crying in marshalls

One thing about me, I’m going to cry in public. 

I think I lost any shame I may have once associated with the act when I lived in London; there’s nothing quite as humbling as crying in a Tube station. Especially if you know Londoners, they will ignore you every single time. 

I have just always felt everything very deeply. I was a sensitive kid who became a sensitive adult. I have joked about it a few times online, but I am certain that I have that affliction Octavia Butler wrote about in Parable of The Sower,  Lauren’s “hyperempathy”.

I hadn’t cried publicly in a while, but recently I ended up crying in Marshalls. I will admit that the store of my childhood does not typically reduce me to tears. On this day, however, I had a reasonable basis for my despair. Earlier that afternoon, I had the opportunity to reconnect with a friend I quite literally thought I was never going to see again.

In the fall of 2015, I was a senior in college at the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle. Bright eyed and bushy-tailed, I was 20 years old and heading into my final fall quarter on campus. That fall, I had two formative experiences: 1) a mixed-enrollment class and 2) a civil rights pilgrimage through the American south. (I may one day write about the pilgrimage, but today, my focus is on the mixed enrollment class.)

The class was on culture, crime, and criminal justice. The uniqueness of this experience was two-fold: firstly, in its demographic composition, and secondly, in its location. I took this course with six students from my department (Law, Societies, and Justice), alongside ten incarcerated students at the Monroe Correctional Complex, a prison just north of Seattle. Once a week, we would drive up to Monroe, WA to take this criminal justice course in a small room on the prison’s campus. 

As you can imagine, nothing could have prepared me to bear witness to all of the things I had read about in all of my courses to date. Physically being within an institution that has effectively been amputated from mainstream society forced me to reckon with all of the mythologizing of prisons and prisoners I had retained. With that proximity, I was faced with so many people who had been harmed by other systems and/or individuals prior to their sentences. I was ambivalent, the experience was confounding. Transformative, but absolutely devastating. Engaging, but gut wrenching. Academically, it very quickly became one of the best classes I had ever taken. My incarcerated peers were extremely prepared and deeply engaged each week. I felt (and still feel) grateful to have had the opportunity to know them and learn from them. But the impact that the class had on me emotionally has never left me. If I think about it for too long, I can still feel the grief crawl up my throat. 

Most people on the outside never have to confront the brutality of the American criminal (in)justice system. Prisons are often located far away from big cities, separated from the general public by design. You cannot grieve what you do not see, and you will not empathize with what you do not know. As such, the breadth of the American imagination of prisons, prisoners, crime, and criminal justice has been carefully constructed through the popularity and resonance of copaganda, true crime, and decades of “tough on crime” messaging. These lenses continue to color American discourse on crime and punishment, rendering people completely disposable and irredeemable within the American machine of mass incarceration.

I never told any of my classmates but every week after class, I would go home and cry. 20 year old me did not know how to reconcile my grief over the fact that the most brilliant people I had ever interacted with were all serving life or long sentences. I felt weighed down with guilt that I and my LSJ classmates could spend so much time talking about criminal justice in theoretical terms, but my incarcerated classmates were speaking from their very real experiences. And naturally, the grief compounded. I would berate myself for crying in my apartment, knowing where they were laying their heads was a lot less kind.

My incarcerated classmates have remained with me mentally since then. I think about them and our course quite often. I am always wondering how they are doing, whether they have been released, or even if they are still alive. (A few of my classmates were elderly, and were dealing with a number of health issues while incarcerated; and thus, at the mercy of the prison healthcare system.) I was especially concerned about them during 2020, as I had been conducting research tracking global responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in prisons. As much as I saw people commiserate online about how horrible lockdowns were on the outside, I could not help but think about how my old classmates were being treated throughout the pandemic on the inside.

Fast forward to a few days ago, I was scrolling on LinkedIn and randomly came across one of my formerly incarcerated classmates’ pages. Shortly after completing the mixed enrollment course, I had been made aware that Devon would be released a few years later. In recent years, I had even come across some of his successes over the last few years on Instagram. What I did not expect to see was my old friend Arthur Longworth’s page. 

