Underworld

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During my time in prison, I reread Dante’s Inferno. Actually, it is possible that I’d never read it before. I’m not sure. It is one of those books that is so well-known in academic circles that you can pass exams on it simply with what you’ve picked up by osmosis. I think I did actually read it, somewhere around about the 8th or 9th grade, but I’m getting old—I can’t remember all the books I’ve read. 

At any rate, when you rediscover a work of art at a different time in your life, you are affected by it in different ways. What struck me most about Dante’s Inferno was the fact that the lowest level of hell was not burning hot, but freezing cold, as the prevailing temperatures in San Diego county jail are.  I had decided to call my book about my incarceration experience “Hell Is Cold” before the Dante book landed in my lap near the end of my time in prison, so the title seemed perfect. 

In the mythology of the ancient world, hell was known as the underworld. Strangely, before my recent experience of being locked up again, I’d never made any connection between this, and the use of the term “underworld” to describe the world of crime. The fact that the criminal underworld is, for me, analogous to the spiritual underworld didn’t occur to me until I found myself back in jail on a parole violation, after I hoped upon my release from prison to never be incarcerated again. 

At first, I thought it was just being locked up that was hellish. But the more time I spent with other inmates, the more I heard their stories, their lives in the free world sounded hellish to me as well. They seemed to enjoy running around chasing drug addictions, engaging in constant meaningless irresponsible sex, committing acts of wanton violence, and going in and out of jail and prison. But when they were telling stories, laughing and joking about their good times, it all sounded horrific to me. You can even tell where these guys place themselves in the universal spiritual hierarchy by the street names they go by: Demon, Wicked, Psycho, Sicko, Monster, Mayhem, Trouble, Vicious, and so on...

The hardest part of it by far is the fact that society, my society, decided to place me amongst these people when my primary goal in life since I was five years old was to be a person who left behind a meaningful positive contribution to human civilization. I think of a line from a 2Pac song: “We reject your deposit”. 

Being incarcerated is hell to me for another reason: the world of jail and prison is an entirely male world. It is, in fact, maleness taken to its ultimate catastrophic end. It is a world where violence is considered the ultimate means of conflict resolution. It is a world where any sign of weakness is an invitation to attack. It is a world where women are called “bitches” as if that is the official proper name for the female of the species, and the only time you ever hear any quality of character praised in a woman, it is her willingness to assist in crime or her willingness to send money to jail.  And because there are no women in jail, these guys, a shocking number of them fathers of many children, follow the adage that men in the ancient Roman elite followed: “Women are for reproduction; men are for pleasure”. They are misogynistic in an extreme and bizarre way that goes far beyond what you encounter in the free world: they actually don’t think women are necessary!  They are beyond homosexual and on their way to something else: the achievement of a male-only world if they could figure out how to reproduce asexually and prevent female births. They aren’t ready to admit it to themselves yet, but they would love it.  The fact is, their most satisfying social relationships by far are with their homeboys. Their wives, girlfriends and children aren’t even on the radar by comparison. I myself have decided the male world is for the birds. I want to join the girls, so being locked up with a bunch of hyper-males is extra miserable for me. 

This brings me to one of the most important lessons I’ve learned about what is broken in our prison system. Incarceration is intended to be a punishment and a deterrent, but it is neither for the criminal class. It is only a punishment and a deterrent for square citizens who are not likely to commit crimes anyway. To the denizens of the underworld, being locked up from time to time, perhaps for many years at a time, is something they accept as a part of life. The square citizen has no idea. I had a young man who had just finished a six-year prison term, and three months after his release got sentenced to another six years say to me, “Prison is fun”. Just several days ago, I was talking to a young man who was thrilled—THRILLED—to find out that illegal Xanax sales, for which he had been arrested, now carries mandatory prison time. 

The criminal class loves jail and prison. And no, the answer to the problem is not to roll back the civilized privileges that have made their way to prisons and jails in recent years. Their lack of objection to being incarcerated isn’t because the food is decent and there are flatscreen TVs. It is because it is their social environment and they are allowed to control the social environment. Try chaining convicts to a desk eight hours a day, five days a week and make them fill out TPS Reports for their supper, then you’d see crime come to a screeching halt. You hear a lot of talk about “slave labor” in prisons, but in reality, in California at least, very few prison jobs answer to the description of a real job, and while there are some administrative consequences if you refuse to work, you can. But if you don’t want to work,  it is pretty easy to get out of it, or get one of the many jobs that requires you to do very little. If prison jobs were like real jobs, a lot of people would be trying a lot harder to avoid prison. Guys who don’t want jobs in the real world are climbing over top of one another trying to get jobs in prison, because most prison jobs bring some kind of sought-after privilege, and very few of them are truly “hard work”. They are geared to the pace of people who are lazy and stupid. And they can’t actually make you work anyway, only deny you certain privileges if you refuse. Incarceration environments are a world free of responsibility and responsibility is what the criminal class fears most. 

So while the criminal underworld is hell to me, the residents like it there. To quote a famous criminal mind, Richard M. Nixon, “People who like this sort of thing will find that this is the sort of thing that they like.” Ain’t that the truth, Dick!

At the end of the Inferno (spoiler alert!), Dante escapes hell by crawling down the devil’s back. These last seven years, again and again I’ve felt, “This must be the rock bottom. This must be the devil’s back.” But it never ends. So many times when I didn’t think it was going to get worse, it did, until this point today where I have lost everything I own, ensconced in a hotel room technically a fugitive while I try to find some way to escape this situation. 

Dante wrote, “The deepest isolation is to suffer separation from the source of all light and life and warmth.” I now know this to be true.  It’s a funny thing. When you get over the fear of death, what comes next is the fear that hard times will go on forever, that you’ve made it to hell. You’ve made it to the Underworld. But in all my musings on theology, there is something that never occurred to me until these last few months: if God were to recompense a lifetime of mistakes with an eternity of torture, that would make God unjust. Though it is often hard to tell, I don’t think that is the situation we are in. It’s the human injustices that make us suffer most. 

I just want to make it out of the Underworld. I want to experience the world of light and life and warmth that I’ve only now come to realize I’ve never had. If faith requires you to wait forever, then it’s a con. At some point, hope has to become reality, or its nothing. I hope...

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