Prison Camp: Homecoming
A White-Collar Journal forum for criminal justice, lived experience, and the personal search for redemption
This week in Prison Camp, I’m beginning a new three-part serialization from the final chapter of my memoir. The moment of release is a kind of fool’s gold. A conviction to make amends, start over, re-build 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.
Here is Part I of Homecoming.
HOMECOMING — Part I
Like a dystopian movie, the airport was desolate from COVID, the store fronts were closed, every gate was empty—except the one for my flight—and everyone was wearing masks, all standing apart and frightened. I was assigned the last seat on the plane. It seemed appropriate, but I was surprised that on a full flight there was no spacing or COVID protocols, other than no in-flight service. I was disappointed by that. I hadn’t had a glass of wine in eighteen months, and being nervous, I could’ve used one. It had been an old weakness, and I was already succumbing.
It was a turbulent flight, but it arrived on time. Being last to deplane, I was the last passenger entering the airport and straggled last into the baggage area, my wife looking worried at the bottom of the escalator. A new straw hat, slimmer than I last saw her and still beautiful. A long embrace. There’s no relief like leaving prison. She was smiling, happy. It was still okay.
Walking out of the terminal, just before midnight, it was a beautiful night of stars and a half-moon, the sweet tropical scent of Florida and giant palm trees on the periphery of the car park. We followed the warm flashing lights to a solo, smiling toll taker. The air was light. I was a free man.
My release order required a call to probation the following morning. A disturbing, ageless voice, in a mumbling monotone, informed me that I was not yet a free man.
“Home Incarceration,” he said—a condition added in small print on the court order releasing me—“is the most restrictive form of house arrest.”
“Will I be able to enter the community?”
“You can’t walk to the mailbox,” he said.
For the next twenty minutes he described the terms of Home Incarceration, while I only answered with Okays. At the end of the call he told me to come to his office the following day.
“We’ll install the ankle monitor and give you a drug test. You have a pen?”
He was on speaker, my wife was listening—paused in still-frame—and searching for a pen. I was trembling, he was difficult to hear. I scribbled the address, but it was barely legible.
Although it was jarring at first, I eventually recovered a few minutes after the call. I was home, my wife was making eggs, and coffee was brewing in a new Florida condominium we were renting. Although not a big or fancy place, it lived large, and the sun was shining. Most importantly, we could afford it as Social Security was my only income now. The prior evening, my first night home, had been a restful sleep in a soft bed—the sheets cool and scented. It was like a drowning man pulled from the water and breathing air. Nothing else mattered. After living in “fifty-four square feet with another guy”—as Jack, the seafood king described it—all was well.
For the rest of the world, COVID was everything, but to me, still divorced from the rest of the world, it was a path out. That’s what prison does. There’s no connection to community anymore. I thought about Judge Bolden who told me at my sentencing hearing that I was not connected to humanity and disconnected from everything that makes life worthwhile.
I learned about the things that make life worthwhile, I’m not sure I didn’t know them before. But I was more disconnected than ever, closer to myself. I can’t explain it. But in prison, exiled in its confusing rhythms and surrounded by chaos, you turn inward to survive, insulate yourself from others, become hardened, and estranged from the world at large.
I was home, I had reentered the community, but I was still coldly detached.
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): Homecoming-Part II
If you’re new to White-Collar Journal, you can read earlier chapters and essays on incarceration, justice, and reentry at whitecollarjournal.com.
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That first night in a real bed...One of the men in my writers' group who is 6'4" told me his first night out was the first night he could stretch out his body in bed. These details you provide, in this excerpt and in all that I have read, make the experience specific and vivid.