Sentenced to Life

BY Kenneth E. Hartman

Prison is a young man’s world, a world of physical violence and posturing, a world of brute strength and primal, unfocused rage. It is not a place to grow old, although more and more of us are doing just that: growing old in prison.

When I entered the system, I was a young man. I spent my days lifting weights and worrying about my status among peers. I rarely considered the significance or the magnitude of my predicament. In fact, the only lesson prison imparted to me, at least to that younger me, was how to be a prisoner.

I found out how to exist with another angry young man packed into a concrete box too small to be a bathroom anywhere else. I learned to become an accomplished thief, an exceptional liar and a proficient hand-to-hand combatant. The state wouldn’t provide for my desires so I stole to satisfy them. Truth is often viewed as a form of weakness inside, by prisoners and guards alike; I figured out early that the big, well-told lie was superior to the mundane and pedestrian nature of mere facts.

And in the joint — in a world where violence is king, perpetuated by us against us, by us against them, and by them against us in a dizzying choreography of pre-emptive attacks and retaliatory strikes do-si-do-ing around sneaky backstabbers and goonish thugs with battery-filled socks still dripping blood and lead-gray brains in their baggy pants — I came to the no-shit-Sherlock conclusion that I had best become as dangerous as possible. So I did.

All of this living at a high-revved pitch, expending all my strength to meet the challenges in this branch of Hades, wore me down to a cinder mote. This is the common experience of those who spend their youth in such concretized suffering. The accumulated weight of years lived pushing against the immovable yields a premature decrepitude. Long-term prisoners, particularly those of us who threw ourselves into the scrum as young men and never managed to slip back past the buzzing electric fences, age at a rate out of synch with the chronograph of time.

Struggling to maintain the battlements I constructed in the frenzy of youth, the hinges and choke points began to fail — gradually but inexorably. My wrists can never forgive the thousands of tons of rusty pig iron I balanced, or the poorly executed angles I threw as I smashed fists into leather heavy bags. My knees were clicking and popping while I still struggled to hoist weight bars into narrow slots, well before I began the 10,000-mile trek on tight oval tracks as a prisoner of the state. Hair and teeth vacated follicles and sockets, blonde locks disappeared, and vigor succumbed to weariness in the infernal contest to keep upright in this maelstrom.

Before long, an old man stands before all of us, his once bulging muscles and steady hands drooping and shaky. Around this old man the frantic and pointless swirl still heaves its poison in blackened chunks of dissipation and frustrated longing. The rough currents gouge fissures from our weathered hides, all battered into smaller visions of our means-to-an-end existence untethered by wrongs or rights: Before you screw me I will screw you. While almost inevitably we will end up screwing ourselves . . . or at least watching impassively as we are banged into tightly compacted knots of self-immolating futility.

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