Behind Prison Walls….
I walked into the doors of cellblock 3 at the Tennessee Women’s Prison west of Nashville. The concrete floors were spotless, the concrete walls a drab yellow, the clanging of the metal bars behind me loud and certain, and the air inside as suffocating as the humidity that had just encased Nashville. Behind the glass wall where we signed in walked one of the two women who faces the death penalty in Tennessee. Her short-cropped white hair had been much darker when she had arrived over thirty years ago. Her appeals yet to run out, but her good behavior had given her privileges, a life not confined to her tiny cell. Instead, she was regulated to a windowless office where she could sweep floors, sort mail and have the occasional opportunity to sit outside on a concrete bench with a Dr. Pepper and watch prison life go on beyond the chain link and wire fence that still held her captive.
I would see a different picture inside. As the buzzer released the lock of the metal door, nothing moved but three guards. One was squatted down by a small opening in one of the back cells, shaking widely at a cup that would reveal the results of a random drug test. The other guard stood talking to a young woman from the safe side of her metal and concrete prison, while another guard stood inside one of the cells talking to another prisoner. But that wasn’t the scene that got me. The scene that got me was the faces that popped up in the tiny 12×12 glass windows of the metal prison doors.
As if sensing the environment had changed, black faces, white faces, drawn faces, despondent faces, crazed faces, began to reveal themselves in the only way that could connect their eyes to our own. Their small window to the world. I studied each one. As a writer, it seems that most any experience I encounter is experienced with the thought process of “how can I tell this story to someone else.” Yet, I knew my attempt to relay what I saw two weeks ago would pale in comparison to the actual experience.
As the guard walked us into one of the tiny cells, the metal toilet protruded into the doorway. The personal items of mouthwash and toothpaste and pictures scattered the tiny home and made the realization that little is truly required for living. For 23 hours a day they are confined to that cubicle of a world. Some have a window to the world offering a picture of the sky that represents the freedom that eludes them, others nothing but a fluorescent world. . One hour a day, they are led with chained feet and hands to a world of chain link fence, concrete slabs that resemble more of a dog run that a “recreational” patio. It is here that they can talk to another prisoner from behind their caged world or they can stretch, or simply breathe in air that is fresh and free. And then they are taken back to their concrete hell.
Three times a week they are allowed to walk across the small cell block to the other side of the room and get in one of three tiled showers, where a little window in the door must remain open where their feet can be seen at all times. Their privacy is gone, their freedom a distant memory and their life as questionable as their safety.
It was here that I saw Christa Pike. The youngest woman ever on Tennessee’s death row. At sixteen she brutally murdered a young woman, and at twenty-eight she is out of appeals. Her face came up behind her little window, her eyes wild with delight and madness at seeing my friend’s Vicky’s face. A face that had spent countless hours with her over the past years telling her about Jesus. Christa had cut her hair, was angry over an accusation she was using drugs, and every thing she did was done with animated gestures and childlike mayhem.
This was prison. This is hell. Confined. Accused. Alone. Watching a life go by that you do not participate in. And yet, there were a few women that passed me, their faces alive, their smiles genuine and their souls anything but imprisoned. I saw a few who were working for the Chaplain. I passed a few on the grounds as they waved at Vicki. And in the middle of it all I realized it isn’t that different from the lives of those who live out their days beneath a bottomless sky.
Prison isn’t respecter of walls and concrete. Prison also abides in the confines of unforgiveness, bitterness, prejudice, judgementalness; self-pity, sexual sin, insecurity…and the list could go on. In the last couple months I have had encounters with people far more imprisoned than some of the women that I saw in Prison itself. People so afraid of letting go of their stuff, as if what heavens has to offer them won’t be enough. As if the Maker of heaven and earth can’t be sufficient. And while they may be able to drive themselves to Wal-Mart, they haven’t lived…truly lived in a very long time.
I’m not sure what may hold you captive today. But I’ve often wondered if Joseph, after he was falsely accused of raping Potiphar’s wife and sentenced to prison if in the being there he said, “I’d rather be in this physical prison with God, then outside of this prison without Him.”
So, I ask…who is the greater prisoner? The prophet Isaiah wrote that Jesus would come to “to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.” That is why He came. May we live as if it were true.
