Scenes of Prison
50. Holidays
I n Nebraska’s prisons, we celebrate four holidays. Three, you would expect: Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and a fourth that might surprise you.
The first three are celebrated with a special meal.
The Fourth of July meal features grilled hamburgers and brats with baked beans and watermelon. Grills are fired up soon after we break deadlock in the morning, and the smell of grilling meat pervades the housing units all day long. The watermelon is a mess.
Thanksgiving and Christmas meals are more traditional with turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, and pumpkin pie. All three meals are served at noon, and inmates are given portions roughly double their normal fare. They eat until they can’t eat any more and wish they hadn’t eaten as much.
The Fourth of July is festive. Inmates with a view out their windows of the city skyline can even watch fireworks displays after deadlocking in their rooms in the evening. However, Thanksgiving and Christmas are more difficult.
Thanksgiving comes and goes quickly. Wednesday is a workday, and Thanksgiving is over in one day. Friday begins a long weekend. By the following Monday, Thanksgiving has been forgotten.
Christmas is different. Christmas is a season.
As Christmas approaches, spirits begin to sink. Management and office staff, who work eight-to-five daily schedules Monday through Friday, will be home with their families on Christmas Day. In the days before Christmas, these staff will bring in treats and host Christmas parties for groups of inmates and staff, and their Christmas cheer and well-wishing for the inmates is genuine. But when Christmas Day actually arrives, these people are all missing. Meanwhile, the family gatherings and holiday dinners inmates will not be attending really do occur in communities all over the country on Christmas day.
For those of us who worked on Christmas Day, there was extra pay, and my family needed the money, so I was always at the prison on Christmas. “It was just another day," I insisted to anyone who wanted to listen. Indeed, since I was there and recognized the low spirits of the people around me, I developed a special Christmas sermon that I refined and delivered many times to listening inmates throughout the years. I delivered the sermon both as Christmas approached but especially on the actual day to anyone who slowed down long enough for me to start a conversation. If they listened long enough, they’d hear the whole thing.
“You know,” I’d begin, “inmates are lucky to be locked up on Christmas Day.” This beginning always captured the attention of inmates who were shocked by my statement.
“Surprised? Disbelieving? Well, consider the alternative,” I said. “What if you were there?”
At this point, I would employ my wild imagination to paint in their minds a vivid scene of their families in familiar surroundings where a Christmas gathering would be taking place. The scenes I created would involve incidents they could expect to occur and relatives they’d be sure to encounter.
I created disapproving aunts. Cousins who would shun them. Siblings who would lecture them about the misery they had caused dear old mom. A father whose stern gaze suffocated them and made them want to flee. A brother-in-law who would order them to leave. I described how they would drink too much, yell, fight, swear, call people names, threaten people, make women cry, and break things. I created and described one disaster after another that would make this Christmas memorable for all the wrong reasons. The scenes I described were believable, humorous, and genuinely awful, and I only paused my descriptions when I could see that my audience was laughing and ruefully nodding their heads in quiet recognition. They recognized these scenes. They’ve been there and done that, and they had to agree that I did have a point.
“Now, on the contrary,” I would begin after a dramatic pause to focus attention. “Since you’re not there, everyone is missing you, and they're remembering all your fine qualities, and they’re looking forward to your eventual release. Instead of a miserable, disappointing Christmas that’s all your fault, you can relax here and write or call your people and tell them how much you regret missing the gathering. They’ll regret it, too. They’ll say nice things to you and about you after you’ve hung up, and everyone can carry on and enjoy the day. It will have been a good Christmas for them and a good Christmas for you, too, because you weren't there.”
Typically, inmates were amused by my Christmas sermon, and they didn’t disagree with it. One thing for sure, it helped them keep their spirits up through another dreadful Christmas Day. How many more Christmases would they have to spend locked up? Well, at least it was one less now, and I was able to help them get through it.
There’s a fourth holiday recognized in Nebraska, one that came as a surprise to me: John Howard Day. When John Howard Day first appeared on the schedule in the fall of my first year of employment, I’d never heard of it, and I asked staff and inmates to explain it to me. Here’s what I learned.
John Howard was a prison reformer who was born in England on September 2, 1726. His family was wealthy enough to give John a childhood of privilege and advantage. At the age of twenty-nine, while traveling from England to Portugal, the ship he was on was captured by French privateers, and John was thrown into prison. Eventually, he was exchanged for a French officer being held by the British, and John returned to England. But he returned with a new mission that would consume his energies and his fortune for the rest of his life: prison reform.
He traveled widely and spoke to heads of state throughout the world, and he organized prison reform associations in many countries. His efforts have had a profound effect.
Today, prison reform associations bearing his name exist all over the world. September second, the day of John Howard’s birth, is recognized as a holiday to be celebrated within prisons in the United States and many other countries, too.
For inmates in Nebraska, John Howard Day was their day. No inmate work was done on John Howard Day unless it was absolutely necessary, and that meant that no one would be giving inmates any orders or inspecting their work. It resembled a truce called for one day, where inmates could retire to their own camp, and their peace would not be disturbed by staff making demands of them or criticizing their work.
Discussion
- The author felt a responsibility to help the prisoners manage their moods. Do you feel a similar responsibility for the people in your life?
- Are you able to tell humorous stories that get other people laughing? Perhaps it is a skill you can develop.
Next |