My brothers and I celebrate each time one of us walks out the prison gates with this freedom restored. We count the time only when we can do so in days, some of us waiting decades to reach that point. “Seven and a wake-up,” is something you might hear us say, which just means eight days but on the eighth day you'll be released bright and early in the morning.
Before someone releases, we celebrate by making a spread — that’s prison jargon for “fancy meal” if you consider ramen, instant refried beans, and squeeze cheese the core ingredients for fancy. Prison food is highly processed and made to have a shelf life counted in years.
Sometimes I consider that it is counter intuitive to make a meal for someone, when in just a few days he’ll have access to a world of food I can’t remember the taste of — though I often try. Think, things that are leafy and green, or juicy and fresh, or even cheese that must be sliced and melted, not opened and squeezed.
I used to think the worst thing was when someone came back to prison. When you’ve said your goodbyes, but sometime later — months or years — you see them walking down the tier. They are easy to spot with their downcast eyes, the invisible “failed” stamp on their forehead, and a dark cloud of shame looming over them. Life sentences served on the installment plan, just a little at a time.
But I've learned that is not the worst thing.
People who release from prison are 18 times more likely to commit suicide than the general population, according to the National Institute of Health. According to my own anecdotal experience over nearly a decade of incarceration that data is accurate, if not understated.
For me, when someone walks out the prison doors it is a type of ambiguous loss. They are not gone, but not really here either. I think, perhaps, the meal we make is just a way to process the grief of a broken connection. Someone I have come to think of as a brother is moving on to the unknown — an outside world that may be a place of leafy, green vegetables; juicy, fresh fruit; and cheese that slices. A place where time is not counted in wake-ups, days, years or by shelf life, but rather it is measured by birthdays and vacations, camping trips and graduations, by anniversaries and all the memories made in between. Simultaneously, it may be a place so unforgiving, so foreign, so harsh and so perilously saturated with risk that ending your life is preferable to the inevitable shame-tainted tier walk of the repeat offender. | PL