Prison Confinement!

What Really Is It All About?

By:  Arthur G. Jones, Sr.

 

       It’s a place where one is given ample opportunity to search one’s soul for simple yet profound realities, or one can live a surreal life on denial.  A place of confrontation with neither friend nor foe; while I choose to treat them on the same plateau.  Where someone eventually gets around to asking many hard straighter-ahead-questions of their hard-hearted-ness.  A cycle that one becomes a “rapscallion” and why?

       It’s a place where one thinks long thoughts, where one can either meditate on the purpose and meaning of contrition in their life, or simply continue to play the part of a “rapscallion” and continue in the day-to-day strife of captivity.

       For most, it’s a place of social degenerates, mental despair of an insidious person, a façade.  A place where there seems to be no hope, a place of degradation and frustration.  A place where inmates walk around the prison compound, whose lives are some kind of a conundrum that resembles a puzzle with pieces that are missing.  I believe it’s called a defect, a dysfunction, and an uncouth profile.

       A place of emptiness where souls are full of unrest issues, a place of barrenness where many have been overtaken by a defeated attitude and by daily stress in being estranged from loved ones, in society.  A physical entrapment, a place of incarceration; men sprawled on bunks, some sleeping endlessly because of all the psychotropic medication they are given instead of real solutions to their many problems.  Other remain staring blankly as if in a daze, which some have referred to as vegetation, by attrition or languishing in melancholy.  Yes, a place where the formula for survival is:  Don’t complain; don’t criticize; don’t condemn.  Just tend to your own business affairs, turn the TV on and continue to learn how not to care.

       A place where bias-ism, and racism are enforced by segregation and degeneration policies.  Resentment from all sides remains the main mortar for building the invisible brick wall that continues to separate us all.  A place where when the night falls the full weight of what it really means to be imprisoned settles upon you, where one feels closed in and fearfully ALONE.

       A place that with the passing of time all sensitivity dulls and even dwindles away, and most of the laughter, jokes or puns and humor are at the expense of others who refuse to put on all the negative human make-up, that would let them fit in while doing time in the pen.

       When one could be thinking and acting like he is in Penn State University!  Yes, prison is a place where the steady and gradual corrosion of a man’s identity and soul is eaten away, like acid burning away flesh.  What a waste of life and human forgiveness for each other, as a man among men!

 Food for thought:

        Are there any solutions for genuine change and hope for those within the belly of the beast?  Yes!  In spite of prison’s political agenda and atmosphere there are still those on the outside who care.  Maybe the time is right for prison to be given a long awaited overhaul where those who want to change can be given the initiative needed.  This can happen when concerned individuals start refusing to allow elected officials to get away with offering simple-minded solutions to such complex problems as walking the gauntlet in this myriad penal system.  For the end does not justify the means to my endeavor.  You will always have my gratitude.  For it is very therapeutic for me to have some solutions.  In that I can rise above this arduous drama that others have staged around me.  Despite my imprisonment, I truly refuse to be that which I see from learned lessons.