Incarceration

                Recently I had cause to visit someone in jail; not a frequent activity for me. Perhaps that is a significant comment on the shallowness of my faith and witness. At any rate, I sat there waiting

under the harsh green fluorescent lights in an uncomfortable indestructible industrial chair facing a small computer screen behind a thick layer of Plexiglas listening to the conversations around me. I listened to a father pour out his love on a struggling son. Across the way and young mother held an infant up to the screen, hoping that somehow the video would help the father form a bond with the tiny baby. Next to me a grandparent tried to encourage a distraught grand-daughter. Pain, love, loss, and gain all mingled in that harsh room of steel and plastic. In that room lives either come together of fall apart. Loved ones make the trek to the edge of town to blunt the edge of despair. If you drive the road during visiting hours you might even see a mother pushing a stroller down the shoulder, hoping, perhaps praying for better days. Occasionally you catch a glimpse of someone walking down the road back toward town. Released from confinement, no one came to get them so they trudge down a dusty, windy, West-Texas road toward an uncertain future. In that room dreams, futures, and hopes flare and die.

                No one gives birth to a child they hope will end up incarcerated. We all hold our children hoping for a better future, one filled with joy and fulfillment. All too frequently I take the easy way out and think of those who traffic that room as somehow deserving of that fate. After all, if they only made better choice in life. That is an overly simplistic and grossly self-serving view. Yes, personal choice do result in a variety of consequences; however, that person in an orange jumper is someone’s little boy or girl. They ache and they hurt for them. Painted into a corner, some make awful choices thinking there is no other way.

I listened to one father implore his son, “Son, yah gotta listen to me. When you get out, get out of here. There is nothing but wage-slavery for young black man with a record in this town.”

We could quibble with him all day long about the goodness and truth of his advice. But we would miss, perhaps ignore, the pain and loss in that father’s advice. All father’s want to help guide their sons into successful adulthood. The best he could do was to urge his son to flee; find another place to grow.

                Somehow we must learn to see those who we’ve incarcerated as individuals. Yes, individuals who’ve made mistakes, some horrible and gruesome, but individuals that someone loves. We must never forget that God made them in His image and that He loves them. It may be that society must lock them away for a while. We need some level of good order and discipline in our world. But, they remain people, not numbers, not animals dressed in orange. Their families, even though they may be fractured and dysfunctional, love them. They undergo significant deprivation and humiliation through this process. They need some sort of sympathy a measure of tenderness.

               We must learn out to reach out to those families that suffer such indignity and loss. They need our sensitivity not our condemnation. Of course we can dissect their mistakes and rationalize our way to ignoring them, casting them aside like so much refuse. But, that ignores their very real pain and loss. It does nothing to help them move forward into a better place. It also virtually guarantees that the next generation will follow them into another industrial room where love, pain, loss and hope mingle and the best of them die.