A Good Neighborhood

by Therese Anne Fowler

Dostoyevsky said, What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love. Unable, meaning being denied, being thwarted. Those of us who’ve had love denied—real love, not a passing lusty whim, not a false infatuation based on some imagined connection that in most cases is unrequited—we fellow travelers through hell know Dostoyevsky told it true.

Young men who are innocent of the crime for which they’re sent to prison are an especially cursed subset. They’re too young to be jaded and toughened by life. They have no skills for survival inside, where their prison mates are actual criminals. They lose their faith in authority figures. They lose their faith. They have been bludgeoned by unfairness and are left cowed by the beating. They get no respect from the hardened men, who want them to stop whining about their innocence, who disrespect them for not being man enough to have done the thing they didn’t do. So, then, if you’re going to go to prison, go for a reason.