Prison and “Awww….” In The Same Sentence

I once taught a guy in a maximum security facility who wrote hilarious stories about a mouse in his cell. K imbued the mouse with a complicated personality. “Morris” (the mouse) was foul mouthed and vengeful. He would “take a crap” in the guy’s shoes if he was angry. The mouse, who had a rap list longer than K’s, sometimes served as the man’s alter-ego and the two would get into long, philosophical debates.

K purported to hate the mouse and made multiple attempts to banish the rodent from his cell. But the mouse always returned, and you could tell in K’s stories that for all his blustering, he was kind of bereft when Morris didn’t show up for a few days. Morris was the only one, K wrote, who could “call me on my shit.”

I taught K years ago. He was a talented writer, but had the most cramped, inscrutable handwriting. It took me forever to decode it, but it was always worth the time, because I was curious about what the annoying little mouse was up to next.

ANYWAY, I thought of K and his stories, because animals – even rodents – can bring out the humanity in incarcerated people. I’ve written here about the Puppies Behind Bars program, where men and women train service dogs. I loved having one of these dogs in the room when I was teaching, and the pups always had a calming affect on the everyone in class.

I’ve had a particularly rough week and needed some comfort myself. So I couldn’t resist this story by Cameron Terhune, printed by The Prison Journalism Project, about how men reacted to the birth of kittens inside the prison fence.

Awwwww!

When Kittens Came to My Prison, I Had Not Petted One in 15 Years
All these hard people doing hard time melted like butter.

By Cameron Terhune

Nothing in prison is soft and cuddly.

Prisons are concrete and steel and stocked with hard people doing hard time. Toughness is mandatory, brutality a virtue, as we resist — are forced to resist — the human urge for comfort. Those who do not forge themselves into weapons are viewed as prey.

Perhaps prison would have persisted this way forever. Perhaps our granite hearts and iron wills would have never crumbled. Perhaps the prison mentality, that we be cold and heartless, would have endured.

Perhaps. But then there were kittens.

At first there was just one, a wary orange tabby that prowled the yard and haunted the forbidden spaces beyond the fences like the phantom of a world long forgotten. We watched from behind glass and steel and wire and cement, watched her chase birds, stalk around, watched her be free and choose to be here, with us.

We watched her grow, gorging on the pigeons she captured and the state-provided food we left for her. Hungry prisoners saved food from their paltry portions to make offerings to this sweet creature.

In time, we realized it was not the scraps of unidentifiable meat which made her fat. No, the reason was something far more wonderful.

The blessing she bestowed on us for our gifts arrived, appropriately enough, in an unused locker on the yard’s spiritual grounds, where those with nature-based faiths worship.

A litter of kittens.

From that moment on, there was a covenant among all her feeders and fawners and fans: We shall belong to these cats.