Public Hostage: Public Ransom – Inside Institutional America
Chapter Twenty-One: Injuries (Continued)
I so clearly understood why the injuries occurred. When you crowd life together and turn up the flame of boredom, confinement, hopelessness, deprivation, disdain, cruelty, there will be injuries and injuries and injuries; it can only be one way. Bites, tears, rents, avulsions, cuts, flesh so fragile, so scarred, so ready to yield to a blow from a hand, a shoe, a chair, a key, a stone wall, stone floor. No contest. These things I understood. To end them would require the demolition of the system of warehousing and dehumanization.
It was the detachment, the collaboration, the expectation and acceptance of this carnage by them and staff of the institution that killed me. Maybe they were too innocent themselves. Maybe they thought the injuries were a given, a river with an origin beyond eyesight, with a delta unimaginable. Maybe the confinement to one building where eight or ten injuries a day occurred seemed tolerable. I, on the other hand, had to see it all in five or ten buildings--scores, hundreds, thousands of crimes of negligence, dehumanization, and institutionalization.
There is no defense against such an onslaught unless one has packed away or amputated one's humanity and sanity. Toward the end, after the lawsuits, after the TV exposés, after the memos, the meetings—it became too much.
The announcement of an injury tore me over and over and there was no defense. It was all over. I was a volcano. I cried; I cursed over the phone; I cursed in the buildings; I began to fantasize how to confront the director and the commissioner and do to them what they were doing to the thousands of their victims, their public hostages for whom they received $8,000 to $17,000 each per year.
Only the destruction of the jailors, only the razing of their murderous violent institutions could stop the river of suffering, blood, and ravaged souls.
I could not go on any longer on the inside. I got an educational leave. I was through. I fled to friends in Canada, then California, like an exhausted, half-drowned man pulled from the flood waters. I sought comfort, normalcy, humanity. There are limits to what each of us can continuously endure, regardless of support and understanding. As you look at the next agonizing evidence, understand that the flooding river of injuries still flows. It is still happening, right now.