Eureka

(This story discusses prison conditions, violence, and human suffering. Reader discretion is advised.)

A local university was seeking a writer for a year-long position in its prison education program, and as part of the job, I was to go into the Facility—a century-old maximum security prison—three to four times a month and visit with incarcerated students, many of whom had been incarcerated for decades and would continue to be well after they graduated from the program. Some, I learned shortly after taking the job, would never leave.

Until I visited the Facility, I was familiar with this country’s criminal legal system through the New York Times and the occasional long read. But more honestly, I was more familiar with reality documentaries, true crime, Prison Break, Escape Plan, Escape From Alcatraz, Escape at Dannemora, Escape From Pretoria. Sensing a theme? If we decide to forgo escape, the tropes were still rampant on the inside: the glass partition separating the accused from their beloved, their lawyer, the cop in search of the truth; the tallies wallpapering the inside of a cold, dank cell; the day of freedom, when they’re finally released, their relative, their best friend, their co-defendant waiting for them outside of the gate. 

“Remember, Red,” Andy Dufresne writes to his pal at the end of The Shawshank Redemption. “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”

Prison was a place where the bad went to suffer and rot, and surely it is not the best system, but what is the alternative? Some would defy the odds and leave the place and become better, more acceptable people. No good thing ever dies—that was it. In a place like the Facility, hope and its brothers perseverance, resilience, and dreams were the only things you could cling to. Simply hope harder, and the few good ones will float to the top. If you just hold on just long enough, you’ll endure. That’s all it takes. 

It was a truth that was easy to accept. 

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On my first visit to the Facility, we were issued visitor badges but were told to keep our government IDs close. 

In the back room of the visitors’ center, I am patted down by a correctional officer, or C.O., from shoulders to groin to legs. I take off my shoes and the C.O. claps them upside down over my head so any hidden contraband will come out. We are shuffled into a holding room and wait while others are patted down. Soon, we all leave together and walk outside across a lawn toward the Facility's offices. 

Inside the offices, we walk up two winding marble staircases past large windows that overlook the Facility’s front gate. At one point, many, many years ago, this entrance would have been a grand gesture for any visiting politician or department head. Today, the stairs are worn and sloped, the walls are cracking and crumbling, and the lights are clouded with cobwebs. 

Steps before the Facility’s Big Gates, the Facility’s largest security checkpoint, plaques cast with the faces of officers who have died inside on the job are hung and stacked, starting at your waist until they reach well above your head. The men who upheld the law, served the public, and maintained high ethical standards.

C.O.s clock in and out from their shift. Their clear bags are full of turkey sandwiches, car keys, Diet Mountain Dew, glucose monitors, whatever will get you by in the next eight hours. 

“GATE!” screams a C.O. With a large key, he opens the gate for two nurses, who quietly chatter past us on their way out. The C.O. closes and locks the gate. 

“IDs!” he yells at us. “IDs out and ready!”

I scramble to get my ID out of my pocket—a few weeks later, I will crack it in half doing this for what feels like the umpteenth time—and show it to a correctional officer. They carry a clipboard, cross-referencing our IDs with their master list.

“OK, let’s see—?” they said, flipping pages in search of my name. “I don’t see you, hmm—”

“I—”

“Got you here,” says the C.O., tapping the board. They move onto the next person. 

Momentarily, the gate opens—“GATE!”—and we walk through to another gate. We stop in line until the last one in our group walks through the gate, and it slams behind us.

“IDs!” yells a different C.O., holding the keys to the next gate. “IDs out and ready!”

We do the same song and dance until we are led to … a third gate. This time, the C.O. simply checks our IDs to make sure they match with our real faces, and then, finally, we walk into the Facility. 

When you make it past the Big Gates, you have officially “entered” the prison, stuck behind the concrete barriers that you saw from the highway on your way in, those insurmountable walls that could withstand an inquisition. It is a portal unlike anything I have ever walked through. 

To get to where we’re going, we’re led through one long hallway into the heart of the Facility, past vacant holding pens, an occupied psychiatrist's office, the steel cafeteria tables bolted to the floor. When, at one point, one of the group members veers to the other side of the wide hallway, split in half with highway lines, stay in your lane, the C.O. stops the group.

“STAY TO THE RIGHT,” he yells. 

