Life inside

“Life Inside” is a monthly column about, well, life inside—“inside” meaning inside prison, within the walls of a maximum security penitentiary, behind a 25-foot concrete perimeter wall, behind the bars of a 6’x8’ cell. The column is written by the men in my Lifers’ Writing group, men serving life sentences, some of whom have lived their entire adult lives inside, some of whom will never get out.What I’ve learned from these men, what I hope others reading the columns in Eugene Weekly will learn, is that there is life inside, that the drive to make a life—a life of meaning and purpose—transcends where we are, or even who we are. These men live in the most restrictive and darkest of places. They live in a toxic environment: chronic stress, everyday hostility, incessant noise, no privacy, poor food, lack of connection to the natural environment, limited opportunities to maintain family ties, mind-numbing routines. And yet they don’t just survive (although this is, to me, astonishing in itself). They work on restorative justice programs within the prison, reach out to at-risk youth, volunteer as hospice workers or crisis counselors, join therapeutic or service-oriented groups, take classes, commit time and energy to a writers’ group, bake cookies to put in holiday gift bags for fellow inmates. Get married.My hope is that my book, A Grip of Time, and now these columns, help others to see what I have seen and learned during the past four years: That these guys are human beings, that they should not be defined by (and we should not look at them through the lens of) the single worst moment in their lives. This does not mean being “soft on crime.” It does not mean that we shouldn’t hold wrong-doers accountable for their wrong-doing. It means recognizing the human being.Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, this is also a lesson I learned when, as research for a previous book, I embedded myself in another dark, restrictive world, the world inhabited by those with Alzheimer’s. Before I spent months working at a residential facility for those with this disease, I viewed people with dementia as empty shells. Because they had lost their memory, I assumed they had lost themselves. The self. I assumed there was no there there. Not true. Even without access to their pasts, they still lived a life. They took pleasure in food, in music, in touch. They made friends and enemies, got angry, laughed.The life they lived was not like our lives, just as the life the imprisoned men lead is not like our lives. But it is lived. Often fully, Often with meaning and purpose. If we recognize this, we can see them as the human beings they are.(Illustration by Liza Mana Burns)