It occurs to me that every time I post here I’m engaging in potentially a very dismal practice: consplaining. That’s something, I think, like mansplaining but from a felon’s perspective. After all, who asked me to talk about any of this stuff? Why should I think that an audience wouldn’t have insight into the topics of my rambles based on its own intellect and experience?
One thing that keeps me from just backing away with apologies and shame from my consplaining project is a conversation I had with one particularly insightful and experienced inmate during my first year in prison. Waiting around to go to lunch one day, we started a back and forth over the value of, basically, consplaining. The Leprechaun, let’s call him, insisted that I should make a written record of how prisons operate, the people in them, and the consequences they engender. Somebody, he insisted, especially somebody from a non-stereotypical “felonious background,” needs to speak to all the stuff that Life After Prison tries to take up. Then he issued a wise caveat: “You and I could go in front of an audience of regular people right now, and tell the truth about our experience, and nobody would believe us.”
The Leprechaun’s insight neatly points out the paradoxes of consplaining. A felon’s voice is, by cultural acclaim, not one to be trusted; it is normally tinged, we are inculcated into thinking, with self-serving distortions and always already untrustworthy ulterior motives. It constantly runs afoul of normalizing thoughts: It can’t be that bad; why should I care?; don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. Certainly, my dear readers of this blog don’t start with such premises, but in daily post-prison life, I find myself being dragged over such conversational barnacles in a startling number of exchanges, both with well-wishers and people who are connected with the justice system itself (and, therefore, tend to be well-wishers in only the most cynical ways). What I didn’t quite grasp is the emotional and psychic toll it would take on me to engage in consplaining. It’s a little nauseating to feel I’m condescending to friends and loved ones when expounding on matters that seem obvious to me. It makes me feverish when debating the catch-22s of “freedom” with jailers. It feels like a sick day when I consider that people might not actually trust my narrative at all. So I must fall back on the Leprechaun’s wisdom. Say it and move on.
I am not, despite appearances, seeking validation here. Rather, I’m trying to document some of the psychology of Life After Prison. If I really wanted affirmation, I could find it behind the razor wire, and that’s one of the reasons why some felons feel more at home behind bars than outside them. For me, that support isn’t worth the environment. I just think you deserve to know that if, on some days, I seem depressed and exhausted, it might be the consequence of consplaining.