Becoming property of the state is both a collapse and a crumble. From the moment we are in the clutches of the punishment system, we are crushed by an avalanche of force and dehumanization. We become numbers, last names and risk assessments. The longer we remain captive, our agency and self-worth are chipped away at, in routine and violent ways. We become cheap and disposable labor, captive consumers, experiments in state-sanctioned premature death Gilmore The prison seeks to be an institution of total control through physical, psychological and sexual domination.
As its subjects, we are expected to suffer in silence; there are consequences for advocating for oneself or others. But we refuse to stay silent. The following report, the third in our four-part series, is designed to take readers on a tour through life in Perryville. Through our testimonies we make transparent that the intended purpose and function of the punishment system is not justice nor rehabilitation, but is to break the human spirit.
Moving through the corridors with us, readers witness state power expressed in both overt and nuanced ways. Prisons do not create safety, and though we are not safe here we work to create safety for one another. This report also serves as an indictment of the normalization of this system and its practices of incapacitation.
We share our struggles to reveal how power gets used to not only dehumanize us, but to make that dehumanization socially acceptable by not calling it what it is.
As poet Aurora Levins Morales writes:. But just as intense heat makes ripples and waves that distort our view of the road and give us the illusion of water when there is only hot asphalt, oppression of any kind tugs at the culture around it, distorting our view of the naked exercise of power, normalizing it so that it appears natural and tolerable. We charge our readers with the task of contemplating whether the daily fight for dignity in this system should be considered normal — including what is known and what we expose in detail for the first time.
