Prison Thinking
Why is freedom so frightening? What a visit to a penitentiary taught me about Gaza, retribution, and the safety of staying locked up.
“Prison is easy,” said N______. “You get fed, you get told where to be and when to be there. Outside is hard.”
A few nods of assent, a couple of “Uh-huhs.” It wasn’t the first time I’d heard this sentiment, but today it had special resonance. I was sitting with a dozen other men—three of them visitors like me, nine of them in prison blues—inside a blank institutional room with lots of windows and doors that don’t lock from the inside. Welcome to Columbia River Correctional Institute, otherwise known as CRCI.
It was my second visit to the facility as a member of the Mankind Project, an organization dedicated to inspiring self-awareness and personal growth among men. And who needs that more than those in prison?
Only don’t call them “prisoners.” The Oregon Department of Corrections’ term of art is “Adults In Custody,” or “AICs.” It’s an ironic rubric; from the Looney Tunes characters airbrushed on the cinder-block walls to the stacks of free coloring books and word puzzles, the messaging is crystal-clear: You are not an adult. You are a child, and you have no agency. And at this moment it makes me think, perversely or not, of Palestine.
Waiting at Rafah Crossing, © Said Khatib, AFP
There are resonances between the two places. Both are ringed by zones of despair; the road to CRCI—less than two miles from my house—is a junkyard, choked with sagging sedans, burnt-out campers and, currently, the gleaming frame of a late-model pickup, looking as clean as it did the day it came off the line. And the southern gate into Gaza—the Rafah Crossing—stands in a barren interzone, a sort of waiting room from hell. One Palestinian-American familiar with the ordeal says that it typically requires at least a month—often as many as three—to even receive an official response to a request for passage.
If neither CRCI nor Gaza include “prison” in their names, that’s precisely what they are: places where people are kept until they’ve been sufficiently “corrected.”
Not that that seems likely, in either case. One of the unexpected lessons I’ve learned here is how willingly the AICs place themselves there. I heard it first from S_____, a stone-faced man with a powerful build. He’s up for release soon, but he doesn’t sound jubilant; he sounds scared. “In here,” he said, “I’m somebody. People respect me. Out there, I’m nothing. Every street corner reminds me of something bad.”
Hearing this from a man who’s spent roughly half of his 60-odd years behind bars is sobering. But it’s far from unusual; I’ve heard variations on it again and again. “I’d just go find cops,” said T______, a 50-something bruiser who’s done roughly fifteen years behind bars. “I’d do something dumb, get them to chase me. I just knew it was time to go back in.”
Let me be clear: The men in CRCI are there because they were convicted of crimes. (Even if—as my unscientific survey suggests—many of them committed those crimes precisely because they craved the safety of incarceration.) In contrast, most of the people in Gaza—roughly two-thirds of them—live there because their families were forced from their homes in 1948, when Israelis—feeling, with some justification, there was nowhere else they could live—claimed those homes for themselves. unsurprisingly, the 75 years since have been a nearly uninterrupted cycle of conflict.
I can practically hear certain parties right now, questioning my right to even comment on a situation I know next to nothing about.
And they’re right. While I’m Jewish, I can’t pretend to understand what it is to be an Israeli. But being an outsider has advantages; sometimes it gives us the vision to see the contortions that others have become acclimated to, the distortions of perspective that at face value make no sense.
I’ve written previously about the dissonance of my one trip to Israel, in 2006. One morning, my family and I picked grapes under the low whistle of artillery shells, ironically just a few miles from the Rafah Crossing. In retrospect, those luscious green fruit highlighted a bittersweet irony: In that moment, as I heard the barrage and watched helicopter gunships swoop west into Gaza, the seeds of the current crisis were already taking root. A few months later, Gaza would be placed under lockdown, a condition that persists to this day.
Incredibly, that was 17 years ago. I can’t help but think of my daughter, whose own life took root on that same trip. Since then she’s grown into a vibrant and emotionally wise young person, bestowed—like myself—with every possible advantage in life. She’s enjoyed liberties most Gazans couldn’t even dream of, and I’m not even thinking of the current conflict—in which an estimated 4,000 Palestinian children have already been killed—but the day-in, day-out grind of knowing you’re in jail, and that there’s no possibility of parole.
I know firsthand how hard it is to break out of decades-old cycles. And I know firsthand the futility of telling people with different life experiences than mine how they should go about solving their problems.
But I do know this: Like many of the men I’ve met at CRCI, both combatants act as though they have any choice but to double down, opting for the safety of imprisonment rather than the vulnerability of forgiveness, of choosing a different way to relate to our neighbors and ourselves. That’s the distortion: That it seems safer to embrace victimhood and rage than to envision a more uncertain path forward.
What would they lose in the process? Everything. And therein lies the rub: Forced to choose between the uncertainty of freedom and the safety of incarceration, we choose the latter time and time again. It’s a contradiction that’s as true for the jailers as it is for those being jailed. Ultimately, of course, it means that neither is free.