One thing that I find myself explaining is that once you are out of prison, you are still, in many ways, imprisoned. Some people grasp this concept fairly readily, even if they haven’t been to prison. Others struggle with the concept that doing your time does not make you free. There is often still time to do, both statutorily and by cultural custom. It doesn’t especially upset me to have to cons-plain this multiple times, but ti does have the ironic effect of hammering home a sense of eternal incarceration that I hadn’t really expected when I was among the Innocents. The ways in which we are taught to understand incarceration just don’t make clear — and make it difficult even to imagine — the true depths of the system that seems so “normal.”
It’s never over because even when you aren’t behind the razor wire, you are likely to be on some kind of parole, probation, or supervised release. That means that instead of having someone guard you by standing over you, you are subject to a loser guarding by a single person guarding people over a wider area. Much of what you do ro say is still surveilled; depending on your conviction, you might not have free and private access to computers or telephones. You might very well be require to give names, addresses, and phone numbers of friends and family members who will likely receive visits from law enforcement should you be suspected of “fleeing” or messing up the conditions of your release. You might have your movements geographically restricted, so that while you have relative freedom in one area, crossing a state boundary would be an incarceratable taboo. Proponents of the system would say it’s a kind of “limited freedom” is the service of public safety, though the oxymoron “limited freedom” doesn’t register as such with them. And you might be subject to these kinds of limitations for months, years, or a lifetime. In my own experience, the duration of such restrictions is absolutely arbitrary; I’ve seen lifetime probation given to folks for whom it makes absolutely no logical sense, and I have seen others get little or no probation and thought, “Well, I’m not sure that serves the public’s safety at all.”
It’s never over because, at some point, you start to become what inmates call “institutionalized.” That means that you start to internalize the mindsets, mores, and practices of prison to such an extent that they become a kind of unconscious and natural pattern. A good dose of formal or informal behavior modification might begin to liberate you from an institutionalized way of thinking, but not necessarily. Quite frankly I think some people return to prison simply because, deep down, they would rather face the institution they do know than that chaos and entropy that sometimes comprise “normal” life. Even when you are happy to have your limited freedom, it can still be difficult to change the conditioned responses that prison has instilled in you. Once I had my limited freedom, I still felt compelled to look over my shoulder all the time to see who was coming for me for having escaped the razor wire. When I was cut loose from an ankle monitoring tether, I still anticipated — at all hours or the day and night — calls and surveillance from the people who monitored the tether. The most prominent sensation I had after being cut loose from ankle monitoring was not joy or relief, but a kind of nauseating worry that someone would swoop down upon me and arrest me for NOT being monitored 24/7.
It’s never over because I still have to fill out criminal background disclosures for many employers and even quite a few volunteer organizations. Even if you have done your time behind razor wire, completed parole, probation or supervised release, and lived a more of less exemplary life before, during and after prison, you still have to answer for your crime. The optimists say that someone will come along who is enlightened enough to believe that you have done your bid and you can start fresh with no prejudice. I quote Emily Dickinson who wrote:
“Faith” is a fine invention For Gentlemen who see! But Microscopes are prudent In an Emergency!
I’d like to have something more substantial than hope, which hasn’t really gotten me that far in life. The cynical Innocents often say something that harkens back to the theme song from that 70’s classic detective show Baretta which proclaimed:
Don't go to bed, with no price on your head No, no, don't do it. Don't do the crime, if you can't do the time, Yeah, don't do it. source: https://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/barettalyrics.html
O! Robert Blake! Did you learn nothing from your theme song? But that’s right, Blake was acquitted of murder, so technically he remains among the Innocent. Basically, the cynical attitude is: it’s your fault you aren’t Innocent, so don’t complain. Sure. But I — unlike Robert Blake — never said I was innocent. Never maintained it for a moment. Was so emphatic about my guilt that my attorneys were upset with me. It’s not about the fact of guilt or innocence, but rather about whether guilt is eternal. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by a common belief in eternal guilt. After all, I don’t recall a Christian belief that says that once you go to Hell, you can be redeemed out of it. Eternal damnation is eternal, if we want to give that law a strict textualist reading (I won’t try to parse Revelation). On the other hand, you are supposed to be able to be redeemed by confessing the Rightness of the Kingdom before judgment, but I can tell you that allocating to your crimes in open court doesn’t really help the situation save for, perhaps, giving you a few fewer years behind razor wire, but even that’s not for sure. I can’t help but think I could have read a taco stand manu during my allocution and wound up with the same sentence. THe judge applied what he thought to be carefully planned out Solomonic justice, and he seemed to be very pleased with how cleverly he had thought this out in advance of anything I said. Moreover, the press didn’t care about what I said. I never saw them report a word of it. They were just interested in the sentence. Then on to the next media circus so as to give the people what they want. Then, of course, we are also blessed with the internet so that whatever I didn’t may not be forgotten, even by total strangers who have never heard of me and will never see me, but who might feel that it’s their duty to make my life miserable until I really do (in their likely estimation) burn in Hell. Think the system wasn’t hard enough of me? Oh, well then you can use the internet to try to injure my family and hurt their livelihoods. Try to make them suffer for standing by me. When the formal justice system stops, the vigilante justice system can pick right up. The internet is not “judge not,” but rather “judge more” … and without any of the “accountability” that I need to me made of have. But after all, the Innocent are always unaccountable by definition.
Yes, I understand better than people who make the laws that prison is designed to be a “life changing event.” I will still maintain, however, that if they had to live just for 60 days with the changes that prison brings, they would rethink the kind of difference that they claim it can make.