Swampland – PT 1: Drugs

            I have a special fondness for Russian authors I guess it’s the existential angst that permeates all their stories, but Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Solzhenitsyn speak to me in here. And so it was this week that I found myself flipping back through hand written notes I’d made years before about Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”

            In that novella, set in a Stalin-era Soviet prison camp – Solzhenitsyn explores the age-old theme of good versus evil. In this dreary tale, however, he asks how man can be good – and remain true to his moral code – when held in an evil system. And Solzhenitsyn’s answer is not simple. After all, he was a survivor of the repressive Stalin-era camps. He understood the magnitude of torment and fear present in those places and he knew there was no easy answer. As the main character realizes, sometimes the best we can hope for is survival.

            Prisons are evil places. Sometimes they are necessary. Some act in such horrendous ways that the only way to protect society is to remove those perpetrators. Those cases are few, however. A society that relies on the mass incarceration of a significant number of its citizens is itself evil. America’s love affair with prisons is wrong. It is an evil system.

            This prison, this “correctional center” is built on a swamp. I mean that both literally and metaphorically. In my six years behind bars I have never seen drug use at such epidemic levels as I see here today. Daily I see dozens of men completely obliterated from snorting heroin. The other night I walked in our building bathroom to a young man retching violently – the “afterglow” from getting high on heroin.

            Adderall, the ADHD drug prescribed to too many young American boys, can be bought in handfuls. Weed is so prevalent it has become commonplace. Any drug can be found here. The facility appears impotent to stopping it.

            Appearances can be deceiving. There is a new, relatively young, major in charge of security. He’s forcing building officers to “get tough” in the building with dorm rule infractions. Meanwhile, dirty officers are turning a blind eye to the flood of drugs pouring on this compound – some even bring the drugs in.

            An evil system. There are some decent officers here, men and women who do their jobs correctly, treat the population with respect, and genuinely believe – and hope – that those sentenced here will leave and not return. I am coming to believe that those officers are in the minority. The things going on inside the walls are a direct result of a broken, corrupt system. And the good, the decent, they quit or give up and turn the other way.

            I asked a young man – a kid really, 21, and in on heroin possession – why he would be so foolish and get high on heroin in here two, even three times a week. He just shrugged his shoulders and said, “What else do I have to do?” Does anyone really believe that by sending this kid here at eighteen for heroin use and permanently labeling him a felon, will lead him to quit using drugs on his release? He can’t quit using in here. How does anyone think prison is a justifiable solution to the nation’s love affair with drugs?

            I expect one morning to walk in the bathroom and see this young man laying on the floor blue and foaming around the mouth – overdosing and near death. I’ve seen it before. It is a look I can’t forget. Yet, in our nation’s support of such an evil system the vast majority will not care. He’s just a drug addict, just a felon, just a prisoner; so what if he dies?

            This is a swamp. And the mire and muck sticks on you and clogs your pores and tries to drag you under. It is a problem of the ages. How do you stay good with evil surrounding you? How, Ivan Denisovich, do you maintain decency and truth in the face of corruption and lies? How do you save a kid from his own self-destruction when the method is provided by those in charge?

            “And their cry for help … rose up to God. So God heard their groaning and God remembered His covenant … and God took notice of them.”

            It is the beginning of the Exodus story, an exit from another evil swamp toward freedom. I only hope my young friend in here lives to see it.