for some months, in the beforetimes, she worked in a prison.
let me back up.
work is a place where some adolescents and most adults spent a good deal of their waking time doing specified tasks or acting in prescribed roles in order to earn money. money was needed in order to purchase food and rent or borrow housing from a landlord or bank in order to have a place to sleep in when you weren’t working. you needed money in order to secure reliable transportation to get to the workplace by the correct time and to be able to leave after the designated number of hours. you needed money in order to purchase care for your children while you were away at work and, as they got older, in order to purchase education for them so they too might someday be able to work to earn money to do the same.
that is work.
prison is a place where some adolescents and adults were forced to spend all of their time not being allowed to do specific tasks and exactly when not to do them. a place where they were given their meals and provided an uncomfortable place to sleep. this was needed because these people were proven to have behaved in a manner inconsistent with the law in a sufficiently severe, dangerous, or stigmatized way that we decided they needed to be isolated from society and stripped of most of their possessions. sometimes they were allowed work in the prison as indentured servants. this gave them something (please god, anything) to do. except it did allow them to purchase some pre-approved and overpriced luxuries like junk food, cigarettes, radios, and hot pots, which were sold to them by the people who ran the prison and which most of the other prisoners couldn’t afford. this provided a replication of the income inequity that was going on outside of the prison, so it felt familiar. it was called a merit-based reward system and justified as helping prisoners learn life skills and demonstrate a work ethic. they were all told it was for their own good, that they would be rehabilitated there and they might be allowed to leave early if they were sufficiently meek and cooperative. nearly no one in prison was meek or cooperative. not the prisoners. not the people who ran the prison. what happened was the prison workers were paid so little in providing essential services to run the prison, like cooking and laundry and maintenance, that it cut costs and increased profits for the people who ran the prison.
profit is where someone exploits someone else and everyone pretends that it just how things are supposed to be. that you are lazy or weak or disloyal if you disagree. it wasn’t supposed to be fair; you were told about it. about life. you got the message that it was against the rules to see the world as it really was. it felt easier to just dim your own light.
it’s like this. each year someone tallied the number of children in the region who were not able to read by fourth grade. this illiteracy rate was the very number used to plan for the amount of prison beds needed by the time those nine-year-olds came of age. it determined how many new prisons would be built in the state and predicted where they’d be needed. it’s like this. schools were funded by local taxes, and rich neighborhoods had rich resources for their schools and poor neighborhoods did not. it’s like this. some children who could not read by fourth grade had parents who could afford tutors and private schools (and later, expensive lawyers) while others fell through cracks in the system roughly the size and shape of prison bars.
they did have words like inequity and diversity and inclusion and even colonialization and learned helplessness back then. but what we knew from textbooks and what we did in practice could be worlds away from each other. some dots were highly discouraged from being connected. some textbooks were banned.
and sometimes, a president would outlaw the very words.
rehabilitation was not really something that happened in most prisons.
the word rehabilitation was used because it was untoward to admit how much we wanted to punish bad actions, that we all just wanted to blame the bad people for being bad so we could pretend we were not these kinds of people. so we could pretend we were not capable of these kinds of actions. we couldn’t be bad people because we weren’t in prison. we were good people and we were at work. since they were bad it felt right to fund a place where they could be treated badly all day long. where they had to sleep where they shat. where they camped out in the yards in tents in the high heat of the south. that felt like justice. we wanted to be tough on crime. proclaimed it would be a deterrent. yelled it in campaign rallies, swore we could scare people into being good. the way you might hit a kid for hitting their siblings. that’ll learn ‘em.
work is like a part-time prison we go to and if we are sufficiently meek and cooperative we can go home at the end of our shifts. aren’t we such good people paying for homes to sleep in with walls between where we sleep and pee? if we put in enough time, we might be able to retire someday, to get out early for good behavior. the rule is, you have to go to work if you are born in a manner inconsistent with generational wealth.
turns out, when you are poor enough, living itself becomes a kind of crime.
the nerve of the homeless to exist out here where we can see them. let’s throw them in metal buildings with razor wire and clanging locks. how we treat animals but with revolving doors. let’s dress it up in words like rehabilitation after the fact and blame the monsters themselves when they get worse, when it doesn’t work.
in any case, in the beforetimes, she worked in a prison.
most workers did.
Carrie Nassif (she/her) is a queer writer, photographer, creativity-focused life-coach, and clinical psychologist with a private practice outside of Taos, New Mexico. She hosts the SOMOS open mic night and occasionally teaches poetry classes at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu. She has one poetry chapbook, lithopaedion (Finishing Line Press, 2023), and one full-length poetry collection, the vulture girl (Saddle Road Press, 2024). The project, which “In the Beforetimes” is excerpted from, doesn’t quite know what form it wants to follow, so she is leaning into the unknown. Links to her published poems, poetry reviews, and poetry readings can be found at https://www.