Prison time can feel a lot like quantum physics. Sounds crazy, I know. But it’s true. Quantum physics is an obscure, often confusing field of particle science. The short version explains that quantum physics involves the study of particles smaller than an atom and how those particles behave when separated from their natural connection with other particles. The laws of quantum physics are completely foreign to the physical realities that help you and me understand the world.
For example, isolated particles exist in what is known to physicists as the quantum realm and particles in the quantum realm can actually be in two places at once, a phenomenon known as superposition. In addition, a recent experiment took place in Germany that demonstrated how a single particle of light, which exists in the quantum realm when isolated, can move both forward and backward in time at the same moment, which essentially means it is moving neither forward nor backward in time while simultaneously moving both forward and backward in time…at the same time, which is a confusing place to be, for sure.
Doing time in prison can feel much like that – abnormal, confusing and uncomfortable. In prison, the aim of your days is often about getting time to move more quickly, but movement through time is relative – the perception of motion depends upon your frame of reference. If you’re in a moving car and the car next to you is moving in the same direction at the same speed, it can seem like you’re not moving at all, but turn your head and look out the opposite window and fence posts are zipping by. Time in prison can be similarly disorienting.
A popular saying holds that time heals all wounds. That may sound good, but it isn’t always true. Even when healing takes place over time, the reason healing occurred was not the mere passage of time. Otherwise, both victims and perpetrators of crime would heal through the prescription of time, but…neither do. Healing takes place because we have the courage to look at our pain, to engage it and figure out how to process it effectively enough to move forward and connect with the important people and significant events that help us navigate our emotions and actualize our growth as human beings…and time just ticks away while we’re not looking.
I have been incarcerated for over 23 years and I experience the movement of time very differently than you. In the outside world, the movement of time feels natural, like a burden of overwhelming rapidity even. Like a massive river carving its way through a canyon, years rush by in a blur of laughter, tears, birthdays, graduations, weddings, barbeques and Superbowl’s. Before you know it, lives are built, kids are grown and decades are gone, like a snowflake on your tongue.
In prison, however, the flow of time is pinched to a constipated trickle. Significant experiences are few and far between, sprinkled in among years of meaningless moments drawn out into droplets and splatters. Each one is broken up into incomplete portions, delivered one by one in an emotionally exhausting holding pattern that constantly leaves you waiting to feel.
The incarcerated dwell in that liminal space where inner darkness meets outer darkness. Unfulfilled expectations of a life well-lived galvanize shame, breeding self-hatred. Emotions become manipulative illusions that pull the strings of a desperate attempt to find meaning, to feel worth, to find hope and to heal. We find ourselves grasping for a life that isn’t there in order to comfort the life that is. Anger, anxiety and depression take root in the personality as you realize your friends and family on the outside have been carried away by the river while you sit in your cage waiting on your drips.
Eventually, a shroud of detachment becomes refuge, insulating you from the pain of a life lived without purpose in a warehouse for the discarded, where even laughter feels hollow. It is like living outside of time while being forced to feel every minute of the separation. Pictures of a world moving on without you dance through the haze in your mind. You call out, but nobody listens – for they don’t have the time.
The emptiness of prison culture, the exploitative nature of the prison system, the unrelenting violence within the prison environment and the lunacy of trying to remain focused on emotional and spiritual growth while being packed in elbow to elbow with narcissists, sociopaths and predators seems to conspire against your resolve, almost granting you permission to give up trying to become a better person. You can feel compelled to join the crowd and lie, cheat and steal in order to get whatever you can from anyone you can. To secure power, pleasure and material possessions by any means necessary can be the perfect distraction, but the pursuit of shiny things in the dark will almost always destroy you. The danger of moving beyond the point of no return increases when getting becomes more important than becoming.
Virtually everyone in prison has experienced some kind of trauma prior to incarceration, used alcohol, drugs and sex to numb the pain and learned maladaptive coping methods to mask the shame of feeling broken and irredeemable. Prison time doesn’t teach you how to move beyond your past or even how to process your present and the prison system doesn’t care about your struggles. You’re a number to be counted and cattle to be corralled.
Prison time is slow and lonely and difficult and dangerous. You’re never by yourself but you’re always alone. You’re daily presented with problems that have no solutions and you can’t truly trust anyone…ever. You’re separated from everything you know and everyone you love and regularly required to follow often arbitrary directives in order to satisfy somewhat abusive authority figures.
Without question I am here as a direct and correct consequence of my own actions, but people, like particles, were not designed to function properly when disconnected from their reality. You have to move differently to find light in prison and if you don’t find it, you’ll be consumed by the darkness. Yet, if you do find it, the search will inevitably contort your spirit in permanent ways. No matter what, you’re never the same, and admittedly, that can produce a positive or negative outcome, depending on the response of each incarcerated individual. Trying to convey time in prison is complicated. I might as well be explaining quantum physics.
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