Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America

Coping with Life in Prison City

59 Coping with Life in Prison City introduCtion The next two clusters of essays—“Coping with Life in Prison City” and “Seeking Peace in Prison City”—may seem so closely related as to collapse into one. But in allowing them to do so, we would fail to appreciate the important difference between the labor required to survive life inside, and efforts to give that life some meaning. The life inside Prison City may be different from life elsewhere, but one constant binds us: we endure each day from inside our own minds, attempting to manage the things over which we have some control—thoughts, memories, emotions , attitudes—in order to make better lives for ourselves. As “The Life” has shown, Prison City carries the peculiar challenges of an environment filled with troubled and often hostile men and women (both incarcerated people and staff) living in conditions bound to multiply the chances for open conflict, and certain to impose less visible but no less debilitating psychic wear. In these circumstances, the resilience that incarcerated Americans show in coping with their circumstances might teach us all things worth knowing about the weight that people can bear, and how, and for how long. A. Whitfield’s “It Could be Me” is a deeply sober meditation inspired by news of the killing of one prisoner by another. This act of violence sets off thoughts that the author must both engage and tightly control in order to retain hold on the self-understanding and resolve he has earned by accepting the weight of having taken a life—work carried out despite living among callous men in a callous institution. Here as elsewhere in this volume, we see the seriousness with which some men and women enter into self-searching in order to retain a hold on whatever constructive parts of themselves they can salvage under the weight of their crimes and the life that prison offers as a result of those crimes. Robert F. Piwowar’s essay, “A Lesson in Language,” is ostensibly about learning foreign languages in prison and learning the language of prison; but beneath its good humor, the essay also shows that part of the labor of coping with life inside means simply paying attention to where one lives, accepting the lessons this environment has to offer rather than regretting what one may be missing from a former life, and retaining a quiet intellectual curiosity even as the chaos of Prison City rains about one’s ears. Incarcerated people must cope as they can with the psychological challenges of life in prison. They are also too often confronted with the unwillingness of prison staff to allow the practical necessities to make this life safe and an experience that will aid return to a constructive life outside . As Martin G. Gann describes it in “One Small Voice through the Wall,” this is a particularly acute challenge for men and women managing physical handicaps—in this case severe hearing loss: a loss that puts Gann in real danger from day to day, and directly affects his ability to communicate with family, whose support is vital to any man or woman hoping for a successful life outside prison walls. In “Food for Thought,” B. G. Jacobs revisits his childhood memories of helping his Puerto Rican grandmother cook pastelios in the company of his extended family. He then describes the difficult and risky work required to reconnect with that time inside his cell. In this essay we get 60 Coping with Life in Prison City a hint of the ingenuity and creativity that incarcerated people must exercise in pursuit of the simplest goals. Jacobs also demonstrates that in prison, one must learn to find pleasure in the very thought of a reward and the work required to achieve it, because no results are ever sure in the face of the exercises of power and control under which the incarcerated live. Stephen Whetzel witnesses the life-changing power of the relationships that can be created between incarcerated people and those on the outside who know each other only through letters . The events in “A Renaissance” begin with the goodwill and advice offered to Whetzel by a prison counselor, who insists that the author make contact with the world outside. Here, as in B. G. Jacobs’s essay, we see the extraordinary lengths to which incarcerated people are willing to go in order to create some semblance of the lives and relationships they need in order to resist...