We are no doubt better off without the prisons that tamed Wilde. But something may be said for the dignity of tragedy once granted to sufferers by the conviction that suffering discloses something worth more than the entire ordinary world. There is another kind of suffering in the prisons of today, quite different from the agony of which Wilde made such profound use. The romance that could survive in Reading Gaol fares ill in the prefabricated architecture of the modern prison. These concrete and razor wire prisons are in their own way less kind than even the bricks of Reading Gaol. Gould could have tried to content himself by humming Bach partitas, but he would have found it difficult through the thumps and screeches of death metal or rap, through yelling and heinous laughter and television. Instead of desolate affliction openly acknowledged and torture murderously inflicted, the better prisons of today put up an ugly parody of life. Under the inhuman rubric of “corrections” and in the robotic “positive programming” jargon of today, the prisoner is enlisted in gainless employment, in banality and triviality, in the perpetual effort at a modicum of physical comfort. Here there is no crucifixion, but endless Stations of the Way: the steps that must be willingly taken, the knowledge that each volitional step is a movement toward a dismal and mean end. As torturers know all too well, the victim’s feeling of complicity with the pain makes the suffering greater. So it is that the knowledge of my own collaboration in the days of my ordinary prison life, in the rituals repeated and the trifling pursuit of utter inconsequence, makes the awful nullity of the existence worse. Longing, futility, repetition: how uncanny the Greeks were in their psychology of suffering when they imagined the punishments of Sisyphus and Tantalus.
The overcrowded prisons of today immerse the prisoner in a foul-mouthed world pervaded by an underlying bestiality of spirit, a world without ordinary freedom and with no sense of any other. Hell is other people, Sartre reported; prison is filled with them. The person forced into prison is plunged into the strife of pompous thugs with corrupt images and inane slogans inscribed on their bodies like graffiti on the dirty wall of a dilapidated lavatory. The stereotype of prisoners as monstrous, grotesque predators tells much more about the mentality of the public than about the reality of the prisoners, but that phantasmagoric image is still closer to epitome than to caricature of the prison subculture itself, which is a toxic distillation of the degraded mass culture from which it springs.
Perversely, it is for the worst that prison is hardly a punishment. These inmates are in their element. Actual violence is honoured. Savagery secures a conscious respect. The coarsest racial tribalism, fundamentalist religion, misogyny, philistinism, junk food, the kitsch cult of sports: all dominate in a hermetic environment that works to make it all seem perfectly natural, as though to induce prisoners and guards alike to forget that anything else exists, could exist, or has ever existed on earth. Nothing remains uncorrupted: Christianity, which once served to chisel out refined human beings, here churns out the crude and the coarse. What inspired Fear and Trembling and Bach is reduced to hokum, bestsellers, and banjo music — if not far worse.
Individual prisoners, of course, may not conform to any of this, but the contagion of prison air is irresistible; even resilient individuals acknowledge its hegemony. And so any life must be a conscientious struggle, an existence of inner exile and alienation, with pantomimes of feigned interest, suppressions of boredom, and expressions of profane pieties. Everything that demands careful development — sensitivity, tact, discernment, incisiveness — dulls in desuetude in prison. Such oddities as curiosity, subtlety, grace, and intelligence, which have little enough place in the world at large, here on noisy days can seem mere fantasies, or at best childhood dreams that cannot quite be recalled. But what prison life impresses on me perhaps most terribly is not just frangibility of soul, but unlively contempt for what remains: the diminishing expectations, the compromise of aspiration, as each unrecoverable day goes by, accumulating memories that are the stuff of nightmare.
I loathe prisoners, of course, but this means I loathe myself, for I am one, damaged and declining also. If I hold on to my contempt and self-loathing because they keep me in touch with some iota of what I should still yearn for and might have become in a different, challenging, various life, I know how ridiculous that nostalgia is. Under these fluorescent lights, quiet repose — whether scholarly, musical, or otherwise — has the cast of desperate escapism and risible amour propre. No lover given over to reveries of his beloved, condemned to caress her features in fading photographs, could be less fit than a prisoner to distinguish between liberation and escapism. In this sense, prison serves as an apt metaphor for both freedom and determinism — an emblem of their consubstantial uselessness; for prison teaches above all that the future will have no cure for the past, and life no end but the tomb.
