How Much Easier to Hate

Illustration: Ansellia Kulikku.

“We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey…”

—Edward Abbey

I’m just a magnet for crazy old guys who never shut up, reads my journal entry from September 25th, 2014. Fucking Wright comes around bothering me every day.

I’d learned Wright’s name a month earlier when he was enrolled in a rotation of Phase 3, the re-entry course all inmates are required to take before going home. It’s supposed to prepare us for a smooth return to society—considered a joke by staff and inmates alike.

I’m toward the end of my two-year sentence and will soon be forced to take the class myself, but until I go home in January, I’m assigned to help teach it. I’m what the state calls an IPA, or Inmate Program Associate, eligible for the position because I graduated high school. I get grade-four pay, the highest inmate pay grade in a medium-security prison: twenty-four cents an hour. A can of commissary tuna costs $1.01.

Dealing with guys like Wright comes with the job: standing at the front of a dingy classroom for hours every day, trying to hold the attention of the blank faces staring back. By the end of the first week, all the most disturbed and lonely guys are convinced I’m their friend. They’re wrong, but I feel bad and try to humor them. I smile and nod as they ramble and stutter about society and wiretaps, then walk back to my dorm when the officers call for movement. With Wright, this strategy doesn’t work. He walks back right behind me; we live in the same dorm.

The dorm houses sixty inmates below a high, long ceiling, each of us assigned a cubicle hardly larger than a phone booth. My cube is against a wall—the small mercy of off-white cinder block at my back, separating me from the men on either side by waist-high partitions.