Me Too by Tim Cusack

Author:Tim Cusack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TC Publishing
Published: 2012-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

When you’re on the inside and meet some of these guys, it’s more than sad. It feels like a waste of humanity, a waste of potential, not to mention how much money we waste to keep them locked up.

As of 2009 the United States has incarcerated almost 2.3 million men and women. Our prisons and jails cost us 52 billion annually. In the state of Michigan we currently have approximately 44,000 inmates in prison and the annual budget for the Michigan Department of Corrections is 2.2 billion dollars.

The prisoners I met knew what they did was wrong, and at some point during our chat I would always ask, “Why did you do it?” The answer that kept coming back to haunt me was: “I didn’t care,” or “I don’t care.” After hearing this time and time again it finally occurred to me to ask, “When did you stop caring?” The answer was simple and straightforward: “When I stopped being cared for.” Oh, that makes sense. Not being cared for came at a very early age for most of these guys.

During an interview one day I noticed a fluttering sound behind me, and turned to see that a butterfly had flown through the bars of the small, lone window of our interview room and was trapped inside. I tried to ignore the sound of its wings beating against the wall, but eventually I excused myself from the conversation and made it my mission to get this butterfly back outdoors. As I stood on a chair and attempted to use my notebook to coax the creature towards the open air, Joey, the young inmate I was speaking with, cheered me on from the table below. At first, every time I would get the butterfly near the window it would flit back towards the ceiling. I was so frustrated that for a moment I thought about using my notebook to whack it against that wall instead, simply ending the whole struggle. For some reason though, that wasn’t really an option. I think I sensed that there was already enough pain and loss in this room. It took a few tries, but eventually I got the butterfly to land on the bars of the window then in an instant it was gone, flying free once more. “Oh!” exclaimed Joey. “You got him out!” I turned to see a huge smile on his face. He was so happy that this little butterfly was no longer stuck behind prison walls. I was happy too, until it hit me: I couldn’t do this for Joey. I couldn’t correct whatever mistake had brought him here, and I couldn’t bring him out with me when I left that day. I couldn’t set him free.

I wanted to meet the statistics, but who I met were a lot of really good guys, good people, that just happened to have acted out some really bad behaviors. Most of them never had a first chance in life, much less a second or third.

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