all walks of life who had been beaten, broken, exploited, raped, and oppressed in places where they learned that to survive, one had to either oppress or be oppressed; there was no in-between. We were witness to the “black market” that came to be when smoking was banned in the California prisons, and tobacco was worth more than any drug on the yard. It created yet another context for extortion, blackmail, and violence. One woman in the program had convinced a younger, weaker woman to get her mother to smuggle tobacco into the prison. The mother got scared and decided to stop. The one who had been getting and selling the tobacco had friends on the outside threaten the mother and the rest of the family unless she continued to bring it in. The mother called the prison authorities, prompting an investigation. Her daughter - the younger, weaker one - was attacked in her sleep with a lock inside a sock, after which she was in a coma for over a month. The first year working there brought all the memories back to me, the things I didn’t want to remember about my own five year prison term, the haunting memories of the ugliness prison creates. This dynamic of the oppressed oppressing each other has always been so difficult for me to grapple with, both from the perspective of doing time and then working in prisons. Knowing I had been one of the oppressors, for years I told myself I had to do it to survive. But on a gut level, I knew there came a point when that reason no longer applied, that I had crossed over to a place of just being a cruel, heartless person joining the ranks of those to be feared, and liking how that felt. Perhaps this work was a means to an end, to balance the karmic debt I figured I owed the universe for all the pain I had inflicted. The team I was so fortunate to have accomplished a miracle by building community - the antithesis of prison - inside one. No easy task, to be sure. By Thanksgiving, three months into the program, we got permission from the Warden to bring in Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings; all the staff spent a week prior to the event preparing various dishes, and we served the women dinner following an incredible moving ceremony of thanks. By then, I had spent years working with convicts, criminals, and addicts with the intent of helping to lead people out of misery and pain with others who had also found their way out. With all my heart, I believe that people lucky enough to overcome their misery and pain experience far greater extremes of bliss and joy than those who have no misery and pain. And then we danced, in that same gym, where they had poured out their hearts, tears, and stories to us and to one another- a day one doesn’t forget.