Now People Pay Attention

So, I came in from running the other afternoon and turned my TV on to mindlessly watch as I cooled down. The crisis de jour (whether Syria, Miley Cyrus, or the Zimmerman divorce) gave way to a new phenomenon. Three different channels were airing stories on the new show, “Orange is the New Black.” All around me guys sat listening as Katie Couric – or some other vapid, pretty face – asked the writer “How did you survive?” How indeed. And then my young friend Mustafa – two bunks over – blurted out, “This chick’s been reading your blog!” It seems everyone is now paying attention to life in prison. If Hollywood finds a story, can the public be far behind?

            

For those who haven’t yet heard all the talk, “Orange is the New Black” is the TV/internet sensation about a woman’s three years in Federal prison on a drug/money laundering charge. Written by first time author Piper Kerman, it is her story of a middle-class, educated, white woman who finds herself behind “the walls.” The title paints out the difficulties convicted felons face. She compares us to blacks in the segregated Jim Crow South.

            

There is dark, gallows humor in her stories of life behind bars. It’s ironic. We laugh a good bit in here. As I tell guys who remark on my positive attitude, it’s easier to laugh about the insanity in here than to cry. It’s also ironic because most of Ms. Kerman’s experiences are the same issues I write about weekly in this blog. Neither she, nor I, are reinventing the wheel. The problems, the lunacy that is prison is as old as time. However, her story, complete with tawdry scenes of lesbian love triangles and violence, captured a director’s attention who turned the book into a show. And soon, everyone was talking about prison.

           

I thought about that as I watched one reporter after another fawn over Ms. Kerman and parade actors out who portray the inmates and guards in her prison story. They are all such beautiful, intelligent people. They aren’t real inmates, the vast majority of whom have lived lives without adequate medical care or educational opportunities, or safe, happy, well-adjusted homes. TV can’t accurately portray life inside because it’s too sanitized. There is nothing sanitized about prison. It is dirty; it is lonely; it is hell. That story unfortunately, doesn’t sell books. Two hot women in orange jumpers getting intimate does.

            

And I thought about the news that broke the other night on the Richmond TV stations. An inmate at Greensville Correctional Center (2-3 level prison with over 3000 inmates and Virginia’s death chamber) died after being attacked. He was a low-custody thief within a year of release. That’s real prison. Death, and dirt, and disgust, and yet it takes a Hollywood version to make people stop and say, “You mean that stuff really goes on inside there?” I laugh when critics of this blog write in and say, “We know prison’s bad.” My dear, you don’t – as they say in here – know “shit” about life in here until you’ve actually lived it. Oh well, just another felon dead means we don’t have to worry about his recidivism risk.

            

In August, I was able to watch the entire first season of the Sundance Channel show, “Rectify.” It is the story of a man who spent twenty years on death row until his conviction was overturned. What captured (funny choice of word isn’t it?) my attention wasn’t his innocence; no, it was his adjustment to real life. In here, it’s a warped “Alice in Wonderland” existence; or, as my friend Mark – who goes home Tuesday after eighteen years – told me, “I have to remember how to be human, how to trust, how to care.”

            

People are paying attention. Really? Is it TV shows that tell us something is horribly wrong with a system that costs American tax-payers over $60 billion a year and still more than one out of three released offenders will be locked back up within the year? Aren’t some things so obvious that we don’t need talking heads to tell us what is right? Apparently not.

            

Right now, prison is a hot issue. In politics, candidates on the right bemoan the waste of money and lack of results while those on the left see prison in terms of racial and economic injustice. Churches are remembering their obligation to minister to those “on the outside.” Authors and screenwriters get rich telling the story of life behind bars. Meanwhile, 2.3 million men and women go through another day inside.

            

More than three years ago, I began this blog with the simple goal of finding out if anyone was out there. Did anyone care about life in here? There have been times when I’ve said too many personal things, where I’ve questioned aloud my circumstances while trying to make sense of life in here. I’ve always written with the idea firmly embedded in me that people are basically decent. They care what happens; even, as they – like me – do stupid, senseless things at times, they care and they feel compassion and empathy.

            

Piper Kerman and others are making people pay attention to what goes on in here. That is a good thing. But, it should not take TV to tell us things have to change.