This is the hardest time to be in prison. At least it is for me.bIt starts with Thanksgiving with all its appeals, the family gatherings and reflections on all we should be grateful for in our lives, and it doesn’t end until the big celebration of the promises of a new year—the limitless possibilities and resolutions, the plans and preparations.
For me, and I’m certain for a lot of my fellow prisoners, all of this feels hollow and filled with discordant notes. I want to be thankful, truly I do, but after thirty-six years of continuous imprisonment, it’s harder and harder to feel anything but sad. And I hesitate to be honest about that, because it brings on both a lot of condemnation from those folks who are trying to do some good, and feelings of resentment from my friends and loved ones. Like a lot of other prisoners I know, I often feel like I have to help everyone else feel better about my imprisonment. I’ll also hear the retort that I brought this on myself, or as the cackling crows of the prison industrial complex’s supporters love to frame it, “You should have thought about that before you killed somebody.”
While this is clearly technically true, and I surely wish I would have thought about all of this back then, I think it’s an unreasonable demand. It wasn’t me, it was a previous, stupider, more violent, vastly more immature iteration of me that killed a man named Thomas Allen Fellows in a drunken drugged up fist fight. This me, the me that’s contemplating all of this, wouldn’t have engaged that idiotic argument with a stranger in the first place. More to the point, this me can’t even really connect to that me.
A good friend of mine, a man who served twenty-seven years before paroling for killing a man when he was seventeen years old, and who has since gone on to become a leader in his community, dedicating his life to helping at-risk youth avoid the life he led, once described his feelings to me like this, “I feel like I’m being held hostage by my teenage self.” This was before he got out. He never liked the holidays either.
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas is the long, grossly over-commercialized run-up that sounds like one reminder after another of all that I won’t have again, melded with how vitally important it is to have those things I won’t have. It’s a kind of psychic pummeling that leaves a bigger bruise every year. Like I describe in greater detail in my new e-book, Christmas in Prison, I’ve watched the holidays devolve from a respite to a brutal reminder of how our humanity has been denied with prejudice.
At the beginning of my term, the prisons made something of an effort at allowing the spirit of Christmas inside the walls. The food got better, there were decorations, there was a moment of relaxing the barriers. All that’s gone now, and its loss is mostly felt by guys like myself who remember when it wasn’t. The younger guys don’t remember when the holidays meant something in here, too. All they know is they don’t mean much now.
I remember full visiting rooms, extra yard time with special events and laughter. I remember when we prisoners dressed up in our best clothes to go to the chow hall and eat good filling meals prepared with red and green frosted cake and little candy canes on the side of the tray. All the years of conning the public into believing their sons and daughters, their neighbors, were somehow not humans after they went to prison, allowed the excesses we see every day on television to occur: cops gunning down unarmed civilians, prisoners beaten and abused—the unmitigated exercise of unrestrained authority. It’s all part of a wide continuum. Denying anyone’s humanity decreases everyone’s humanity.
By the time the big ball drops on the present year and heralds in the new, I’m worn out. What resolution can a prisoner serving life without the possibility of parole make except for, “I’ll be out by the next holiday season” But how many times can you say that before the very thought of it gets caught up in your throat? Don’t forget your friends and loved ones inside prison this holiday season. It’s harder in here than they can let on. This is Kenneth E. Hartman, Executive Director of the Other Death Penalty Project from inside California’s prison system.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
