No touching -- The theme of my life. And, incidentally, the perfect phrase to introduce the primary, and overwhelming force in my life right now, and the reason I want to start blogging again.
For the past three months, I’ve been working with a team in the Civil Rights Clinic to represent a prisoner incarcerated at the federal Supermax prison. (Supermax does in fact mean exactly what it sounds like – the Bureau of Prisons has little stake in the art of language, as you might imagine) Our client is undoubtedly one of the kindest, loveliest individuals I’ve ever had the privilege to meet, but one who also happens to be, er, an international terrorist of sorts. He’s faced myriad injustices, which failed to cease the moment he arrived in The Land of the Free. Since mid-August, my thoughts are devoted to figuring out how to help this man to get some modicum of justice, a mere fraction of that which he has been denied for so long.
Donna, on culling a list of candidates for Presidential pardons:
“You tell me? Do we toss out Daisy Aimes, mother of three who had a boyfriend who stored a kilo in her closet. She's done eight years and is facing eleven more. That's longer than rapists and child molesters get. I don't see a list anymore. These are people.” (“The Benign Prerogative”).
They are people. I’ve met one of them. I ingratiated myself with him by telling my usual repertoire of self-deprecating jokes. The last time we had a conference call, he told us about 6 jokes in his charmingly halting English that he has devised about tall people from Texas. He had written them down and brought them with him to the phone. I was so delighted and moved, I was practically weeping with laughter.
The situation of the average prisoner in the United States is something I knew literally nothing about before I applied for the clinic. Nevertheless, I have never been one to buy into the bullshitty propoganda that prisons are vacation homes, serving duck pate and serving up premium cable channels like a fucking Hilton. I’m not concerned that our (read: Bryce’s) hard-earned tax dollars are going to buy feather beds for violent offenders.
Note: If you are the kind of person who believes prisons are too cushy for the people they house, and that all prisoners should be put down to keep taxpayers from having to support them, stop reading and go fuck yourself. I’m too enmeshed in this prisoner stuff to have patience for people who are wrong. Or, in the alternative, swing by charming Florence, CO. In addition to housing “the worst of the worst” [their slogan not mine] it’s a antiquing mecca.
I digress. And all I really want to say is this: People do bad things, and it’s fine that they go to prison. That’s how it should work. (non-violent drug crimes being a topic for another time). But in order to maintain that order, the order that says they should be in and we should be out, we have to make the right decisions for those who have lost their freedom. Because treating people humanely should be how we earn our freedom.
*Note: My one and only tat should give an indication which way I lean on this subject. If, after reading this post, you feel my idea of prisoners’ rights is hopelessly quixotic, then remember, I did have “justice” carved into my forearm by a 300 pound man named Butch.
Today I re-read letters from our client’s family entreating the parole board to let him come home and spent his remaining time with his family. No matter how much I think about this case, no matter how much I feel convinced of the injustice of the situation and the righteousness of our client, I will never be able to read those letters and not be moved to a point at which I am forced to realize, yet again that I cannot empathize enough.
“She said that after he missed one birthday, one Christmas, one fly-fishing season, the following years he’s spent in Leavenworth have been a frozen hell….She said if it would help she would get down on her knees. She begged for your mercy."
Understanding another's personhood is the best way to become an advocate for them. It helps me to know our client -- Prisoners are not statistics. They are like Texans -- only much shorter.
