Stanley-Eric-Captive-Genders-Trans-Embodiment-and-Prison-Industrial-Complex

The Only Freedom I Can SeeWhy can’t I get my life in harmony?And be like any other person?For I know life can’t be this cruel, cause even animals have it betterthat live in a zoo.I mean life looks so gloomy for a person like me.But what did I do to make it this way?She then goes on to trace the interpersonal and institutional mechanisms—notmentioned in her question—that ensnared her in the USprison regime at the precise moment when hundreds of thousands ofpeople (soon to be millions) were swept up by regimes of immobilizationas neoliberalism emptied cities of capital and jobs. I want to briefly summarizeR’s poetic life narrative. 20R was born into the foster system (“I had no family of my own”) andpassed from family to family (“none would call me there [sic] own”). Forthe first ten years of her life, she lived off “grease from a frying pan” and“beer from the night before.” “I don’t remember much before I was six,but I know at this age I only weighed thirty-six [pounds].” When she wasfinally placed with a family she hoped would be “home,” she was “adoptedonly in name” and was “nothing but a slave…to work on a farm and tobe beat for anything that went wrong.” At thirteen, her foster father rapedher for the first time. “He took me,” and like so many children subjectedto sexual violence and extreme poverty, she began using drugs, runningaway, and stealing. At sixteen, she escaped the foster system for good andbegan traveling around the South, surviving by stealing. In 1978 she wasarrested for burglary, and while in jail she was beaten within an inch ofher life by seventeen prisoners and raped by six—“but in reality” her lifewas saved “to face more of the same.” When she was released, she traveledfrom Louisiana to Texas, “still running and trying to survive,” and was arrestedfor burglary again and sentenced to a year and a half of prison and“was raped once again and beat down a couple of times, but still I try tofight, not just to keep the wolves off, but to survive.”The whole poem fills one page of prison-issued paper, a life summarizedin thirty lines. The gaps of white space between each of R’s stanzas,textual silences that encompass years, speak loudly and constitute moreintangible (unseen) forms of knowing. There is so much she can’t say, can’twrite down, or simply can’t remember. The final stanza of the poem reads,“I got released from prison in 81/but as luck would have it/Two and Halfmonths later/I was in penitentiary for burglary again.” 21175