Some Thoughts on a Jail Visit

When I arrived here, I was told by control that because my clients “A” and “B” were in segregation and there was a program running (i.e. the general population inmates were in the yard), A and B could not be brought through the yard to the visitation area. Thus, all my plans of a 45-minute visit were tossed out the door.

“Control” told me I could leave or I would wait 25 minutes to speak to my clients. This is so typical of the prison in which we are all being gradually required to live. The authorities create conflicts which they alone can mediate, solve, and harmonize. Thus, the elites acquire special significance and justification by bringing law and order to a chaotic world, a chaos they themselves created. How similar this is to the growing body of complex laws which only benefit the bureaucrats, the lawyers, the police, the judges, the elite, while it lays up heavier and heavier burdens on the lives and increases the taxes for ordinary people.

In fact, over the last 40 years of visits to prisons in my country, I have developed an insight into the general direction of society as a whole as it grows progressively more restrictive, controlling, authoritarian, intrusive, and complex. So few people are able to see the big picture. We are developing into a massive prison or police state, and nobody seems to notice. Politicians of all stripes and all parties compete with each other, promising to develop more and more rules, regulations, and punishments to gradually impose on society a prohibition on anything fun, anything profitable, anything original, anything which builds bridges between the various isolated special interests and islands of special rights which the state has done its best to isolate and alienate from one another.

The State seeks to be the arbiter of all conflict which the State has encouraged and arranged between its various competing special interest groups. Pretty soon, they will have us all in a form of protective custody where no one can talk to anyone else. By such a means, communication at the personal level, on anything important that they understand, is eliminated in favour of the rule of and by control. No wonder Chief Justice McLachlin says they have to deal with facebook and Twitter who might not support the justice system. No wonder communication and free speech are the real battlefield. The State must silence all criticism. That is control.

I have waited for 30 minutes and still no clients. If I was being paid at even the rate of a junior lawyer of say $200/hour, who would pay for that? Does society care? I will pay with half an hour of my life. The system makes no exceptions. Control will be obeyed. If you want to see your client, you will wait. This is a jail. You are not entitled to special treatment. The bureaucracy has rules. Nobody contradicts control. More and more, the system has rules. They do not vary. There are no exceptions. You can wait or you can go. Your client, your time, your life means nothing. You have a panic button you can press in an emergency, but God help you if you press it and there is no emergency, only an inconvenience. You will be dealt with.

These thoughts run through my mind as I wait and consider the prison as a microcosm of society. I must share these thoughts as a word of warning to the Western World. If these words sound familiar, I am aware of the writer who originally chose them. Very apt they truly are.