We are now outside, almost smack dab at the center of the entire property. When we look to the horizon, we cannot see anything but concrete. Immediately before us, though, is a more present barrier, a 20-foot-tall barbed-wire fence that funnels us all inside like lab rats. On our walk, we pass several buildings—a coin toss, whether occupied or not—a running track, a basketball court, a piece of pavement dedicated to lifting weights and talking on the payphone.

Past a stretch of gravel, we arrive and walk through a door already opened for us. 

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INT. THE FACILITY — EDUCATION BUILDING — CLASSROOM

The room is silent as THE MAN strides in, carrying himself like a prophet descending from a mountaintop. A faint beam of light (or maybe just a flickering fluorescent) seems to catch his figure as the door swings open. The INMATES, previously slumped in their chairs, snap to attention as if moved by some unseen force.

INMATES

(collectively, in reverent awe)

He’s here!

One inmate, stands, trembling, and begins a slow clap that echoes through the barren classroom. Others join in, until the sound builds to a crescendo.

MAN

(clears throat, earnest)

Settle down, settle down. Today, we’re going to talk about what’s possible. Hope isn’t just a word. It’s something we can build, here and now.

The inmates glance at each other, hesitant. One raises his hand timidly.

INMATE #1

Are you saying… we’re worth it? Even in here?

MAN

(smiling)

Yes. You—yes, you—are worth it.

Change starts within these walls.

INMATE #2

(whispering in awe)

He believes in us.

INMATE #3

(standing)

I’m finally going to start my memoir. Right now! 

INMATE #4

(shouting)

You’re not just a man… You’re Hope!

END SCENE. 

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Reality hits. 

The guys have a fantasy football league, and it’s all done on pen and paper. That means somebody has to calculate the points by hand, and each trade has its own piece of paper. Huge props to the commissioner. 

But maybe there’s change on the horizon for the fantasy football league because the students just got computers to do their coursework. Before that, it was writing with pens the size of your palm. And if you screwed up what you were writing, or if you had a change of heart, it wasn’t edit-undo—you threw it out and started over again. Recently, R told me he was still learning how to use a keyboard, so C was typing up some of the things he’d written for him as a favor.  typewriter, R said, that was where it was really at. 

Now J—he was a good typist, but a better paralegal and human being. If we’re considering criteria to get into whatever your version of Heaven is, I’d argue that, if we can change the course of someone’s life for the better, just one, you have what it takes to go through the pearly gates. But if you do that ten-fold, a hundred-fold, for other people, like J did for seemingly all those who asked for it, you might consider it sainthood. Add to the mix that J didn’t do any of the things he was accused of—decades and decades inside, then poof, exonerated one day, sorry our bad—and you truly begin to wonder when J started to lose hope. 

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One C.O. regularly led us from the education building back to the front gate. He had a youthful face and always wore combat boots, a hesitant hitch in his step showing his age.  

In a few years, when he turns 50, he’ll be able to retire with full benefits, which, if you do the state-mandated retirement system math, means he’s been working at the Facility since he was 25. He has spent half of his life behind bars, an inside joke (no pun intended) that wavers between irony and reality amongst the C.O.s. 

Some days are better than others, he admits, but he doesn’t linger on it. Instead, he tells you about Michigan's playoff chances or the strength of his German Shepherd’s jaw around a possum’s neck.

If it’s not that C.O., another leads us out. When we get back to the visitors’ center, he follows us to the parking lot and beelines right for his car, turns the bass up high and hits the vape hard, producing grape-scented plumes that hang like fog above tinted windows. 

One C.O. tells us about love of jazz; he spends his days here, his nights playing at the clubs. Another C.O. plays solitaire whenever I see him at his desk, with another C.O. close by, leaning back in a broken office chair, watching YouTube. Another is a mother, a brother, a sister, a father. More than one has been nice and smiled, and more than one has yelled and scowled at my presence. 

They say that the most evil is done by people who never decide to be good or evil, the people who don’t do anything about it. And there’s something to that. But when you talk and become familiar and shake hands and realize that there are people who facilitate this evil but don’t like it any more than you, you start to wonder whether this is the root of the evil you are starting to see. 

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Since the Facility opened, it has been falling apart. 

Over the years, entire wings had been closed and shuttered, deemed unsafe for occupancy. But they weren’t ever demolished—they were abandoned, on display each and every day, serving no purpose but decór, graveyard architecture. And don’t forget about the cemetery or the bodies on the Facility’s south grounds. 

