5 Miles Away
5 Miles Away
Embedded Files
Student N | 06/08/26
Fiction: A system designed to better people, to show what's right and wrong. They just watched him deteriorate until there was nothing left for him.
“I am trying to sleep, stop making so much noise.” I said.
“I don't know what's going on, I can't think straight, I don't know- I don't know.”
Michael, my cellmate for the last 6 months, had recently started acting weird. He wakes up in the middle of the night talking to himself and starts breathing extra loud. People in other cells around us are getting angry and it's causing problems within genpop. I'm not sure why he's in here, he likes to just keep to himself, but it's a little creepy, I don't know of anything specific. Aside from him, I was involved in a “Hit and Run”. Somebody stole my car, hit a man, and the cops took me in. My fingerprints, nowhere to be found, my car had been detailed at the shop and there it was stolen. I called the owner of the shop and he said that I picked it up. It really sucks. I'm in here for somebody else's crime.
“My head is spinning,” he said.
“You sick? Like what do you mean your head is spinning?” I asked.
“No, I'm not sick, I just feel like I'm losing my mind,” he implied.
About 5 days or so goes on, and time feels like it’s moving slower, but Michael can’t even eat now, so I informed the guard.
“Listen man, there’s not much I can do about Mike, but I can let my higher ups know and there's a chance we can transfer him to a rehabilitation center,” the guard said.
We’ve had only 2 guys in this prison that have been transferred, and they were totally gone, like non-verbal as if they had lost the ability to speak and hear. Nobody for the last 5 years has been given help, even if their problems have been increasingly hurting their health. I mean, I understand, some people here deserve to spend their lives in jail, but they don't deserve to lose their sense of sanity.
“Theo, I got news. I told my boss, and it reached the warden, but I don't know how long this process will take, eventually it will happen, then again I don't want to be too involved with it,” the guard whispered. I nodded, but these words didn't sit quite right with me. Around here, “eventually” usually means it's never gonna happen. There's no way I'm going to get Michael some help any time soon. By the time I can do something, I'll be out of here. As he walked away, I saw Michael standing at the bars, watching us. That night, something felt wrong. Every night, metal clanking as doors shut, not tonight. All I could focus on was Michael, sitting there and having a conversation. Nobody else was in the cell.
One week. A week, not a word about Michael. It's almost as if they don't have the staff for it, it's not that hard to move him to another building. It's 5 miles away from here. Every day I ask about him. Every day it's the same answer.
“We’re working on it.”
Nobody is working on anything. They hardly do their own jobs.
The prison had been practically falling apart since I got here. Paint peeling off the walls, leaks in the ceilings that never seemed to dry, half the lights flickering constantly. It was basically abandoned at this point. Meanwhile, he kept getting worse. He hardly touched his food, spent hours on end with his head planted in his hands. Sometimes he would look at the wall, mumbling things that I couldn't make out.
The metal door slammed behind me. I didn't react, I just stood there listening to the echo going down the hall. It had never really gone quiet in here-just different noises all the time. Far noises, footsteps, anything that is noticeable, yet nothing unsettling. At this point, Michael had been in our cell when I returned. Same position, same stare, same mumbling that he’d been doing since I left the cell.
“Hey Mike,” I said quietly.
No response, as if I hadn't even spoken.
“Did you eat anything?” I said.
Again, nothing. That's when I noticed something different. His lips were moving slower, his pupils small as if light was shining in his eyes.
“Michael.” I whispered.
As if that brought his attention back.
“Yea?” he finally replied.
“I need to help you, you're not doing well. And I can't stand and watch you go on like this for the rest of your sentence.”
It took him a minute to realize that he needed help. He had been so focused on whatever he was hearing in his head, that he did not know that it was abnormal.
“Oh, oh yea.” he said, as if it was a normal thing.
Down the hallway, a door slammed and the lights started flickering like usual and Michael flinched hard. He started talking to himself and he started laughing. Not because it was funny, because he was scared.
A month from then, out on good behavior. I had dreamed about this for months. This was supposed to be the happiest day of my life, yet I couldn't stop thinking about Michael. This one phrase he said kept repeating in my head, “They told me I'm leaving soon”. I don't know what he meant by that. He never specified who “They” were.
My taxi arrived after hours of waiting. I had to charge my phone down the street at the pizza place because it died while I was in. The prison got smaller the farther I drove. Every night I wondered what was going to happen to him.
Days, weeks, and months passed. My life outside had to move on, whether I was ready or not.
One day, I felt off for some reason. I was sitting down on my couch in my old apartment, all beat up after a rough day of work. The news was the first channel that popped up when I turned on the TV. The screen read “Officials facing criticism after inmate suicide after mental help was denied”.
I turned up the volume. The walls, the fences, the towers. All the same as where I was. The reporter said his name. “Michael,” she said.
For a moment, the room got smaller, I couldn't breathe. My chest tightened.
The reporter kept talking, explaining that other inmates claimed to have mentioned that he seemed to be going ill. Questions had been asked whether the prison staff had done enough to prevent this.
