The festivities for the Christmas Holidays are taking center stage out in the community. The celebration of hope, family get togethers, and present-giving is what you call the Spirit of Christmas. Far away, in the outskirts of civilization, however, the atmosphere at the house of the living dead tends to be different.
The two to three weeks leading up to December twenty-fifth, the celebrated birth of Christ, overshadow the prisoners with a spirit of melancholy, their faces grim and branded; an emotional turmoil tormenting their souls, filling them with a hateful woe. This turmoil ferments and boils over resulting in arguments between the prisoners over the silliest of things, oftentimes culminating with the wielding of homemade shanks and someone getting stabbed in the process.
Few understand the precarious situation of having to live behind bars during the Christmas holidays. To paint a picture of such a life experience wouldn’t do it justice. The colors would just streak down in blotches of pain as if heaven decided to cry over the prison with tumultuous waves of acid rain. The law-breaker and offender is removed from the community and stigmatized as less than human.
He is forcefully thrown into a cage like a savage animal – without a say so, without complaints – and the captors oppressively tame him into subjection through manipulation, fear and psychological torture. Each day of confinement carries with it a sense of desperation and worry, not the kind as if something bad is going to happen, but the scary feeling that life has come to a stand-still.
After a while, however, the scary feeling numbs itself as the body and mind becomes accustomed to the monotonous, chained, repulsive environment. They both have to submit and live in such a place for however God knows when.
The day I walked through the gates of a maximum security prison was in 1999. The memory feels like a dream now. I was led under heavy guard, shackled and fettered. I was stripped down naked in front of prison guards, each orifice of my body scrutinized and searched. Later I was clothed with old, shabby prison attire, and led into a community of killers, rapists, terrorists, mobsters, and gang members.
Forty-foot walls surrounded a perimeter the size of four football fields in a rectangular shape. Eight gun towers oversaw the confined grounds made up of metal gates and wire fences. The raping of the less vulnerable, the stabbing of the snitches who had cooperated with the government, and the child molesters who were beaten to a pulp and sent to the hospital (later placed into protective custody) sobered me up to realize I wasn’t ready to live in the house of the living dead.
Over time, nonetheless, my mind stubbornly gave in to the notion that this was my world; this was my life. Thousand of days have transpired here in this overcrowded sea of lost souls, where I’m just a dead number; a dead man. The clock ticking its seconds, minutes, and hours makes me aware that I am still living from day to night and night to day.
Only the faded memories in moments of reflection appease me somehow: the grayish, dusty images of my children playing when they were toddlers, the loving intimacy of my ex-wife Sara, whose name is tattooed on my left arm, and the festive family get-togethers I had with Mom and Pop, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, cousins and friends.
If I attempt to cry, no tears would stream down my face; no sobbing, despairing syllables would utter out of my lips. Only the darkness and silence of midnight, the cockroaches and mice, are attentive to the opened eyes; the tossing and turning of my body on top of a metal bunk, and the painful nightmares that won’t let me sleep. For I wish I were home with my family.
Pope Leo in his homily or Christmas mass and devotion might say, “God is in your heart.” The religious man in society who claims, “The prisoners are free inside their spirit and heart,” cannot provide me comfort. They are not experiencing what I am experiencing. Even if they did, they would soon know that dead men don’t cry during the Christmas season.
Edwin Rubis is serving 40 years in federal prison for a non-violent marijuana crime. He has been imprisoned since 1998. His release date is 2031. You can help release Edwin from prison to be reunited with his family: tinyurl.com/FreeEdwinRubis
You can send Edwin a text message through corrlinks: (256) 982-5828
