Standing or Stamped?
OR
Whose Label Do You Wear?
OR
Whose Label Do You Wear?
You entered with a name, with an identity. Then, step
by step, everything in the system seems determined and designed to strip it
all away. Your dignity, your sense of self, your value and values, your
passions, your masculinity or femininity. You're herded into pens, called out
like cattle, stripped, hosed down, given uniform clothing, given a number.
You're given an identification with one
word stamped on it in big, bold letters, a word that haunts you from that day
on OFFENDER. And, for far too many of us, we lose our soul in the process to
the uniform code of condemnation and dehumanization.
It is not all that surprising that a society, ignorant
of the realities of the courts and the justice system, would place these labels
on men and woman, seeing them as menaces and threats needing to be locked away;
the world is a harsh, judgmental, unforgiving place, more ready to hide those who
are caught breaking their laws away out of sight, defining them by a negative
moment or time in their past, than to face up to the failings and weaknesses in
our culture and in themselves that those so easily and quickly labeled reflect.
What is most sad, however, is that we, those who know best the
overreaches and injustices of the system, who understand most intimately the
depths to which the best of men can fall in his weakest moments, the failings
any woman can reveal in her frailest times, and who know the pain of being
labeled, ostracized, filed away, and determined irredeemable and valueless
because of an act or time of foolish lostness, we who understand this
most deeply, take on that label to ourselves, allow their stamp, their brand to
burn into our souls, searing the very core of our identities, then reflect
these vilifications that pain us most deeply onto one another!
This is sanity?
Don't think you are guilty of this? Ask yourself some
questions. When you refer to the man or woman who lives in and shares the same
close spaces you inhabit, do call that person your roommate or your
"cellie"? If the latter, you are giving way to their label. Do you do
all you can to live a healthy, disciplined, ordered life, as you would to function
and live well outside the prison walls, or have you settled for the lazy,
pre-programmed, easy
floating along of institutionalization? If the latter, you are
giving way to their label. How much "prison lingo" have you allowed
to slip into your vocabulary? When you see men or women wearing the uniform of
an inmate, do you see a person, as much human and as much invested with
preciousness and value as every other person in the world regardless of race,
color, or creed, or do you just see another prisoner, another inmate, another
offender? When you see prison staff or officers of the law, do you see a man or
a woman with great value and dignity simply doing his or her job, or do you
just see a stuffed uniform of the "po-lice" and reflect onto them
everything you hate about the system? Oh, here's a tough one: When you think of
the various crimes or convictions of those of us in the prison system, do you
rank some men and women as worthless scum and irredeemable1 and others almost respectable based
on the act or conviction that place them behind bars?
How
you doing so far? Can you see yet how deeply you have accepted the scarlet
letter "0" that the rest of the world places on us?
One
more question on this test: When you look in the mirror, do you see just
another criminal, branded by his or her past, destined for failure and
unworthy, worthless, void of anything to contribute to the world? Or can you
see a man or a woman, who has a past (but every person on the face of the
planet does), but who can, who has learned, has grown, has matured, and
who has immense value, who has much to offer in a world badly in need of good,
and yes, broken but redeemed men and women to reach out to the broken, hurting,
and lost with the hope that only the redeemed ones know?
The
problem is that for too many of us have never learned who we are to begin with, and so have
bought into a lie. We've spent our lives building façades and shaping masks, or
more precisely stated, allowing those around us-friends (so-called), gangs,
social norms, cultural expectations, jobs, family, and the list could go on -
shape those false fronts for us, all in an effort to hide our own
lack of identity and our own insecurities. So we look for identity and
fulfillment in temporal externals: sex, drugs, money, cars, excitement, and
acceptance by the crowd, success-things, stuff, and feelings. We have no clue
how to stand in our own identity because we haven't the first clue as to what
or who that person is. So what is another label, another stamp? And another?
And another? And another? It's easier, far simpler to just float along
accepting them, no matter how degrading or dehumanizing the label, than to stand against the tide of masks and disguises being
fitted onto us.
It's
time we stop accepting brands, stop blindly putting out our hands to accept
another club stamp. It's time we learn who we are, who we were born, were
created to be. It's time we stop being another face in the crowd, another
statistic, another number, another faceless follower of the flow.
It's
time we allow that something in our core, in the very heart of our being, to be
stirred up, to be aroused with a fire of passion that cries out, "ENOUGH!"
It is not the system to blame, my friend, for a system is a blind, soulless
machine; it is you, how you respond to the gears and assembly lines you are
being dropped into! It is time for you to wake up and learn to stand in your
identity, to learn who you truly are as a man or a woman and to live in it!
You are not a valueless, numbered animal. You are not
the thing you were convicted of in the courts. You are not the worthless thing the
correctional officer, the social worker, the P.R.C. Board, or society treats
you as. You are not "OFFENDER ________". Oh, and neither are you that
thing or name placed on you by the other insecure mask wearers in the gang or
social circle that has defined you for so long.
You are
a son, a daughter, a husband, a wife, a father, a mother, a brother, a sister,
a nephew, a niece, an uncle or aunt. You are an artist, a musician, a mechanic,
a composer of songs, a writer of poetry, a storyteller, a cook, a designer, a
builder, a speaker, a thinker. You are a teacher, a mentor, an encourager, a
helper, a leader, a friend. You are some or even many of these things and more.
You are, most of all, a man or a woman made in the image and likeness of Almighty
God. Stop floating along accepting stamps. Do the hard thing! Learn who you are
and then learn to stand in that identity.
Friend, it is not until
we, men and women behind these walls, begin to do this, to do the thing that
most in the "free world" have not learned to do (but how free is a
society under bondage of masks, behind prison walls of false fronts, in
reality?), that we will begin to finally break off the chains, both of how
society labels us based on our pasts, and of what our social groups place on us
as expectations - expectations which have in many cases led to the chains of
prison labels. It is not until we begin to view one another with this value and
identity that we have any moral right to decry the hatred, fear, and
condemnation from others keeping so many of us behind bars and walls of iron
and stone. It is only when we learn to walk and stand as men and women of
identity of a conviction of who we are created to be, it is only then we will
know any real sense of freedom from bondage in the world.
And on that day it will no
longer matter if we live behind prison walls in a cell, or in a palace with
every amenity and luxury in the world. It will no longer matter if we are
called "OFFENDER" by the world or paid the homage of a king. It will
no longer matter if all the world rejects or accepts us in who we truly are as
men and women. On that day we will be able to wash away the stamp on our hands,
rid ourselves of the scarlet letter painted over our hearts, and cleanse away
the brand that has too long remained burnt onto the fabric of the core of our
souls. On that day we will have learned, not only in spite of all we have faced
and been through, but because of it, to finally stand no matter what the obstacles
ahead.
It is then
and only then we will understand the liberty of living as a woman or a man, to
stand free and clean of stamps, brands, and labels. When will that day come for
you?
Reader: If you are joining
me online, you are likely in the “outside world”, and this feels a bit like
inside baseball. So two brief comments
to you. First, while you may not have prison system tying to stamp their identity
on you, you do have a world or pressures and peers desperately trying to do so,
the principles here , then , apply as much to those of you on the outside as
those of us on the inside. Second, this message desperately needed inside
prison walls not only here is Wisconsin but around the nation, far too many
have simply given up and taken the condemnation of the world as their identity,
forgetting who and what they are as men and women, now living in hopelessness. Please,
if you know anyone in prison, print these pages out, send these words to them,
and encourage them eto pass this encouragement and challenge to the others.
Maybe then we’ll begin to see real change, if not in the system, then at least
in a place far more important: ourselves.