Inside

Jeremy and I were watching a National Geographic special the other night called "Inside: High Security Prisons." At first, Jeremy didn't think I should be watching it, since we had also recently started the first season of the show Prison Break, and I had been having nightmares and queasy feelings about some of the terrifyingly evil characters.

So Jeremy watched the first ten minutes while I was finishing up a row of crocheting and getting ready to take the dog on a walk. I found myself being pulled into it nonetheless and, strangely, feeling comforted.

The story of line of Prison Break is that an innocent man is framed for murder and is awaiting his unjust execution on death row. His genius structural engineer brother, who has the blueprints of the prison tattooed on his body, gets himself thrown in prison with his brother so he can use all his brains and a lot of good luck to break his brother out before execution day. (Interesting note: The story is based in Joliet, Illinois at a high security prison and is set in 2007. In the show, this prison still uses the electric chair, which hasn't been used in most prisons for decades. In reality, Illinois just recently passed a law to get rid of the death penalty entirely. Someone didn't do their research.)

Throughout the story, the main character/genius/rescuer brother, Michael Scofield, finds himself struggling with all the horrors he sees while in prison: inmates shanking each other, hanging themselves, and killing guards without pity. There is one particularly evil inmate who is incarcerated because he raped and killed five children, and he manipulates and sexually torments weaker inmates in the prison. While disgusted by him, Scofield has to work with him in order to help his brother escape.

The National Geographic special, on the other hand, looked and felt very different even though its subjects were much more evil criminals with many more horrible crimes under their belts. Filmed within the fortress of a super-max prison, where the most dangerous and violent perpetrators are sent (most come from other prisons, sent to the super max because they keep fighting with and even killing other inmates), camera crews were in close proximity with men who had between them destroyed the lives of thousands of people through murder, rape, and absolute savagery.

But somehow, I found myself more disturbed by the fiction than the reality.

At first I thought it might have something to do with the lack of dramatic music, or the lack of unbelievable, high stress situations that the main character faced in the obviously less realistic fictional show. But the more I watched the more I realized it was more than that.

First of all, both shows deal differently with this question: does goodness and justice exist?  Part of the tension of Prison Break is that you struggle with knowing who to trust. Besides Scofield and his brother, nearly everyone else seems crooked to the core, with the guards taking bribes and the Secret Service as the bad guys, framing Scofield's brother and hunting down the rest of his family to use for leverage. Even Scofield has to do some things that go against his conscience in order to survive. While the fight is for justice, the things that are sacrificed for that justice make it almost not worth it.

In the reality of the super-max prison, on the other hand, justice, while still imperfect, is clear. Guards are normal people, just doing their job routinely and thoroughly. When an inmate gets into a fight with another inmate, their charges are written up and reviewed by an unbiased third party (i.e. not a prison employee) and the inmate has a hearing with the disciplinary officer, warden, the third party, and any legal counsel he requests where he can plead either guilty or innocent to his charges. His punishment is then set out as an amount of days he has to spend in solitary confinement, depending on the severity of the charges and the amount of disciplinary points he has already accrued. Even after sentencing, he can always write a letter to the warden requesting a second look and a reduction of punishment.

No crooked guards, no innocents framed, no conscience-killing choices between darker and lighter shades of gray. The rules, punishments and rewards were clear. The employees had not committed crimes. The inmates had. And each inmate knows the crimes for which he has been imprisoned, even if he doesn't regret committing them.

The second, and I think bigger, difference was this: the inmates in the super-max prison were human. They are human. In one perspective, that almost makes things scarier; these people, just like you and me, have torn people apart with their own two hands, raped, destroyed, killed. But on the other hand, I was reminded that they aren't somehow godlike in their evil. They are not supernatural, they are not immortal, they have weak spots. They are humans who have been twisted, who have chosen to do horrible things while other people have chosen to do good things (or at least, not illegal things). And in the end, whether in prison or out, they will die and come face to face with their creator. Unlike the characters in Prison Break, who seem to be unlimited in their evil with no one to stop them.

But more than just the fact that these men are going to die someday and face judgment for their actions, my real comfort came in seeing the near-hilarity of their sinfulness--what all of us have in common with them. Jeremy noted that one inmate who was interviewed about why he always ended up in fights sounded like a boy who has just been pulled into the principal's office after giving another kid a bloody nose at recess. They make excuses, they protest that they have good reasons, that the way they live is the way they have to live. There is no other choice, and they shouldn't be to blame. Whatever they did, it was justified. The punishment, though they might not deny that they deserve it, is always unreasonably severe.

One man interviewed told the story of how he once killed and chopped into tiny pieces another man who had insulted him. After telling the whole story without emotion of any kind, he put up his chin proudly, as if to say, "That's just what happens if you insult me. He should have known better. He deserved what he got."

And yet, when their punishments were read out, the mask of violence and toughness slipped just slightly enough to see the abused and broken little boys underneath.

All of us are these men. We just haven't made the choices they've made to end up where they are, haven't bred sin within us to the extent that it has completely destroyed our lives and the lives of others. But the seeds of all of it are within us all the same. And there are other things that we water in secret, things that are not illegal, more easily hidden. Secret lusts and hatreds, envy, and our precious idol most in common with theirs: pride.

Jesus relates anger to murder during his sermon in Matthew 5. All kinds of sin, he reminds us, have the same root, all grow from the same poisoned soil of our perverted and twisted hearts. All of us are murderers and rapists filled with a destructive evil on the inside, all of us locked up in a super max prison built for us by our forefathers and fortified with our own hands. Little children beaten and abused, we have grown up to hurt others in the same way, and we suffer the punishment of absolute isolation for our crimes.

He sees all this, but instead of leaving us where we deserve to be, he died a death much worse than the electric chair in order to not only pay the price of our evil, but also to effectively abolish the evil we have inherited and nurtured inside ourselves. He sets us free not just from prison, but from the things that put us there.

Sometimes, I think that I am the worst of sinners compared to other people I know and that there is no way God could possibly stand my pathetic self for more than a few seconds at a time, that he won't let me into heaven simply because he can't bear to be with me. I hear myself say, "Well, at least you're not a murderer," and feel the hollow echo of the lack of the comfort this thought was meant to provide.

In the show, I did see the hearts of murderers, and realized that they aren't any different from my own, or from those belonging to people who made me feel so insecure, not when considering our innate sinfulness. The only difference I could point to was that grace given to me freely, nothing more and nothing less. Beyond all reason, he chose to save me, for no reason other than his own glory. And in that, I see the only true comfort I could ever find.

We are those men, and he loves us still. We are those men, and yet he has sacrificed everything for us. He is the ultimate judge, wielding the only true justice, and yet he has chosen mercy. In this, all of us have the only hope of freedom through change, from the inside out.

With Child

I knot the lines of your first blanket,

Child, though you are not mine

I hold your weight in my belly all the same.

Like an unspoken promise, one read in

Eyes and lips and subtle hands,

Are the flutters of your non-existence within me.

I loop and loop yellow yarn for your mother

But really for you, child I have not met,

Wishing you were mine, flesh of my flesh,

Blood of my blood. But you are not,

And so I knit you a blanket

Dreaming of that one whose life

My life will knit together.

Blank Pages

blank pages, you mock me

singing your song of perfect

nothing

pen marks only mar.

dare to write, you chant,

create, you our ridiculous god,

begin what isn't.

but i hear another ancient song

and write what has already been

written and sung and lit into flame,

myself being the perpetuation of

exponential imperfections

multiplying the mysterious workings

of deformities forming

the very flesh of beauty.