Jacks in the Box

A colourful, cartoonish eagle is painted on an otherwise barren cinder wall in the worship centre at the Barton Street Jail. Underneath its outstretched, soaring body is a string of initials, presumably those of the inmates who carried out the bold notion of putting one of the world’s most symbolically liberated creatures on the blocks at the bottom of their prison. It’s not a fantastic work of art, but whenever I see it I’m reminded of the powerful human urge for freedom, which seems to abide through even the most frustrating of circumstances. Though coming here week after week, doing the same things and seeing the same faces, can easily sink into mindless routine, it’s crucial for me to remember that prison’s no place to belong in. In many ways, in moods washing from angry to patient, hopeful to terrified, everyone here is trying to break out. And it’s a need – essential, elemental, universal – that seems to operate independently of whatever just or absurd reason for why a person might be locked up to begin with. This dissociation – between why a person may be in jail, and the prevailing motivation to get out – causes one of the many tensions that sprout out of the stacked rocks of the incarceration matrix. Because it is the collective who, officially in the service of public and individual good, sees fit to box up ‘bad’ people, we bear a large amount of the responsibility for the consequences of our doing so. This is where our civilisation rubs rawest, and untended wounds fester unseen.

I deal with the overwhelming need for freedom in two rather contradictory ways. As a lawyer, I come to Barton Street to see clients who (as I mentioned in a previous column) are considered ‘unacceptable risks’ to be allowed to remain in the community while their cases are before the court. I meet with them across scarred tables in small glassed-in rooms, one breath removed from the noisy pods of their spare, highly-surveilled lodgings. Not surprisingly, getting free is a major preoccupation, so we discuss the legal strategies and options best designed to reach this narrowly-defined goal. The antagonist, of course, is almost always the “other side” that put them in there, usually vaguely symbolised by the court, the system, or else some wretch who lied or snitched to the cops. At least partially because of the setting, it’s a struggle to handle anything more during these hurried encounters than the barest bones of a particular charge, which is circumscribed and set apart from the much deeper who’s and why’s of where they are. I feel like each of us is programmed, in this place, to approach problems (“hey, you’re in jail”) and solutions (“get me out of jail”) in the crudest, most impoverished sense. Creativity and self-empowerment, for men most desperately in need of them, seem muted, far away.

But blessedly, I have another job in prison, a volunteer gig on Monday nights leading small groups of so-called Y.O.’s (young offenders) in yoga and meditation. There’s lots of giggles and grunts, but never any talk about why these earnest boys are in the bowels of an adult institution. Instead we start by acknowledging the mental barriers to being free (whether we’re in jail or on the streets), then learn, along the ancient paths of movement and stillness, the possibilities of spiritual escape. All done in a dimly lit, locked room, the eagle watching from its frozen flight upon the wall.
I’m not alone in this effort to provide tools and guidance to inmates, to engage in some helpful way with the undeniable yearning for liberation. Chess, church ministries, smudging ceremonies, A.A., all sorts of healing arts are brought through the heavy doors by well-meaning folks propelled by various ideas about how to make the broken whole. Through this lens, it doesn’t so much matter exactly what it is that someone did to land them in the slammer, it’s enough to know that somehow something hopeful led this ragged man or cocky kid to your particular prescription for getting free. The law, in its wisdom, will nourish or at least not trample on the good seeds planted in these quiet evening freedom sessions, will bring its power to bear in ways that do justice to both past wrongs and future chances.

Or at least, I could be forgiven for thinking so if I were not also a servant of the system that so often maintains and widens the divide between freedom and responsibility. With both perspectives – that of the lawyer encouraged to maximise the quantitative aspects of my clients’ freedom via legal combat and message massaging, and that of the volunteer who is involved in enhancing these same persons’ qualitative experience of what real freedom feels like – I’m beginning to understand the depth of confusion inherent in a restrictive, impersonal prison/justice model. How can I expect to introduce a prisoner to the practice of Zen or Christianity, which, if taken seriously, arguably leads directly to courageous engagement with the source of one’s imprisonment, and then turn around and counsel an incarcerated client on the importance of not opening up in court, if a risk of longer imprisonment would result? Yet that’s precisely what I find myself doing, week after fractured week.

Imprisoning people, if it’s not eminently necessary to protect someone’s safety, makes the difficult job of responding holistically to criminal allegations and conduct that much harder to accomplish. More than the elephant in the room, prison is the room itself, the walls that shut out much of the breadth of freedom-seeking, narrowing it all down to the sparest basics. Understandably, when you’re in, all you really want is to get out. But without the integration of tools and values necessary to get at the roots of criminal behaviour – a process that implicates the public system as much as it does the individuals whose lives are caught up in such suffering – the outside becomes little more than an interlude between recreated reasons for being thrown back in again. Until we learn (and truly teach) how to take up problems with the heart as well as the mind, none of us – not least those behind our bricked-up walls – will really get free.