From the Founder’s Desk: Unexpected Moments of Peace

I've been feeling a little reflective lately, and I found myself thinking about some of the moments of genuine peace and tranquility I experienced while incarcerated.

Peace and prison may sound like a strange combination. But those moments existed. They were usually brief, often unexpected, and for me, they almost always seemed to revolve around weather—snow, rain, storms, or fog. I thought I would share a few of them.

One of the first I remember was in Virginia. At that point, I had already been through the military prison system, which was a very different and unique experience, not one that really compares to civilian prison experiences and had spent a couple of months in a Virginia jail. I was now at the intake facility for the state prison system.

I was young—23, maybe 24 by then. I was scared. Nervous. Worried. I didn't know what to expect.It was one of those older brick prisons, the kind that gets used in movies when someone wants a building that unmistakably looks like a prison. I was still in intake and had a cell to myself. The cell had an open window with bars across it but no real way to close it off. Heat came from a pipe running through the corner of the cell—and let me tell you, that thing put off plenty of heat. No complaints there. Like a lot of older prison facilities, this one had several colonies of feral cats. At least part of one colony lived in the grassy area between my wing and the next one.

One day, snow was falling.

I remember standing at that window, watching the snow come down over the grass and watching the cats moving around outside. It was quiet. After months in jail and the constant forced proximity to other people, it was also one of my first opportunities simply to be alone.

And I felt peace.

It lifted some of the anxiety. It gave me a moment to collect my thoughts. I wouldn't describe it as some profound spiritual experience or a sense of God's comfort. It was simply a moment in a harsh and uncertain environment when I experienced genuine tranquility. The next memory comes from about four years later, still in Virginia.

By then, I was at a prison that had actually been built on prospect by a group of private investors, leased to the Virginia Department of Corrections, and contracted to Corrections Corporation of America—CCA, now CoreCivic—to operate. It was a brand-new facility when I arrived, and I was among the first couple hundred people there, helping to finish setting up the facility. At the time of this memory I was a resident of the therapeutic community. I had been dealing with a lot. My spirit was pretty thoroughly beaten down by everything that had been going on.

It had been snowing steadily for a day and a half. I rarely went to breakfast, but for whatever reason, I decided to go that morning. There were already four or five inches of snow on the ground, and it was still coming down—not heavily, just steadily. You could see farther than you could in heavy fog, but the snowfall still softened the distance around you. More than anything, though, I remember the silence. Mot of us have experienced that particular kind of quiet that comes with being outside during a snowfall. A heaviness, perhaps, but not an oppressive one. More a quietude. A sense of the natural world sleeping around you. It was a fairly long walk from the housing building to the dining facility. I remember both the walk there and the walk back. For those few minutes, being outside in the falling snow was a genuine replenishment of my spirit.

Whatever prompted me to go to breakfast that morning, I'm glad I did. I needed that walk.

Years later, I was incarcerated in Texas. The unit was on lockdown for some reason that I no longer remember. It only lasted a couple of days. I happened to have a cellmate at the time whom I got along with extremely well, so even being confined together didn't create any particular tension or friction. One afternoon, storms moved through. The wing was unusually quiet. Nobody was shouting back and forth. No radios or televisions were competing with one another. The lights were off in the wing.

Our cell had a window we could actually open. There was no screen. You could stick your arm outside and get rained on, and if the wind was blowing in the right direction, the rain itself would come into the cell. At times the rain was heavy, with thunder and lightning. At others it softened into a steady rainfall. With the window open, the wind brought in the smell of the outdoors and of the fields surrounding the unit. I remember sitting on my bunk beside that open window, looking outside, listening to the storm and smelling the rain.

And again, I remember the peace.

The final memory comes from that same Texas unit, perhaps a year or so before my release. Again, for no particular reason I can remember, I decided to go to breakfast. The yards and walkways leading to the dining hall at that unit made for an even longer walk than the one I remembered from Virginia. Often, particularly when the unit was short-staffed, they wouldn't let us out when there was heavy fog. That morning, they did. And this was heavy fog. You could barely make out another person once they were more than a few feet away. The light was muted. Sounds were muffled. The buildings, fences, and everything else that ordinarily defined the landscape disappeared only a short distance in front of you. Not many people went to breakfast anyway. And unlike lunch or dinner, when people would be talking as they moved around the unit, at 3:30 or 4:00 in the morning even the people walking together tended to be quiet. So I walked through the fog toward breakfast, surrounded by that profound silence and solitude.

None of these moments changed where I was. None changed my circumstances. When the snow stopped, the storm passed, or the fog lifted, I was still incarcerated.

But for a little while, I was okay.

And all these years later, those are some of the moments I still remember.