Prison Camp: Epilogue
A Forum for Stories of Incarceration, Justice, and Redemption
Since my release from prison, I’ve written a series of essays as a requiem for the exiled incarcerated class and for all the inmates I lived with—including the guards—who, in some ways, are just as confined as the rest of us. Last week, I shared an excerpt on the overall experience of incarceration. This week, I’m posting another, focused on the uneasy reality of returning home.
EPILOGUE
The moment of release is a kind of fool’s gold. A conviction to make amends, start over, and rebuild a life. But returning home from prison, the relief fades sooner than you’d think. The old failures still reside there, and prison makes the trip home with you. The experience of incarceration: its agony, sense of exile, isolation, and the misery of day-to-day confinement lingers long after the arrival home. Even in the relatively low-security environment of a federal prison camp—like Devens, where I served—confinement becomes an internal form of torture, no matter its locale or facility.
The presiding judge told me I had already sentenced myself to a prison without bars. Still, a prison nonetheless, a prison of the soul, that I was not connected to humanity, disconnected to what makes life meaningful and worthwhile. He said I had a challenging life ahead, and I must figure out how to release myself from this prison of my own making. I concluded that my crime was a failure of character, something intrinsic, revealed only under great duress and crisis.
Returning home, I embraced a life of contemplation, renewal, and self-reflection.
But no one’s the same as you remembered them. Friends are uncomfortable, distant, and measuring; opportunities are foreclosed. Ambivalence follows warm greetings. And then there are the questions asked, and the more painful ones, not asked but implied in half measures, stares, and pauses —more revealing and hurtful than a thousand insults. You try to put on a good face, show courage, and believe it yourself for a while. But it doesn’t last, resonate. You’re damaged goods because prison doesn’t prepare you. All the stuff on the bulletin boards, the courses, seminars: resume building, reentry strategies, interview preparedness, family orientation, all bull-shit. Every inmate leaves with only a T-shirt, a new pair of jeans, a pair of sneakers, a felony conviction, and maybe $200 from his prison-store account. The excruciating self-loathing, a permanent consequence.
It’s been four years since my release. I’m still disconnected from humanity, and I haven’t reached out to any of my former inmates. I’m not sure why that is. But that’s what prison does to you, it takes everything you came in with and everything you left behind. I still think about them; many of them are probably in those dreams I have every night that I can’t remember in the morning.
I’m uncomfortable around good people. The self-loathing, the residual guilt that the guards instilled in us every minute of incarceration, lingers long after the arrival home. I’m connected to a group of former white-collar felons—a kind of AA confessional for the formerly incarcerated. I’m the worst kind of member, still wallowing in my brokenness, and reluctant to share and truly connect with their honest and open confessions. But I think I know what makes life meaningful and worthwhile. I got that much out of prison. I’m not sure, I didn’t know it before.
My most vivid memory at Devens is the cemetery alongside the track that I passed every day during my daily walk. An eerie tableau of perfect rows of pure white-crosses. It was rumored that several former inmates were buried there, and I often contemplated the prospect of being buried there alongside them. It always reminded me of conversations with my wife, who told me she wants to be cremated and her ashes spread over the little river near our first house on a beautiful, pristine hill in Darien, Connecticut. But that was before we knew anything, as it was the beginning of our lives, really, and of course we weren’t aware of it as you never are when you’re young marrieds and the last thing you’re thinking about is how you want to be buried. But after all my time at Devens, passing those graves of inmates I never met, but part of my brotherhood just the same, I decided that I don’t want to be ashes and spread anywhere. I want to be put in a box and know the weight of me will be felt by some unknowns who struggle lowering me down there, next to the other buried inmates I had never known. And it doesn’t matter that they don’t know me, but only that there’s somebody in there that was alive once, and I’ll take comfort just knowing that. But please don’t make me ashes and spread me anywhere because no matter where you spread them, it’s really nowhere, and I was here once, and at least I’ll know that there’s a place that says I was here, no matter what I was or wasn’t.
Here is a link to the complete essay, A Muddled Brotherhood.
If this story resonates with you, or if you’ve wrestled with your own origin myths, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Up Next on White Collar Journal:
Wednesday (Justice Notes): Criminal Justice Reform Efforts
Thursday (Notes from Exisle): Log/Verse: Daily, fragmented reflections
Sunday (Prison Camp): More portraits from prison