By Victoria A. Dennis / Prison Journalism Project
When I was sentenced to prison, I lost certain rights. I lost the right to go where I wanted, when I wanted. I lost the right to vote. I lost the ability to choose what clothes I wore, what words I used, what foods I ate. Our society has collectively decided that this is more or less just.
What is not understood, nor just and rarely spoken of, is one right that I did not forfeit: the right to feel.
I’m not talking about feeling sad because I miss my family, remorseful because I committed a crime or upset because I got caught. The emotions I’m talking about are deeper, more painful ones that burden our souls and impact our overall mental health.
Shortly after I was sentenced in 2003, an old friend sent me a joke in the mail. Well, it was supposed to be a joke, but it actually made me feel sad. It began like this:
“A young man was sentenced to 10 years in prison. And the first letter from his loving father read: ‘Son, Keep your head up. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. I’ll figure something out. I love you. Love Dad.’”
In the story, the family owns a potato farm and the young man’s father couldn’t harvest the potatoes without his son’s help — and without the harvest, the family would lose the farm. After some thought, the young man called home and said: “Dad, I love you. Whatever you do, don’t dig up the east field. It’s where I buried the bodies.”
A couple of days later the young man received another letter from his father: “Son, they dug up the east field but didn’t find anything except potatoes. I didn’t tell them anything; they just showed up with a paper allowing them to dig.”
The young man called his father that night and said, “Dad, I’m glad I could help. I’ll figure something out when it comes time to plant. I love you.”
Did you laugh at the son’s ingenious way of helping his father? For me, reading the story gave rise to a kind of melancholy. I could feel the pain of the son who had to find a way to support his father from behind bars.
In some ways, this son was lucky. He was able to help. When family members are in need, prisoners are often helpless. This helplessness creates an anxiety that can become all-consuming, and even traumatizing.
Once, I called my mom on a Saturday afternoon at our regularly scheduled time. She told me that she’d spent the past three days in the hospital. I suddenly felt anxious, imagining calling my mother and her not picking up the phone. I would have no choice but to sit and worry. There would be no way for me to check on her because at that time, I had no way to call anyone else.
Situations like this induce helplessness, guilt and anxiety.
When I went to prison, my father tried not to burden me with the stresses of his life because he, too, had been incarcerated and understood what I was going through. In his attempt to support me, he did not tell me he had severe lung cancer. I learned of his death in the prison chaplain’s office. I never got the chance to say goodbye or attend his funeral.
A similar situation also happened with my aunt. When she died after a lengthy battle with cancer I experienced grief and sorrow because I lost a woman who was like a second mother to me. I also felt guilty because I never told her what she meant to me.
I was filled with anxiety. I had not been there with her in those final years. I felt that my aunt and the rest of my family would blame me for this. After all, my own choices led me to prison. I hadn’t even been able to say “I love you” or “goodbye.” I couldn’t apologize to my family for not being there in shared support of our grief, because I was not permitted to attend the services.
I could do nothing but feel. However, any public display of it was off-limits to me. The prison environment forces the majority of emotions into hiding.
There are three safe emotional displays in prison: anger or lashing out, laughter, and stoicism. Everything else leaves you open to judgment, gossip, arguments and other negativity. Often, helplessness becomes ambiguity, which becomes stoicism. Guilt can become anger, and anxiety manifests as laughter. Changing the emotion to an acceptable one takes some pressure off of the feeling, but nothing is truly resolved. To soothe emotions that cannot be expressed, many turn to companionship, substances, violence and self-harm.
It’s one thing to miss out on life events like a baby’s first steps, graduations, births, weddings and all the other achievements of life that we first think about when the gavel falls. It’s quite another thing, and even more painful, not to be there when your parent is ill or your child needs help. This is a kind of grief that you can’t prepare for and that is difficult to articulate. The punitive nature of the justice system does more harm than any human being deserves.
Solutions like sentencing diversions, easier access to medical and family leave furloughs, proof-of-need commutations, and free phone calls or emails could mitigate these unexpected pains.
At times these seem unlikely to occur, but as the number of justice-involved individuals continues to increase in the United States, I believe that at least some of these changes will be implemented.
Recently, there has been a push to make phone calls free for prisoners. My prison’s phone calls are provided by GlobalTel. During the pandemic they implemented a once-weekly, free five-minute phone call for each prisoner.
This is the only reason that I am able to call my mother who lives two time zones away every Saturday afternoon. This is one small thing that has helped to ease the pain of not being able to be there for her.
This pain burrows into the soul, seals itself in and festers. It is a pain with no relief and one that people rarely consider. Few people ever think about the reality of missing out on the “what ifs” in life.
This is the pain of prison.
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