Quarantine: A Meditation on Incarceration
By: Ali Psiuk
Tags: White Privilege, Self Reflection, Quarantine, Slavery, Prison Reform

Come with me on a wander down a city street, which can be any street in any city. Feel the air on your skin, feel your lungs expand gently with breath, the sun perfectly placed in the sky to warm you just enough.

Notice the non-descript nature of the neighborhood and the neutrality of the buildings. They all blend together with the scenery.

Sense how the buildings feel flat, lacking in character like a hospital or tired hotel. Now look at one particular building.

Through its blurred out windows, horizontal strips of light permeating to the depths of the building’s core you can almost make out shadows — human movement. It almost feels corporate. These nondescript headquarters are actually a jail.

The specific jail I’m referencing sits just off the bridge coming from the East Bay to San Francisco in California however, there’s probably one not far from where you’re reading this.

If you’ve had the experience of snorkeling or scuba diving and watching what you thought was a rock lift up and swim away, you may have seen that rock had a colorful underbelly and is in fact, a fish having evolved to survive.

Concealing coloration is a term used when an animal hides itself against a background of the same color. Those who design prisons have learned from nature to disguise their work and mimic the scenery. Cryptic coloration is strategic and jail and prison locations are masked for many reasons.

Photo by pisauikan on Unsplash

The trend of moving jails and prisons back to local communities in urban areas and away from remote areas has allowed family and friends to visit more frequently. The camouflaging may be a response to community fears and NIMBY (“Not in my backyard”) mentality. It’s difficult to assess if the public is actually fearful of having these structures in urban areas.

Regardless, penal institutions are being increasingly more disguised to merge with the environment whether that be in rural or urban environments.

And when we cannot distinguish something, it can easily become extinguished, at least in one’s mind.

Once a neuronal pattern is set as habit or routine, say allowing something to blend with the scenery, it can be difficult to find the time to slow down to intervene with automatic thought to actually see what is there and what may be happening.

A structure becomes out of sight and mind unless:

You work there. You know someone there. You’ve been in yourself.

Photo by Jeremy Lishner on Unsplash

There are 2.2 million people incarcerated in US prisons and jails. This is a 500% increase over the last 40 years. According to Washington, D.C.- based research and advocacy center, The Sentencing Project, most of this increase is due to changes in law and policy and not changes in crime rates as one might expect.

Since the beginning of the 1980’s the ‘tough on crime’ and War on Drugs, the number of those incarcerated for drug offenses jumped from 40,900 in 1980 to 452,964 in 2017. Tough on crime can be translated to tough on poor, or tough on melanin rich skin.

The number of people sentenced to prison for property and violent crimes has strangely increased even during periods of decline in crime rates.

The fact remains no other culture in human history, other than the US, has imprisoned so many of its people. Culturally and socially we have a hunger for incarceration that impacts us all.

In these quieter times of social distancing and personal reflection may we become curious about the ways in which this impacts our collective and individual psyche on an unconscious level.

Perhaps this downtime has allowed reflection on the ways your own mind allows you to be imprisoned. Are you catching places where you feel stuck, trapped?

How have you been trapped by your own mind through familial, social or culturally assigned limits? And how does this translate to allowing others to remain unjustifiably behind bars?

If we look up and back and trace the roots of incarceration to our nation’s history of slavery we can see the ways in which being an individual in the US immerses us in a struggle for power over one another, profit, and enslaving vulnerable populations.

I write these words as a psychotherapist, as a consumer of mental health, as a woman of European descent, and a human with a past.

I wish I could recall the moment 15 years ago when I got word that the criminal charges I was facing had been dropped. I don’t remember where I was, if the information came in the form of a phone call or an email. I realize now there is no memory of any of those details because it was actually an insignificant moment. As a white person this was due, in large part, to having been groomed my entire life to believe I was safe from the system.

Instead I was released to heal, repair, and make the most of what my life had to offer. I got off because there was a deeply embedded cultural and social story about who I was based off of what I represented. That story was not written by me but, carried through alongside the genetic mutation of my melanin recessive skin; a mutation that developed long after our ancestors.

May these times provide us with clarifying moments of pause. Pause for restitution, healing, and gratitude to recognize imbalance when we see it.