The Awful Thing I Saw in Prison That Stunned Me Into Silence
"It was the kind of moment that you witness but your brain just rejects; you can’t believe what you just saw."
One evening last July, I was on a phone call with my girlfriend Taemi that would no doubt end like all the others: with me hating myself and wondering why I called in the first place. That seemed to be our routine. Still, I’d line up for the telephone each night and spend half of my 45-minute rec time receiving a sustained dose of verbal bashing from someone who was supposed to love me — about all I’d done wrong, all the shame I should feel, and so on.
This seemed to be the norm for quite a few of my fellow offenders. Gluttons for punishment and prisoners of our past wrongdoing, we couldn’t bring ourselves to stop calling home. Most of us were hooked on abusive
