by Nicholas Ganz

As part of my ongoing effort to feature the voices of prisoners on this blog, I wanted to share excerpts from an essay written by William Healy, a prisoner at the Indiana State Penitentiary, titled “Another Day Coming.” The essay appeared in Black Voices from Prison by Etheridge Knight published in 1970.

…I am hesitant to say anything more about prison because I feel unequal to the task of explaining my imprisonment in order that another might glean from this telling an understanding of the universal encounter with penitentiary life.

What word is there that can duplicate the prison experience? Or reproduce the feeling a man has of being swallowed up by the earth; of being removed from the rolls of the living, yet knowing there is no defense against this feeling — nothing he can take to cure the malady caused by his displacement? How is it possible then for me to write about it? Being aware at the beginning of the difficulty of the chore does not quicken my eagerness to begin.

So now I am confined to this cramped cubicle, just large enough to die in, thinking mean thoughts about nothing in particular, because in prison there is nothing much to think about. My meanness is scattered all about the cell: Sliding off a prison cot, piled high in corners, my accumulation grows to resemble a World War II garage waiting for a paper-collection drive to end.

[…]

So this is prison! Its storied existence is a legend commercialized by book and film, a fictitious narrative depicting prison as a place full of men hard and calloused beyond belief, who have committed acts against a society which, in turn, has sentenced them to this place where a man’s life is given up to serving time.

Yet prison’s self-image is perpetuated not by the man lodged in penal institutions (though many men have died here because of it, believing the legend), but through an atmosphere which demands the continuation of both guilt and punishment. The great tragedy of our penal system, also its interior weakness, is its promise to be always indifferent, never conferring upon an individual the needed conditional absolution — that an adjustment within his life, in terms he understands and wants, might be tried through programs that are designed for his eventual release, instead of holding him for the grave.

When you consider that 90 percent of everyone in prison now will be released some day, this attitude implemented now would awaken a real self-interest in these men about their own lives; and such a program could also be used to measure progress and determine when a man could be released. To enforce an authoritarian position upon the imprisoned, with its rigid controls, only benumbs the spirit needed to resolve guilt and increases the intolerance of the future that he inherits anyway. There is just no excuse for making sick people sicker and therefore more of a threat to society when they return to it.