Prison

How is it that I don't sit in prison? How is it that I have so far avoided a finger pointing, which would sit me there regardless of evidence and circumstance? And why, if I am free, do I think only of how penned in I am? Of real prisons, the descriptions of which I can compare to my cell, I have with an ample sampling. And none compare; this is ease, while that is surely hard time, torture.

Perhaps it is that present circumstances require us to consider the carceral as part of a virtual circuit within which we are included. We are home only for certain moments, and as for the rest, it is uncertain if we might be accused and dragged off.

The Kafkaesque returns to my imagination– but why is this appropriate? What has happened? This fantasy of wrongful imprisonment … cultural product? Does the production of this fantasmatic coincide with political circumstances that put us at risk for actual wrongful incarceration? Or is there something else that challenges the mind with this threat?

Two aspects coincide: the wrong and the contained; the ethical and the phenomenological. It is a matter of the turning of the moral valence of habitation from pleasure to pain, from good to bad. What was put out, is taken in.

Never having been there; always wanting too have been. Never wanting to be there now. A cowardice: never willing to risk it. Always willing to speak, never willing to act. Never knowing if it is the moment when it might matter.

The situation here is this: many here are at risk, regardless of taking any. 60% of those inside are unconvicted. We are encarcerated at the rate of 1 in 109. One half of these are in because of what they have taken into themselves (or put into others): the substantiation of evil, a drug. What seat is this Goldilocks? Too small? Too big? Or just right. Surely not just. Mercy!