Prison Streets

Written by Michael Mason Norman, ED.D.

Streets are locations where several forms of learning take place. For instance, you can pick-up skills in information mining on how to survive without shelter. You can learn how to sleep and run on concrete. Streets are even famous for making some people — famous. Then, for a select crew, you can discover a chalked model outline of a termination spot to spill your blood on your very own reserved piece of asphalt. But let me offer another perspective, a more nuanced view of a pedestrian avenue.

Turn left here, look, let me invite you to examine, very closely, a different place, a different life space. Walk carefully and quietly. Eyes are watching us! How does the street feel? Yes, the lane of concrete goes and goes on and on, on into infinity. In truth, it never reaches a dead end.

To our right, glance down a treeless, dark avenue, where a single blinking, fiery red LED sign reads out the brand name of our mystery street. It is called, without irony, “Prison Street.”

Don’t be surprised! Every town, large, small, even the insignificant one-lane-no-reason-to-stop places in every state manage to have at least one Prison Street.

If you are fortunate to have a curious mind, look around for an urban-like trail near where you live today. You will find more and more of them. Just “see” with your own eyes and not let your biases and bigotries define your limitations. Prison Streets are not hidden, they are there to be seen. The polite mannered would point out they are ubiquitous.

If you are in the burbs, look near the stores and homes where the clean-cut, so-called advantaged teenagers hang out.

They innocently borrow bottles of booze, while waiting for “free” handouts of heroin and religiously ignore cell phone calls of caring parents searching for them. Take a moment and ask our youth where the Prison Streets are in their communities?

Don’t expect them to answer, for they will look at you with guiltless smiles; which declare, “If you have to ask you are too dumb to see one even if you were standing on its curbs!” Hint! Hint!

As you ponder their evasive responses, think back to the news links, marketed by the specialized type info Mediaosa machines. Those digital spinning heads are designed to under inform and miseducate non-thinking people of the world. Again look closely, you will find abundant hits of tales about crime raging every night in specific areas in your town. Shame, shame, shame! Pity the poor souls, for they know not who they are.

Repeat! Pity the poor souls, for they know not who they are and what they can never become. Lucky we!

Those foolishly impoverished people, they have to live with all the crime, with all the killings. Do you wish they could feel sorry for you?

Can you see a neighbor losing her house due to a divorce? Forget the house and divorce part, would you help that neighbor if she needed support with a son or daughter going through tough times during adolescence?

I am sorry that was an inappropriate question to ask of you. I apologize! But, I should ask that of a few politicians. Some people think we cannot and should not help poor people.

A few observers believe our poor are the envy of all the poor in the world. I guess you can benefit from being fabulously famous if you are poor! Back to the kids on the roads.

Look at those dislocated youth who have abandoned their families in order to live lifeless days and nights on the streets. Dumbing down has become their professions of choice. They live without the love so abundant in suburbs.

It is reported by self-declared socially astute politicians that in the streets practically all “you know which youth” are fatherless! It has been suggested most don’t know their mothers, whom they don’t care about and no one is there to take care of the youth. Except, that isn’t really true if you take the time to look, listen, and think with an unrestricted attention span.

Our special streets are prisons, no matter where you find them.

Yet with few exceptions, our prison streets must have guards to look over wayward prisoners. Prisons cannot exist without guards! But this picture is incomplete — where are the cells, where are the uniforms, why don’t the streets look like real prisons?

Again you are asking another one of those “down and dumb questions.” Obviously, you have been watching too many hyper budgeted guns-in-your-face TV crime programs. Just keep walking down the street, better yet, now drive down the street. Be safe. Lock the doors. Don’t stare at anyone. Close your ears. For as with the road, the language is a little rough. Of course, my God, what am I thinking, you never use those words? Never!

For a long moment feel the tensions in the space you have entered and ever so carefully move on with questions seeking answers.

Now that you have passed the test, what does it feel like to venture through a Prison Street; especially one in your mind’s eye? Does it look familiar? Did you play on such a street earlier in your life?

Hold up! Two other major pieces of the picture or puzzle are still missing.

Where and who are the guards?

Why do we see only boys on Prison Streets?

Bigotry, prisons, streets