here is perhaps one kind of freedom that prison can make you understand as no other experience can. To grasp the indifference of the universe is one thing; to understand the open malevolence of an entire society of human beings is quite another. In the segregation cell, you are confronted with the terrible confluence of both. The world is narrowed to a single dirty room. However many times you are moved, the room is always the same; only the dirt is different. The days are the same as well, and they operate on the same, repeated plan. The food comes in on a tray, the tray goes out. The brief gleam of our lives between dark eternities seems not glimmer but dingy waste. The self and the spirit, you come to realize, do not exist deep within, but extend far beyond you; they exist only through the connection with all of that with which you share an interest. In utter desolation all becomes idle, and even if you know you will get out with some life still left to live, even if you think it will be soon, you feel an irresistible awareness of the senselessness that life is, alone. Even self-mastery can come to seem futile. Become a stoic if you like, and practise resignation, practise your indifference to all that happens; the system continues as before. Hope is irrelevant; only the perpetual loss of the present moment is real, absolute, permanent.For a long time, I would try to live out in as much detail as possible my memory of days long past and far removed: in Pakistan, sun-bathed reveries on a warm couch, playing with kittens, a precocious first dinner date in a Japanese restaurant. But ineluctably, the memories came to seem indistinguishable from imagination. Once every connection with your past life falls away, you are left with only your presence in the dirty room. There is one relief: nothing is expected of you, you have no responsibilities, you are at ultimate and absolute liberty. But it is the liberty of a man immured in an indifferent mausoleum, awaiting his own extinction.
I cannot say that the isolation cell is the only way to attain even this unhallowed understanding of freedom. As an adolescent, I had already formed an idea of its peril, in the condition of error: alone in a room, checking my incorrect mathematics answer again and again, unable to detect any mistake, and yet seeing my error immediately once it was pointed out to me. Without my father to correct me, I thought, I might have forever remained in error. There is a moment, moreover, in Kafka’s last novel, The Castle, that captures the very emptiness of freedom taken to extremity. The protagonist accomplishes his escape from others, only to find himself estranged in his victory:
It seemed to K. as if at last these people had broken off all relations with him, and as if now in reality he were freer than he had ever been, and at liberty to wait in this place, usually forbidden to him, as long as he desired, and had won a freedom such as hardly anybody else had ever succeeded in winning, and as if nobody could dare to touch him or drive him away, or even speak to him; but — this conviction was at least equally strong — as if at the same time there was nothing more senseless, nothing more hopeless, than this freedom, this waiting, this inviolability.
I read these words in segregation — with recognition. I laughed. In prison as in no other human affliction is there so fundamental and sustained a rupture of human solidarity, so seamless a sense of enmity.
he hell of other people can reach delirious extremes even in segregation. Perhaps especially in segregation. Bad neighbours are nuisances in ordinary life, but the prisoner in a neighbouring cell is never more than a few feet away, and if he is insane, as is often enough the case, life quickly becomes maniacal. A deranged Vietnam vet (if his ravings may be relied upon) once ranted next door to me in an intensive management unit for weeks on end, before being released directly into the free world. Another prisoner, Somali Ali (as he called himself), the first neighbour I had in the King County Jail, was hardly more than a boy, but already long gone. He took me for a liar when I told him I’d been imprisoned six years already, because his head was filled with tales of brutality of incarceration inevident on me. Then he launched into a practised and deafening tirade — “I’m a mothafuckin’ savage, I’m built for this shit” — that went on for days, and which I had to endure without even the mild amelioration of earplugs, which were banned in the jail. He alternated beating upon the wall with emitting scraping sounds that, he assured me, were from the crafting of a shank for the moment when we might come into contact. At one point, he tried to pour liquid through a crack in the wall, before I sealed it with toothpaste and newspaper. Eventually, he attacked a prisoner who was cutting his hair, and they took him elsewhere. A year later, he was shot to death in the prison yard at Walla Walla when he wouldn’t end his assault on another prisoner. By sheer coincidence, my attorney at the time had once been his; it transpired that Ali had been brought to America from Somalia for sexual exploitation by an American soldier. He had been shunted through Washington State’s foster system and its juvenile prisons before being graduated to the adult variety.To talk of freedom and spirit is obscene here; the lesson impressed upon me most forcefully is how utterly our ears render us the prisoners of others. The eye’s lid has no counterpart in the ear. Not even the best earplugs will do for hearing what we do for vision whenever we, mercifully, shut our eyes.
t is rage rather than freedom that I have come to understand most in prison. I was always more disposed to laughter than to anger, and thought fury a brazen confession of moronic monstrosity. But fury is not so alien to me today. I sometimes wonder how the free might feel if they could know what feelings the prisons they have built can inspire in those forced to live in them. There is no respite from fury in prison. I now need only think of certain things, and hatred from tiny points engulfs the world. When I think of years spent lying awake from the cold, though there were piles of blankets ready; when I think of the years spent without a note of music, though forced to listen to vulgar conversations yelled from cell to cell in the night; when I think of the boorish bureaucrats manipulating the mechanisms of misery with their misspelled memos; when I think of the years without dental floss; when I think of these years wasted by the complacent and comfortable, by the ignorant and the indifferent; when I think of all this completely unnecessary cruelty and then of that world that can find it possible to be upset over desserts that do not turn out right at Christmas — then rage unfolds, and it is possible to wish to bring down the world in ruins.
