Signs of the Times - Sallying Forth a Moving Experience
July 2003
Criminal Justice: Sallying Forth a Moving Experience
Search for:


Home

"Mass Movement!'

The robotic voice sounds over the intercom. Numbly I respond to the big voice in the sky. Grab my coat. Grab my glasses. Check I have mints. Close my cell door and join the herd around the living-unit door.

We surge forward as if our momentum, our willpower alone, will let us out.

The door unlocks, after much mumbling and complaining about the slowness of the officer, and why they always let other wings out first and we're always last. The door pops open. We stream through into the bubble area and converge on the sally port. I hope it's open. It is. Push on, water plunging into a dam, we fill the sally port, squashing in as many as possible.

Perfume, loud voices, kissing, whispering, someone smoking illegally. Shrill laughter. Cussing. As last, the first door closes. The air tightens. The second door of the sally port doesn't immediately pop open and a ruckus begins. 'Open the door.' 'I'm going to faint.' 'Open the door, you lazy good for nothing. Do your job.' Nothing happens.

I close my eyes. I could be on the New York subway, the London Tube or the Paris Metro. We could be stuck in a tunnel, air closed, pressure building.

The work hour crowd also wears uniforms and is just as ruthlessly self-absorbed.

This is the mundane anthill activity of everyday life. Who are these people trapped in it? Who are the people who rise above it? Circumstances, rules, social mores and expectations bind us all. Prisons with or without bars are fundamentally the same. But are these physical confinements and mindless scurrying truly the prison? The externals bear similarities but what about the insides? The woman in front of me just got her General Education Development certificate. She's glowing and her words tumble and garble about college. The woman whispering in the corner just lost her visit with her children and she is telling an elaborate lie to avoid responsibility for her predicament. The woman at the front of the pack is negotiating a deal. The one behind me is praying. I am too but for air.

She is praying about 'other people.' As Sartre wrote: 'Hell is other people.' One could then say, heaven is that ability to be teflon in the face of other people's toxicity. Or perhaps for some people, heaven is solitude.

Or maybe heaven is the ability to embrace other people. Become your enemy, say the Buddhists. Love your neighbor as yourself, says Jesus. Those people who rise above the rat race are neither rats nor in a race.

The door opens. I dash into the fresh air, my nose straining to remain up wind of the cigarettes lighting up. As a reformed smoker, I am a demon about cigarette stink. I breathe deep. Air. Clean, sparkling air so fresh and bright it makes my teeth ache. I suck it in, gulp in the sky.

A sky smeared with bold electric colors, constantly shifting shades and cloud shapes. I turn a slow 360 to take in the horizon. Now this is heaven." (Elizabeth Haysom, Fluvanna Review, July 17, 2003).

Elizabeth Haysom is presently incarcerated at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women in Troy, Virginia. She is serving a 90 year sentence as an accessory to the murder of her parents in 1985. This column was first printed as part of a series, under the general heading 'Glimpses from Inside.'


Comments? Questions? Write me at george@loper.org.