It is a nostalgic reminder that there is a world and life out there.Ernest Hemingway was right in the title of his classic work, The Sun Also Rises. In the spring, I watched that world come to life again.In the early morning, I can hear the lonely distant wail of a train whistle as it meanders along its tracks by the Merrimack River hidden from sight by miles upon miles of trees. In the winter, I watched with a chill in the frigid wind as the frozen world down below seemed to extinguish all signs of life. At night I can see distant headlights on the Interstate some miles away.After the dungeon we lived in for all those years, I was stunned when I first saw that view. The walkway outside our cell looks out over the walls into the forests and hills beyond. When I step from our cell out onto the outside walkway with my coffee at sunrise each morning, I have to actually look down to see prison walls. We can roam outside at will in an area large enough for us only barely to notice the barred gate that slams shut if we roam too far.So though our prison is still a prison, it is a vast improvement over how we once lived. For the better part of every day we are now, in a sense, free range prisoners. For just the last two of my twenty-five years here, we have been able to do just that from about 5:00 AM until 9:30 PM. ![]() Then lock yourself in your bathroom with them, and ponder the fact that this is how you will live for the unforeseen future.”Ĭoping is a matter of perspective Such an environment serves as a great impetus to get outside. Invite the first 23 strangers you meet to come home with you. “To better understand prison, imagine taking a long walk away from home far outside your comfort zone. There are 24 such pods stretching across two multi-story buildings.To really capture the atmosphere, I have to paraphrase something I wrote awhile back in an article for LinkedIn pulse entitled, “ The Shawshank Redemption and its Real World Revision”: At one end of the small pod is a bathroom with two showers, two sinks, and two toilets used by 24 men. After 23 years trapped inside a single building with very little “outside,” we like the fact that the place where we now live has very little “inside.” Even prison is a matter of perspective.Twenty-four men live in an area called a “pod” which is about the size of your average living room The room is surrounded by ten six-by-ten foot cells each housing two men with another four bunks out in the open to accommodate prison overcrowding. ![]() We are not supposed to like it at all, and for the record, we don’t. ![]() These Stone Walls recently published a post about annual spring cleaning and inspections in prison entitled “ A Good Housekeeping Seal for the Hotel New Hampshire.” We also gave it a subtitle: “How Two Grown Men Live Free of Clutter Without Room Service in 60-Square-Feet.’‘ It presented a soap opera-like glimpse of the days of our lives in prison from the inside.A number of readers wrote that they laughed out loud all the way through it, but some also marveled at the photos of my friend, Pornchai Moontri’s woodworking creations I don’t want to overemphasize the soap-opera-like drama of life inside a sixty-square-foot prison cell, but as the world turns I would like to also give equal time to the outside.Prisoners are not supposed to dwell on things they like about prison. Gordon MacRae cites a need for perspective in any measure of your own existence. In a simple but powerful post about being unable to change the cross he bears, Fr.
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