The Destiny of Unnatural Endeavors
By Benjamin James
Beautiful things and beautiful people tend to make room for other things and other people to be just as they are. I’ve learned that beauty in any form always makes some allowance for flaw and distaste. That is the nature of beauty. The truth being always such a stubborn thing, it is by that very same logic an ugly thing. That is the nature of truth. The opposite of what is beautiful, then, is what is true.
Eventually, every penitentiary morphs into a monument to insanity and brutality. That is the truth of it. It is the destiny of unnatural endeavors.
Human warehouses are antithetical to decency and humanity. Prisons INEVITABLY extend beyond the realm of reasonable use and societal necessity. Inevitably. Every one of them. Ever. My very simple proof for this is that none of them are empty. However many prisons stand, today or tomorrow, none of them are empty.
If prison cells are strictly RESPONSIVE mechanisms of retribution and punishment and not preventative or even preemptive ones, then there would NECESSARILY be at least SOME times of NONRESPONSE: Glorious occasions when a prison cell sits empty for a while because no one happened to do anything illegal to get themselves put inside of it that day.
A time of nonresponse.
But regardless of the crime rates or demographics of any given place at any given time under any given set of circumstances, prison cells are NEVER empty. They are like revolving doors.
So, much like the chicken and the egg conundrum, one must ask: Which came first, the convict or the cage? Do they build cages because there’s more of us every day who need to be put inside of them? Or is there more of us getting put inside of cages every day because they won’t stop building them? And maybe, just maybe, the wounded souls from the latter scenario feed and thereby justify the former one.
I am a prisoner who committed crimes out of basic desperation, apathy, and poverty. I can face that. That is the truth. I am imprisoned by other criminals, though, who commit crimes out of complex avarice, gluttony, and greed. Every time they build a new prison, every time they force a new creature inside. I have learned to face that, also. That is also the truth. The truth is ugly. That is its nature, after all…
Bio
Benjamin James, age 36, is a writer from the Cincinnati area. He has been a prisoner since age 18. His memoirs, “The Simple Torture Situation”, will be available soon…
Thank you!