A Prisoner

A Story by George Coombs

Something that sort of came to me a few years back

A Prisoner

Silence between them. The prisoner could hear his own breathing. Each alone in emptiness. Lack of sound was hostile and menacing. One led the other by wrist manacles. Symbols of control fear and the solitude of pain yet who, in truth, was afraid of what?

Where is the real source of the terror that linked them together? Manacles were symbols of power, which, when wild as a beast with lust for blood and violence always leaves questions like, who are the real criminals?

There was time to think. The prisoner needed this. Always the looking. The prisoner also had many questions. Asking questions perhaps caused the real criminals most anxiety. Deprivation of freedom has deeper meaning. All life is one; this was a key truth he had learned. Yet life needs space in which to live. Pluck a flower from its ground and death has begun. Life remaining is perhaps in a vase by a window but eventual death is the second death began when deprived of space. The prisoner had insight and knowledge. He could see desperate struggle of police to improve performance figures. Yet with seeing, understanding and knowing came the realisation he that so much had died inside him. Suicide and self harm was common in police or prison custody. Is it any wonder? Take a living being from its space in which it lives it will inevitably begin to die a process aided by the lack of insight and wisdom as to a response to a call for help.

His teacher taught justice was not revenge. It was walking the path of the afflicted, the pained. It was a ministry of being there �" crime was caused primarily by lack of hope but what of crime against criminals. Acting on unverified evidence. Bullying in interviews so intense a solicitor intervened yet, they got away with it. The heart of the state was violence and much in evidence among the Police.

The prisoner was a scholar, an intellectual who wrote a lot. Most prisoners were not this and were very vulnerable to class oppression. The man knew of a Marxist Intellectual imprisoned in Italy during the last war as Mussolini wanted “to stop him thinking.” This is what real criminals fear most. Thought, questioning.

In a real way, a way they would never see, the man’s teacher was with him. All they would do, all they would ever do is deprive the deprived and hurt the hurting. Justice is not revenge linked with ill treatment and incarceration. Deprive of space and the dark executioner and torturer of mind perhaps more than body begins his ghastly work. We will never know if we do not ask and the asking is what they fear most. He lay down, pulled the blanket over his face �" “do not weep for me” he thought and closed his eyes…..

A loud noise, the heavy door opened, someone in a uniform brought a meal, he eat then was able to wash before a court appearance. His teacher was near, he knew he must open his eyes and learn, the wrong lay in refusing to listen. The wrong lay in betrayal and was not that, and this, all pathways to how humanity betrays itself leading always and ever to the death inside and one of the real crimes, that of preparing the ground for suicide…they came for him court next the state’s attempt to make oppression and revenge respectable in some sort of sick and contemptible way.