For context, Art was sentenced to Life Without Parole (LWOP) when he was 17 years old. When I met Art, he would have been about 50 years old. Art’s quiet brilliance, his capacity for introspection, and his spirit all left a lasting impact on me. When I left Monroe for the last time in 2015, I tearfully assumed I would simply never see him again. 

So, you can imagine my surprise when I came across his smiling face on LinkedIn. I immediately paused and squinted at my screen. I clicked on to his page, and then zoomed in to his default picture. As I inspected his image, I noticed that he had gotten a haircut, and even looked to be wearing normal civilian clothes (as opposed to the prison attire I remember him wearing - white tee, beige cargos). I audibly gasped at the sight of him holding a phone. I had known that he had been fighting for clemency for years, but I couldn’t quite let myself believe that he was finally free.

Naturally, I sent him a friend request and messaged him. We exchanged hellos, and I was overjoyed to find out that he was doing really well for himself. He had gotten a great new policy role for a Seattle-based law firm and even owned his own home. We arranged to meet later that week, since he would be in the city for work.

Two days later, I arrived at one of my favorite coffee shops by UW’s campus and waited for my old friend. He arrived and took a seat across from me. We spent the next few hours talking about all of the things we had been up to since 2015. He let me know that he had been released nearly 4 years ago, thanks to the Monshke decision from the Washington State Supreme Court that deemed it unconstitutional for minors to receive life sentences. What could only be described as a miracle allowed my friend (and ~50 other men) to walk out of Monroe as a free man, for the first time in 40 years.

I updated Art on all of my travels over the last few years, and asked him about his new life. How has it been adjusting to this new world? What did he think of the internet? Does he watch any shows? Did he see Sinners? (Because of course, I asked him about Sinners). In short: the internet is amazing. Prisons restrict so much access to information, so this newfound ability to have the world at his fingertips has been incredible for him. Art does not watch any television shows, but instead loves being outside in nature. (We will be going on some hikes soon!) And yes, he did watch and enjoy Sinners.

As we spoke about his re-entry process, there were a few things he had to learn upon release that unnerved me. One of them being the fact that he had to learn how to use a fork (because of course, everything in prison can be a weapon). This denial of participation in the minutia of everyday life is one of countless, intentional decisions to dehumanize people behind bars. The barbarism of the American prison system is in its frequent, unceasing reminders of its intention to render people as disposable. Consider how these kinds of decisions can accumulate over the course of someone’s entire life inside, and you may begin to understand my cynicism over the insistence that these spaces are restorative; or, that there is any intent here larger than the will to break someone’s spirit. I think some people like to purge their own guilty consciences by regarding LWOP as the human alternative to the death penalty; taking real solace in the fantasy of prisons as rehabilitative institutions. When in reality, that sentence is a designation of life in prison in name, but effectively, a death-in-prison sentence. 

And so, dear reader, perhaps you can now understand why I found myself crying in Marshalls later that day. I left our impromptu reunion feeling a range of emotions: jubilation, relief, rage, and grief. So much grief. As I write this, I am a few days away from my 32nd birthday. I still cannot really wrap my head around my friend having been incarcerated for longer than I have been alive. Even worse, for a mistake that he made as a teenager and expressed deep regret and remorse for ever since. I wonder about all the names of the people inside that I do not know, all of the people who have been cast out at sea without a life jacket. I wonder when people start to lose their compassion for mankind. I wonder when people begin to lose their imagination for a better world. Surely, grief is the only emotional response that makes sense in this world. Grief and rage. On most days, I oscillate back and forth between the two. 

I am beyond happy for his new life, and thrilled that he’s been able to find peace and build this new, beautiful life for himself and his beautiful dogs. I am so happy that he gets to see the sun whenever he wants, that he no longer has to answer to anyone but himself. But, I cannot shake the grief of so many years lost, and the rage at how quickly we discard people. I cannot accept banishment as the bedrock of our responses to harm, or that this carceral machine is our only option. Not in a world in which abolitionists exist. Not in a world where restorative justice exists.  Whenever I remember my classmates, I return to the words of Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative: “each of us are more than the worst things we have ever done.”