 Want an e-mail when there's something new? Join the e-mail news list today! selected writing From Ramallah to Rikers Island (Part 3) THE VIOLENCE OF CONFINEMENT
11 February 2007 — Confinement is frightening. For sure everyone, at different stages in their lives, has had to cope with different levels of constriction of freedoms. But full-on, uncompromising, adult confinement is utterly terrifying. There is no "Okay, I'll get up and do something else now." There is no "I'll go take a walk and come back to this later." There is only a massive iron, stone and steel barrier that doesn't even need to start a conversation with you. You can talk to it as much as you want. This will not alter any aspect of your relationship with it. You aren't going anywhere. Once you realize that there is no reasoning with this reality, this immutable fact, and that there is only coming to terms with where you are ahead, this is the point at which fear begins. Your journey will be within because there is nowhere else outside left to go. As you cast off, with no choice but to do anything else, you are resigning yourself to confrontation with one of the deepest human fears — the loss of control.
Take 9/11, the defining moment in recent American history. As the blow from the second plane punched me in the stomach from 1,200 miles away, I could feel the illusion of control slip away from me as surely as if I had been a passenger seeing the hijackers with box cutters fanning out. Or had control on that day long slipped away with the ignored FAA recommendation on securing cockpit doors a decade earlier? With butterflies this far back in time and Tsunamis this powerful in the present, the very notion of 'control' itself is moot.
Cops and jails and courts and prisons solve nothing, bar a genuine need for a safe confinement mechanism for the tiny minority of pathologically violent individuals. As I sat in a cell in Precinct 30 in Harlem on January 25th, an optical illusion put the bars around the detectives outside, not around me. A metaphor for seeing our relative positions in a more enduring, more powerful social order? In this world the heart is a kitchen and a battleground. In their world, that which is cooked up or fought for takes place in a predetermined, external structure of rules created by a third party, not in an internal or sacred refuge of life and magic, or of change and healing. Letting go of such forms and cooking individual solutions for individual problems is more time-consuming, but more powerful and deeper-reaching. At least that's what I told myself as I literally shook and shivered my way through illness and a series of powerful barriers of fear in my first week at Rikers. Again, this was not a self-pity process but a straight up stripping of illusions. The walls weren't going anywhere, so I needed to adjust.
And I needed to understand the process I was going through. As a volunteer, I'd spent times in prisons in the Far East, the Middle East, and Europe. Never as a prisoner.  A large part of the violence of confinement, the assault it carries out on the human soul, is the sheer sense of waste it forces upon people. If you did anything on the outside more involved than that observable in the life of a snail, it's going to hit you hard. The more highly functional you were outside, the more severe the shock. Forget even functional phone access. As I measured the lost hours, days and weeks for current and future clients, including child abuse prevention and poverty relief networks, I wanted to literally throw myself at the solid walls, to hurt myself, to register in some symbolic way the utter pointlessness and damage that my incarceration, at the hands of the system, was doing to the society that created it.
Now, tens and tens of thousands of dollars in debt, my business is in tatters. And I yet have to be found 'guilty' of anything. The feelings of wanting to smash into the wall were real. Their opposite, the positive forces that get me out of bed in the morning to work for good and change are real. Caging and crippling this positive force produced a similar and contrary tidal movement that turned in on itself.
In the meantime, I am left with nothing but time to mull over how easy it is to pick up the phone, call the police, and unleash hell on a life in America. If that person does not have money or a good support network of friends in town to deal with things like bail and lawyers, then they're going to be unprepared for the sudden way that you are plucked from everything you control in your life and put away somewhere where you can only watch it drive off the cliff. DEALING WITH STRESS Time is the main arena in which the waste of confinement clumsily finger-paints out the windows of your shrinking mental home. The stress this induces can be dealt with in one of two ways—as there is nothing else to do here—exercise or sleep. Exercise is a release valve for time's pressure cooker. Sleep takes it off the burner for a few hours of blessed unconsciousness. If the physical confines of your jail environment are not big enough to allow for decent pacing, alternatives such as homemade weights are possible, but slow burn exercise such as pacing is far better as it burns time as well as energy. Big cats that pace in small zoo cages know this very well. And of course, sleep compresses time, by removing chunks of it. Fill up at lunch and, if you're lucky, you can make it to dinner without waking, about five hours, or one-third of your waking hours. Exercise in the long corridors of Bellevue Hospital helped me survive there. Sleep at Rikers is working. And now writing. The prison system is 100% dedicated to your confinement, 100% dedicated to the belief that it is somehow 'worthwhile', that 'it works' on some level. The people around me certainly have no respect for this logic; it is just another form of societal exclusion. No new lessons are learned here apart from that society really likes to speak in barriers. With nouns formed from walls, and verbs fashioned from gates and doors, a message is being spoken that is nothing new, inspires no one, and will change nothing for the better.
If the poor and the young who we shepherd through these prison gates need to hear anything, it is the opposite of what we have been telling them with this place — that there is something beyond all this negation, and this superficial and brutal communication. That is the new song they are desperately wanting to hear, a melody of hope, carrying lyrics of truth and justice, bound together with a chorus of love. A song of freedom and vision to pull them out of our lack of hope that ensnared them and brought them here. GO TO "FROM RAMALLAH TO RIKERS ISLAND" (PART 4) Endnotes 1. As of June 1st, 2008, this is still true. Missing in action, everything I use to make money in this life: all of my computer equipment—a desktop computer ($2,000) and a laptop computer ($1,700); all of my camera equipment ($8,000—could they have not just taken the data cards?); ten years of client data and client photographs, including that of the non-profits and charities I work for; my cellphone; every personal e-mail, photograph, and piece of writing I had in digital form in the last 10 years; my passport; and a notebook I kept in Bellevue which includes several (not bad I thought) paintings of EXIT signs. :-) Obviously, with no passport in my possession, I have been under what amounts to "country arrest" (like house arrest, but slightly more generous) in the United States for more than a year. It took until 29 February 2008, over a year after my home in Harlem was raided, and over three months since the court dates ended, for my lawyer to be able to get the property release forms from the Manhattan Assistant District Attorney's office. I will now need to fly to New York to retrieve the items in person and mail them back. Of course, this requires money. For the account of returning to NYC to retrieve my property, read Unreasonable Search And Seizure: Nigel Parry on getting your stuff back from the cops, 1 June 2008. [Back to where you left off] GO TO "FROM RAMALLAH TO RIKERS ISLAND" (PART 4) more from this section  • Unreasonable Search and Seizure (Sunday, June 1st, 2008)  • From Ramallah to Rikers Island (Part 1) (Tuesday, April 1st, 2008) |
      
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