"Voice is important, a way to know a soul" – Shawna Forde
One of the most stressful things about prison used to be using the phone.
With 16 phones for a yard of almost 1,500 guys you could spend hours in the phone line – especially on a holiday – and at any time your chance of telling your mom 'happy mother's day' might vanish in a cloud of the dust kicked up by shuffling sneakers as a dispute over who cut whom in line got physical.
Even if there were no brawls or alarms you might not even make it out to yard where the phones are at all. You might have an antagonist in the tower who doesn't feel like turning the phones on. You might stand in line half the day only to miss your people in the narrow window you have to place a call before the next guy's breathing down your neck to get on with his own spin of the phone roulette revolver.
In April of 2023 at my facility the prison rolled out tablets to the inmate population. Everything else about tablets aside, one feature of ours is the ability to make telephone calls from it. All of a sudden instead of 16 phones for 1,500 guys there were 1,500 phones – and zero fights, at least over 'I was here first, motherfucker' – and using the phone went from being the most stressful part of the day to the most relaxing.
I hear out on the street now it is considered rude to call people, and that you are supposed to text first, or do whatever it is people do now – sometimes it seems to me that people outside are as bad at communication as we are in here. But while it may be considered poor manners to call without warning, thank you for remembering that I am a caveman and I'm reaching out to you from the Stone Age where nobody teaches folks like me the rules of polite society.
And thank you for enduring the torturous automated messages informing you that you have a phone call from a prison, that yes, really, a prison, and that yes, seriously, the person calling you really is a prisoner so if you are absolutely sure you want to accept the call then go ahead and press five – and your phone call will be monitored, your phone number recorded, and no doubt you will be placed on a list of People Who Talk to Them.
And I am sincerely thankful for every time someone presses five.
What a phone call means to someone in prison may not be readily apparent: yes, we want news from home, yes, we want to know if mom's feeling better, and yes, we want to confirm that the mail got sent, that the pictures got sent, that the money did – all that.
But more than what's on the surface, we want to reattach to the larger body of humanity. We are like a severed limb in the discard pile, but when we connect it is like we were never shorn away for a blissful fifteen minutes. We want to step outside of the miserable, stifling, boring, oppressive world of incarceration and remember what it feels like to be with real human people. To remember what it feels like to just talk. To have someone want us around.
We want to take a breath of free air. We want to catch a glimpse of domestic life. We want to spend just a few moments feeling included again. We want to spend time with someone we love, to feel present in their life despite the distance and our isolation.
I am 40 years old. Last week I began my 17th year inside a state penitentiary. I don't have a lot of happy memories to look back on. The people I knew before prison are long gone from my life. But when you press five I'm not in prison. When I am with you I am not in this place that daily chisels away at my soul. I know they said I don't have one, but here's a secret: I do.
It doesn't matter to me where we are or what we're doing. Are we at the grocery store? I don't mind. I haven't been to a grocery store in 17 years. Are we doing laundry? Cool, I wish I had a machine like that to do mine. Are we by the lake? I haven't seen a body of water bigger than a stainless steel sink since I got locked up. Is there a tree? Can we touch it? What kind is it? I haven't been near a tree in almost half my life.
Even at home the phone takes me to a whole new world with you. Are we cooking? What's for dinner? Are we on the couch? Are we on your bed? Are we whispering to each other so everyone else feels like they're far away? 17 years ago I did things like this but my heart then entered stasis – until you accepted my call and woke it up.
It's been all these years since I talked to a woman who didn't have a baton on her hip. All these years since I heard a woman say, 'I love you.' All these years since I said, 'I love you.'
I love you.
Your call will be monitored and recorded. Thank you for using Global Tel Link.
–ronin
