Setting:
A poet or an artist or an anarchist or a teacher or a student asks himself a question he cannot answer about a place he has never been. A polyvocal chorus responds. You can imagine this as a conversation recorded on a tape recorder, or a conversation of empty masks sitting around a public library. Maybe you’d prefer to imagine it taking place around a tree outside on a pleasant day instead. If masks make you uncomfortable, you can, instead, imagine a single man sitting at a desk typing, sometimes laughing at himself or sometimes crying. Imagine a world of your own choosing, and let these words shape or shatter it.
EXAMINER
(EXAMINER inquires without passion and yet with great command, as if the voice emanates from above or beyond the reach of any and all RESPONDENTS.)
Why are YOU investigating this prison, McPherson’s Unit, located at 302 corrections drive, Newport, Arkansas 72112?
1ST RESPONDENT
(gulps nervously and sighs before mustering a response.)
That is a terror-inducing question to answer. It induces terror because I must do a knockout job of answering it, or I come across as another unqualified white man taking time and energy away from all the other important projects to be done on this planet without the critical mass of people and resources necessary to do them.
It is a question tense with subjective subtexts that threaten to override the project itself at every step that I encounter them. A question so fraught with complexities that I must beg from the beginning of this inquiry for an opportunity to modify it: Who are “yous” that are investigating this prison?
2ND RESPONDENT
(full of derision and skepticism.)
Ha! You gotta be kidding me, right?
We’re really gonna derail this investigation right out-the-gate by distracting our audience with nonsense? Everyone knows there’s only one author here: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett.
We already know that the needs for real justice in Arkansas/America/the World outweigh any systems currently in place. How can you then justify what some insensitive #fuckboi might call a “decent into madness” by talking about multiple “YOUS?”
1ST RESPONDENT
(responds with defensive injury.)
If each of us insist on referring to ourselves as Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett for the duration of this project, there are not many audiences that are going to be able to make sense of what is going on here. The name itself is already preposterous and pretentious enough to create an aura of distrust and suspicion.
By your tone and attitude, I think it is safe to assume that you will not stand aside while I respond to our examiner’s questions alone, and since we agreed to this structure, the investigative dialog, because it allows for all of our ideas to be shown in unresolved discussion, rather than as an artificial consensus built around the loudest or most authoritarian voice, I suggest that we refer to you from now on as Mr. Prove-it.
2ND RESPONDENT
You do hear yrself, right, Mr. Whiny?
We won’t have any audience if even the simplest ideas we have to discuss become run-on sentence/paragraph fragments that need six fucking commas.
1ST RESPONDENT
A fairly apt observation that only strengthens my argument:
WE can most effectively represent the complexity of the problems faced by the one real-world implementation of criminal justice that we seek to investigate by acknowledging that there is not just one perspective through which the issue must be looked at.
2ND RESPONDENT
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s no way to deny a person’s rights that’s gonna be fair and just for all.
So, if neither one of us get to be Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett, and you want to call me Mr. Prove-it from now on, then I’m gonna call you Mr. Whiny and we can get on with this investigation already.
1ST RESPONDENT
Well, the gendering of selfhood that comes from both of us identifying as “Mr.” anything feels a little socially forced…
2ND RESPONDENT
(Interrupts with a scoff before rebuking.)
Is this really where you wanna dig through all of our complicated bullshit surrounding gender? Right here at the beginning?
1ST RESPONDENT
Not as long as we agree that it is an issue that deserves its own time and space in this investigation.
I was only meaning to point out that this is intended as a polyvocal exploration of a specific, constructed, environment on planet Earth, and that not every contributing voice should be interpreted as male. I submit temporarily to the sarcastic naming of “Mr. Whiny” because my male gendering is a relevant and necessary detail for the reader to bear in mind, and I would rather go on record as a vocal complainer than a silent curmudgeon. Let us proceed from here and if additional voices join us along the way, we will do our best to make space for them as well.
EXAMINER
Why are we investigating this prison, McPherson’s Unit, located at 302 Corrections Drive, Newport, Arkansas 72112?
MR. PROVE-IT
Prisons are real.
McPherson’s Unit is real.
It is a real physical building built around many different people’s ideas about how to best serve order and justice in Arkansas. Real women are sent there for crimes both real and imagined. Real people, men and women, are responsible for running McPherson’s and real people live in Jackson county, where it, McPherson’s Unit, really exists.
When it comes to prisons, folks got all kinds of ideas abound about what prison is and what it shouldn’t be. Everybody’ got an opinion about what services prisons must serve in the world, and yet the people with the most at stake in how prisons run—i.e. prisoners—have the least power to do anything about them.
MR. WHINEY
(Interjecting with a sense of immediacy)
That’s not exactly true. Prisoners have a history of exerting agency through legal and illegal challenges to their conditions that have radically changed the environment of incarceration.
MR. PROVE-IT
(responding with retaliatory frustration at having underplayed “the riot” in American prison history.)
No shit. But those are examples of prisoners taking power from a system designed to deny it. It is accomplished, not just despite, but in spite of that system. Prisoners are denied the right to vote, many permanently. Prisoners are compelled by law to a labor assignment chosen by their captors or else they face punishments and restrictions unimaginable to those outside of their walls. The use of prison labor as slave labor is enshrined in the constitutional amendment that was drafted to abolish slavery. It has been used as such since before there were states to unite.
Now a lot of folks in our audience might not have a lot of fucks left to give out about the rights of prisoners to control the conditions of their own environment. I’m not going to try to convince them there is some secret source of fucks out there to tap into that will make it so they have one to give about mass incarceration in America, or McPherson’s Unit specifically. But I will fight, with my fists, the assumption that what happens in prison only affects those behind bars. Whatever we do to establish and enforce the rules we think are important, we have to do so from a place that recognizes that how we want justice to be carried out and how it gets carried out is not the same damn thing. No matter how we as people decide to create and enforce laws, it’s got to come from a place that recognizes the humanity of all involved.