No matter where you were inside the Facility, the windows were either a.) blurred and thick, somehow capturing light instead of letting it in, or b.) so high you couldn’t see out of them. Each time I returned, I began to dread the hours spent underneath the hum of dying fluorescent bulbs, the way noise bounces off of concrete. 

But imagine: hearing a bird chirp outside of your room for years and years and never being able to see the color of its wings, the curve of its beak, the way it swivels its head when it hears a noise. To have to imagine what the bird looks like. A bird. To feel a breeze but to not see how it plays with the grass or the trees, of which there are none. To see the early morning light but never the sun as it breaks the horizon. 

And the water. The water that ran from the sinks inside the Facility was brown. Brown. It smelled like shit and the guys called it iced tea. Even the Facility told them they shouldn’t drink it and gave them a ration of water bottles each week. Some wouldn’t shower in it, but when your bottles ran out for the week, it would either do that or smell like shit. No one who lived with you would appreciate that.

It has poisoned and rotted the health of some already. Many of them know that if they don’t have something it now, it’s probably in the cards. 

We are a less than an hour’s drive from the largest freshwater lake complex on the planet, and yet, the water was brown. 

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When you know that you’re looking at someone who is going to die right before your eyes—be it in a minute or a month—time doesn’t come to a stop. There’s no moment to stop, slow down, say, “Hey, can we put a pause on this for today?” It’s go, go, go until the end; then, you get to relive it over and over again, flipping it around in your head, trying to wrap logic around it, if there’s any logic to be had. 

When L saw blood pooling out of a man’s body, he expected it to run smoothly like a river. But no, blood clots and curdles until it takes on the look of raw beef. As if rags are soaking up the putrid mess, but the rags are the putrid mess. 

When C and A worked in the infirmary, they saw cockroaches scurry into the walls when they changed the blind old man’s bedpan. More than once, under similar circumstances, the roaches would climb onto the old man and skitter over his body. He has since passed but C and A still wonder if the old man ever knew. 

M battled cancer—beat it to bits when he knew it should’ve taken his life—and then wrote a book and graduated college. Next on the docket, the sequel, grad school, starting a nonprofit once he left this place. But then, during a heatwave over the summer, M was struggling. The guys told the C.O.s as much, too—he needs some air, get him some air!—and then, in a moment, he’s gone. The world just keeps going. 

Can you try to forget that? You don’t—you can’t—and instead, it feels like the only way to deal with it is to ingrain so totally deep inside of you that it fundamentally changes who you are so as not to experience anything like it again. You are forced to become something you are not. 

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When the announcement came that the Facility would close, the old me wanted to believe it marked the beginning of something better—a resolution, a release. But what I felt, from the men who themselves had lived so long within its crumbling walls, was the opposite: unease, fear of the unknown. For them, a learned hell was better than one they couldn’t predict. 

I came into this experience carrying a story, a tidy, hopeful belief in the redemptive power of endurance and progress, the kind of comforting truth. With enough perseverance, enough hope, the system could be overcome, its flaws mended, its people saved. The longer I spent around it—never truly in it, could never could actually be truly in it—the more I saw that the stories we tell ourselves often serve to simplify what resists simplification. The world is not a hero’s journey, it is not rebirth or slaying of the monster; it is a series of overlapping contradictions, fragile and unrelenting. The truth of it, if there is one, is that life is not coherent. 

By the end, I realized that these men didn’t need my hope. I was not there to save. They needed their own truths—truths that didn’t fit neatly into the stories I or others wanted to tell, truths that were fractured, painful, difficult. They needed the world to see their reality as it was, not as we wanted it to be. 

Our shared humanity depends on confronting the parts of the whole we’d rather ignore; the fragile, jagged pieces are just as real as any hope we might cling to. If we choose to look away, to retreat into the comfort of simpler narratives, we risk losing our ability to connect at all.

The world is full of people trying to make sense of it, trying to survive within it, trying to make it better for themselves and others. We owe each other the effort to see things as they are, to keep going even when it’s hard, even when it’s hopeless. It turns out that hope is a part of this story, after all. 

But to lean into this completely, to ignore the subtleties, is to take the easy road leading us right back to where we started: disconnected, divided, ultimately alone. Happy, perhaps, but ignorant.  

Can we bear to hold onto the fragile, contradictory pieces of reality without smoothing them into a story? Without finding comfort in a truth that may not exist?

Because if we can’t, we risk losing something more valuable: the chance to truly see each other, as we are, in all our messiness. The chance to build something better—not from a dream of what should be, but from the difficult, imperfect truth of what is.