Celebration vs. Dismay

Everyday in this country, large numbers of prisoners leave prison to return to the free community. Whether we did long time or short time, the day of our release from prison inevitably ranks near the top of the list of the happiest days in our lives--often at the very top. Many of us spent our whole time inside locked-up in an emotional prison much more challenging than the physical reality of confinement. Some of us experienced so much inner turmoil in wrapping our minds around the cold facts of our personal sense of failure that we became oblivious of, and indifferent to, the actual bars and barbed-wire fences that enforced our banishment from society. We did our time in a daze, as if sleepwalking through a long, bad dream. For many of us, quite ironically, time stopped the day we entered the system, and it didn't start again until we walked out of prison. In the language and imagery of many of our slave forefathers and mothers at the time of their emancipation, though, we greeted our new freedom as our own Day of Jubilee. Hallelujah!

During my years inside, I watched that process play out more times than I can count. The unmitigated joy of so many of the folks I watched virtually skip and dance out of the prison I knew would hold me for some time longer lit up the whole joint. Some of those fellas never cracked the hint of a smile--or indicated the least suggestion of conscious engagement in the real-time world of mundane affairs--during the entire time they spent inside. Their happiness sometimes made me feel good but most often it left me curious. I wondered if, somewhere beneath the profuse and profound expressions of victory and celebration, my erstwhile comrades in confinement had any real notion of what awaited them on the outside.

As I've already acknowledged, I didn't fully comprehend the magnitude of the benign rejection that awaited me out here. I say benign because it most often occurs very quietly and casually--even stealthily. While many in our society have no problem telling us that they want nothing to do with us, most of the people out here who reject us when we seek employment, or even the support services that we, prima facie, qualify for, do not wax so bold or obvious in owning up to their disdain for us. They kill us softly. This process recalls the insidiousness of racism in the almost invisible way it works to deny our humanity and our potential for successful transformation.

Happiness and celebration should characterize our experience on the day we walk out of prison. The reality that awaits most of us out here, however, disabuses us of those feelings. Without a doubt, for the vast majority of us, joy ultimately surrenders to dismay. Not all of us survive that transition well enough to hold on to the precious freedom for which we so longed.