What more could I have done? Maybe I could have seeked help from the outside. The truth was that I tried. I told the guards. I did what I thought would have helped. Not enough.
Annotated Bibliography
Annotated Bibliography
Thesis
For profit prisons are only focused on making money rather than bettering the people in prison and getting them help. Some people may argue that we need a place to put criminals but for-profit prisons are not the way to go, because people shouldn't have to work almost for free.
Annotated Bibliography
“Prisons for Profit.” American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, ACLU of Ohio.
https://www.acluohio.org/prisons-profit/
This article from the American Civil Liberties Union examines the ways private prisons in the United States are influenced by profit and growth of the economy rather than bettering people and public safety. The article also highlights the privatization of Ohio prisons and explains how these large corporations, such as private prison companies, and any companies funding this or helping out in general with mass incarceration that profit from these prisons. It argues that capitalism plays a major role in this line of work because of how much they are financially benefitted from mass incarceration. This site also discusses how privatization can lead to understaffing, unsafe prison conditions, violence, and increased problems within the prison itself. With us taxpayers supplying the prisons with the budget, it isn't in many people's best interest because it doesn't directly benefit them. By including how big corporate companies/corporations are all about mass incarceration, it unveils how they prioritize profit over the people inside the prison. This source is viable because it is a page straight from a college and the writer used many pieces of evidence and persuasive facts about mass incarceration for profit.
Adjei-Brenyah, Nana Kwame. Chain-Gang All-Stars. Pantheon Books, 2023.
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame, Adjei-Brenyah is a dystopian novel, published in 2023 that criticizes the American justice system, Capitalist ideology, and the advertisement of violence. The story follows incarcerated individuals who are forced to participate in televised death matches through the fictional “CAPE” program, where winning these fights can eventually free the links from their sentence. Through characters such as Hurricane Staxxx and thurwar, the novel explores themes like mass incarceration, exploitation, and the dehumanization caused by prisons for profit by using inmates as unpaid tv stars. Adjei-Brenyah exposes big corporations by showing how they use violence for entertainment, when the people have no choice but to fight. As they do this, they make money off of them and they technically have no rights in this prison, revealing that they value profit over human life. This novel is valuable and trustworthy because it connects fictional storytelling with real world issues with for profit prisons, exaggerating what goes on in these prisons to a certain extent.
Fulcher Patrice A. “Hustle and Flow: Prison Privatization Fueling the Prison Industry Complex.” Washburn Law Journal. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2097864
This article examines how prison privatization contributed to the growth of the prison industrial complex in the United States. Fulcher argues that the large corporations such as the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the CEO Group financially benefit from this new method of mass incarceration through private prison contracts and prison labor. This shows how capitalism can turn a safety method into a money making scheme. The article also explains how harsh sentencing laws, the war on drugs, and racial profiling increased prison populations and created a desire for large companies and even the government to side with the private prisons. Fulcher ultimately states that prison systems prioritize profit and business moves over rehabilitation or better help. This source is reliable because it connects prisons for profit, capitalism, systematic racism, and the influence of big companies in America.
Budd, Kristen M. “Private Prisons in the United States.” The Sentencing Project, 02/21/24.
https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/private-prisons-in-the-united-states/
In “Private Prisons in the United States,” Kristen M. Budd examines the expansion of private prisons and how corporations profit from incarcerating people in the U.S. The article examined the harsh policies for crime, growing prison populations, and companies such as GEO Group and CoreCivic to manage prisons while having an increasing profit margin. Budd uses facts and stats with state comparisons to show how privatization has become more connected to the correctional system. This article reveals a large piece of capitalism in its argument to show how incarceration can be a major way to make money and when the prison population is high, the money is as well. This generates concern for us taxpayers because citizens are the ones who fund it through inevitable taxes, while private companies still earn profit from these incarceration numbers. This is a serious problem because the question about whether or not the money we give is going to be used to benefit us in our day to day lives. The article proves the relationship between capitalism, mass incarceration, and the financial burden on taxpayers.
“Prison Contracts: Profits & Politics.” Tufts University Prison Divestment, https://sites.tufts.edu/prisondivestment/prison-contracts/
The authors, researchers at Tufts University, wrote an article in intent to inform us citizens about where our tax money goes and what these places are doing with the money, while showing us that they make profits off of it. They dug deeper into the prisons they are building and how they can profit from the prisons while still taking tax money to use for these prisons. People need to know this because the money that we pay, comes from our paycheck. If the government wants to use it for unnecessary accommodations, we should have some sort of say. These authors write that prison companies like CEO group and CoreCivic profit directly from incarceration. Even when crime rates don’t support it, prison population still remains high for economic value. Their lobbying and campaign contributions further show how corporate interests can shape the law in order to make more profit, while using this to sustain incarceration rates. These authors are reliable because Tufts University is a premier institution in the United States. Many people working there or even attending there had many obstacles getting there and they must have knowledge and good research skills to maintain a spot.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse