What is Prison?
Do you know what prison is? It is the constant desire to be anywhere except where you are. Only, if you go somewhere else, especially back to where you used to be, how will you belong? Prison is a loss of identity. Who are you now? It’s like Sam Cooke was killing me softly when he was “strumming my pain with his fingers, singing my life with his words.” He told y’all that it was “too hard living, but I was afraid to die, because I don’t know what’s out there, above the sky.” I don’t know why he told my secrets, and he told them before I was born. I couldn’t even stop him. How did he even know?
Prison is what put that look in Brother Malcolm’s eyes. That look of determination, love, and sadness. The look of the highly qualified intensive care surgeon. That look when you know you have to wake up a million people in a short period of time because it means the difference between life and death of a nation. And the ones you need to wake up the most have been put into a socially induced coma to minimize the swelling from the lifetime of pain they have experienced so they have a fighting chance… Or their love language won’t turn into the language of pain and cause an allergic reaction of a breakout of riots.
Prison is the devil’s answer to my righteous prayers. I called out to God and asked Him for relief from the messy life I had ignorantly created. Lucifer replied with a knife in my back so deep that I begged for death. Just when I got used to the pain, he pulled it out halfway and sent me to the house and asked me for gratitude.
Well, no matter what prison is, I am a survivor, a winner, a truth teller. I just need someone to listen. I am a calm, casual conversation. Now I need you to be an open, excited audience because I am just getting started.
Claudia L. Shivers 