The Prison Experience

I had a reader of Minus One who openly procliamed that she was not a reader, tell me she couldn't stop reading. As an author, I want to know why so maybe I can repeat this. Apparently part of it is "the prison experience". People are fascinated by things that they have little or no knowledge of, and that horrify them. Look at the popularity of horror/slasher flicks.

Now I won't compare Minus One to a horror flick, but prison has all sorts of auras about it, and so the book opens a little bit of a window into an experience all too many people are curious about.

There are a number of other sources. On television you have Lockup, stories about life in prison. But they focus on the most notorious things, and don't get the drudgery of life inside. And for the most part they don't touch on the experience of women behind bars.

Minus One is fiction, but it is based on a lot of interviews and shared experiences. There are alumni of prisons all over the place, and you would be surprised at how many there are.

And then there is Orange is the New Black. The author spent a year in a Federal prison for something she was involved with several years before, part of a money laundering scheme that supported the illegal drug trade. Her experiences should be read and studied. She gives voice to what I heard in interviews time after time, the loneliness, the caution inmates develop, and the (sometimes) raucous nature of a society of nothing but women. She also touches on one of the central facts that doesn't apply as often in a men's prison: what of the families?

Famileis are built around women. Especially, there are growing children. When you take the mother out of the family, what happens to it? In some cases the father/husband holds it together, but in too many cases the woman enters an ever-tightening spiral. She leaves prison with no prospects, some go into shelters, some return home and try to pick up the pieces. But the only thing they know is what got them put in prison to begin with, and for too many, they end up going back inside.

As for the children... They're on the edge of being cut adrift. If the woman is pregnant when she goes in, and gives birth in prison, she gives up the child, hopefully to her family. In some cases it is to foster care. In Indianaalmost as an exception, mothers are allowed to keep their children with them for several months (imagine the problems of designing prison cells so little fingers won't be hurt).

This only touches on the whole experience of going to prison. But too many people who have been inside still feel the bars around them after they get out, and this is not related to the recidivism rate. The human mind can adapt to an awful lot, and someone who has come to grips with life in prison has to adapt all over again to life outside. But there is the security of being inside. You know what to do, where to go, and when to do it. There are dangers and a lot of petty (and not so petty) annoyances. They don't have those in the outside world. The freedom has struck some as frightening. They miss the order and security. It takes time to adapt to life in prison, it takes almost as long, or perhaps longer, to adapting to life outside.

One of the most important people I met while researching Minus One was a woman who had a one-person cleaning service. She had been a free spirit before her troubles, and life in the Women's Prison at Purdy (Washington) took a lot of that away from her. She liked her job because it was a routine. Every day she did the same thing. She did good work, and she liked that. She did do other things, but they were non-threatening. She lived as low-level an existence as she could. Reading and writing poetry was her liberation, but it was a small part of her life. Most of it was consumed with routine.

An essential part of Minus One was what happened after Jan Sutherland got out of prison. Rebuilding a life is very difficult. She had her brother's help, and the group. But the person has to do it for herself. And that struggle has to form part of the story. It gets back to what one of the lines in the story, that touches upon a critical point: "...it is among them still that I feel I still dwell".

Minus One is a story of change and growth, and it attempts to mirror the experience of women who have gone through the System. It takes her soul and anneals it in a prison experience.