“Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams I,” (1961–65), Ibrahim El-Salahi, Tate, © Ibrahim Salahi
by Jorge Antonio Renaud
If that is so, the sensory remnants of pain and terror also remain in our bodies, no matter where we encounter them. Never believe, not for a moment, that the memory of violence simply leaks away like the blood spilled in its spasms. Rage has no preference in how or where it is expressed, and it can disrupt a friendly game on a sunlit handball court, a crowd gleefully kicking a man to death and then skipping off, leaving bloody bootprints on the grass. It can swell onto the space just outside your awareness, the sly motions of men casually bending down to tie their shoes for better footing before the cacophony of a riot. It can appear in the soft thump of what you believed to be a friendly slap on the back of the man sitting next to you at the domino table that morphs into wonder as he slumps over, a sharpened spoon jutting from his spine. The violence that throbs in American cages is inescapable and dehumanizing and accepted to an astonishing degree, and once leaving those cages, we are expected to simply discard the experiences we lived and walked with. I am here to argue the opposite.
The rage and pain of incarceration has left its residue within me. I have no idea where it lives, but those remnants of violence and dehumanization seen and felt and sensed through 27 years in prison are in my body. Each night they bubble through my dreams. I nourish them. I hold them close. It is only through them that I find the strength to bear witness, to add my story to the narratives that will ultimately be used to eradicate the very cages I once lived in.
How and where will the transformation that we seek take root in our criminal justice system? What must happen for that to occur? I’m speaking of a true transformation, of a society that is not built around centuries-old ideas of property and privilege and power and punishment. That type of change will not happen if we continue to accept incremental reform, if we continue to believe that we need only tweak our courts and train our cops and humanize our cages, and that if we really really really identify the keys to that magic word, rehabilitation, things will get better. Meaningful transformation will not begin with a cost/benefit analysis, the route chosen by many reformists. A cost/benefit approach to transformation is advanced by individuals who believe it appropriate to portray the costs of caging our fellow humans as purely financial stick figures in bloodless ledgers. They assign dollar amounts to every quarter-hour spent by the government functionaries we send to prosecute or defend those we incarcerate. Each ton of iron and cubic yard of concrete necessary to build our penitentiaries is measured. Every program we grudgingly extend to our comrades in the belly of the beast is quantified for rehabilitative possibilities. After the ledger is complete these reformists argue that but for the cost of these cages we might build X amount of tax offices or Y numbers of public schools. No reference is made to the humans in those cages, no allusions to the historical neglect that forever consigned them and their families to intergenerational poverty, still commodifying their existence and contemptuous of their worth except in relation to the bottom line.
Neither can we be persuaded to fall out of love with prisons through intellectual or philosophical arguments. What chance does an appeal advanced on an amorphous universal good have against the bloody reality of a sneering madman who has ripped out the uterus of his partner? That exception will then be seized by politicians to deny and obstruct any attempt to fund communities that may have eased the trauma certainly visited upon those in our society who commit such unexplainably violent acts.
Americans claim they are passionate about possibility and redemption, but true second chances are denied to those who have been ensnared in our criminal legal system, especially those who commit violence. Toward them, the concepts we most favor are questionable deterrence, sure incapacitation, and lifelong retribution. Policies based on punishment and “paying your dues” have overwhelmingly triumphed and are now used to justify post-incarceration consequences such as civil commitment — a never-ending incarceration of those who commit certain sex-related crimes — and criminal registries, along with the denial of employment, housing, and financial opportunities.
No. All of the changes above are those suggested by penologists, by the academics who have made a fine living and become tenured at universities everywhere by writing grand texts about “what works” in relation to those we consign to cages. Their changes manifest themselves in decisions about which individuals are exiled to prison, how they are treated once caged; who is and is not granted parole, and finally in how those humans might still be rejected by society if they associate with other formerly incarcerated humans, and rarely are any of them allowed a clear path to redemption.
Any true, bedrock, societal transformation of our criminal legal system will only come to fruition if we are at the forefront, as what we have seen and done mutates into story and narrative and then into empathy, which must then be molded into law and policy and practice.
By “we,” I am speaking of individuals with lived experience and those who love them, change birthed in communities populated by those who have lived in trauma and those who have survived violence. I am speaking to change ripped from apathy by raw power exerted by individuals with skin in the game and not just academic papers to publish.
America will never achieve radical transformation of its criminal legal system, with its final goal being the eradication of prisons and punishment, by trying to save money or pointing out the humanity of those we cage and punish, especially if the crimes they commit are gory and personal. We will only achieve that by appealing to our own humanity, by making every individual involved in the process feel and smell and taste the sure debasement and dehumanization that clings to the walls of our prisons, and we can only do that through authentic, intimate narrative.
We must share our stories. We must scrape our cellular memories, over and over, and present to our fellows that pain and degradation. We must revisit, again and again, the violence that we have endured and with conviction and urgency convey that violence without bitterness, and with the determination to have them understand that what they do to others, they do to themselves.
And if in that retelling, our pain lessens and our memories become hazy, the remembered violence retreating, we must nourish our nightmares all over again. It is only through the vividness of our shared lives that we demonstrate our penance, ensure our own transformation, and rid ourselves of the scourge of American cages.
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This essay is the second of TAVP’s new series of writings and reflections on liberatory memory work and transformative justice. We are grateful to Jorge, our current writer-in-residence, for contributing to this series. The first essay of the series is available here.
