Notes from Exile: Code of Conduct
Log/Verse: daily reflections from prison, written every morning at my bunk. Part poem, part log book.
Last week in Justice Notes, I wrote about the gap between who we believe ourselves to be and the choices we actually make—the private “code” each of us claims to live by. For this week’s Log/Verse, I’m sharing a short prose-poem from my prison journal—a fragment about those shifting codes, the numbers we quietly assign ourselves, and the slow education of learning how a place like prison resets them.
CODE OF CONDUCT
MY PRISON JOURNAL:
Everyone has one.
More complicated in prison.
Like everywhere else, amorphous codes prevail—
a moving target of low numbers,
whispered to favored friends.
Fingers pointed like arrows
leave deep wounds
and permanent scars.
Twelve months down
I’m still learning,
as the number gets lower and lower.
Learning to prison
takes time.
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