My prison life

In 2010, it was my fifteenth and final year in A prison. In April in the north, the spring is cold. Thick and high prison walls are installed with crisscrossing high-voltage lines, there is a watchtower every few hundred meters on the prison wall, the sentries in the watchtower are on duty 24 hours a day, and the escape from the prison wall has never happened in A Prison, so everyone does not know whether the high-voltage line is really through the high pressure. Separated by a wall are two different worlds, collapsing into small, isolated societies.

In the winter of 1995, we escorted a group of nine people, all of whom were felons for more than fifteen years, and at first some people shouted injustice, and then they did not shout, and the nine of us were assigned to different prison cells. The cell I went to had more than 20 beds, the quilts on the bed were folded into tofu blocks like those who were soldiers, at night, dozens of incandescent lamps in the cell were hanging brightly on the roof, the snoring in the brightly lit cell was one after another, other inmates out of habit or daytime hard labor exhausted their strength to everything around them has been insensitive, just went to more than a month, sleepless all night, thinking about the outside world, regretting the mistakes made, snoring and lights intertwined, I saw the yellow-haired youth sitting on the incandescent lamp tube, I had been shaking there, grinning at me like I was begging with tears, tears dripping on the ground, stained a blood red, and soon the blood spread throughout the room, I shouted for help, a pair of rough thugs fanned my face, a burning heat on my face made me wake up, a beating was inevitable, I held my head and curled up on the ground.

For more than a month I described it as withered, my stomach slumped in, my face forming a terrible sick state, and my eyes esoteric and sloppy. Prison A implements military management, getting up at 5:30 every morning, folding quilts, running morning exercises, and the first month is used to train prison cultivation. Next, according to the previous occupation assigned a variety of jobs, I used to be a jerk on the street, no door, no faction, no profession, completely out of a self-confidence in my own physical fitness and ignorant and fearless barbarism, so that I can be a shameless bully of other little, beat him to teach him to be a man, collect some pocket money, go to the Internet café to play games to kill time.

I was assigned to the construction team, and I heard from my fellow inmates that the new buildings and parks of the prison were in the hands of the inmates. The place where we live is not like the prison from the perspective of film and television dramas, from the outside it is a well-repaired building, there are some graphic copy designs designed by the prisoners on the outer wall, I like a person who climbs from scaffolding to a very high place, overlooking the earth and the sentry in the watchtower, this is a deadly skill, I think if I fall down and die, it doesn't matter, at first my legs will tremble unconsciously, and then I often climb up to work, that is when I repair the chimney of the boiler room. Burning boilers in winter is a very pleasant thing, I have been in prison for 10 years when I was assigned this errand, and I have also reduced my sentence by 5 years through efforts, and I have a good relationship with the prison guards and fellow prisoners, that night I burned the fire in the boiler room, shoveled a few shovels of slag coal into the boiler every once in a while, got a bottle of white barn through the black market, high wine is very suitable in such winter, a small drink, wrapped in tattered cotton clothes under the watchtower to chat with the sentry, the sentry is also very curious about us, most of the time will not talk to us, especially the recruits According to various judgments, we know who is a new recruit and who is an old oiler without looking at the police rank, and this kind of chat is generally to pass the unbearable loneliness, and no one will tell the truth. For more than a decade, there has been a change of stubble sentinels, watching them standing in the watchtower, there is a kind of solemnity, but also a kind of sadness, these people are separated from us by a wall, we live day and night, even the rhythm of life is similar, maybe they are the people who know us best.

Every year there are several raids of the prison clearance operation, said to be a raid, in fact, we have already received the news internally, in order not to be too clean, there will be some insignificant small problems waiting for the prison guards and soldiers to seize and confiscate, so that everyone can be satisfied with it is a difficult science, cunning some prison guards know this well. Prison guards and soldiers wear masks and gloves to the prison to check, rummage through the boxes and cabinets, they passed for a while, leaving a mess, collecting things, nothing more than some blunt instruments that can not even kill a mosquito and some tattered yellow books, occasionally can also receive some privately hidden money, A prison circulation of currency is not rmb, but cigarettes, cigarettes were not contraband at first, and then something happened, someone roasted cigarette butts on the lighter to a very high temperature, this is a technical job, first pull out the cigarette butts, Twist into a head that continues to be extremely sharp, then let the cigarette butt reach a certain high temperature, and then it cannot burn up, and finally rub it on the wrist, which is like a blade cut. Since then, the cigarettes in the prison have been removed in advance.

The prison guards and fellow inmates know that a person who wants to commit suicide without a desire to live is there is no way to prevent him from committing suicide, and there are also suicides by hitting the wall, but this fellow prisoner did not succeed in committing suicide, and became a serious concussion, and was escorted by the prison guards and soldiers to lie in the hospital for half a month, and did not look for death after returning.

It was an eventful autumn in 2000 when three people climbed out of an abandoned heating pipe at lunchtime, and a week later the three were killed on their way to escape. The risk and cost of escaping from prison is too high, and it generally happens to the most vicious life sentences.

There is a large mechanical factory on the east side of the prison, and the door is connected to a train track to the outside world, and trains came in every few days before 2000 to take away the products processed by the prisoners, and no trains have come in since 2000. On the west side of our prison is the railroad line, and for a long time, 63 trains pass by the railroad tracks day and night, and the trains become our clocks.

There are several plane trees on the south side of the prison, whispering spring, summer, autumn and winter. I like spring, the sun is gradually bright and warm, sweeping away the winter haze, and with a little greeting component. The small park built on the south side is our playground for spring. In addition to the sunshine, spring also brings vitality, kite flying, is a must-have activity every spring. I doubted the significance of this activity for a time, presumably at the outset they naively thought that people like us who were deprived of our freedom and confined to prison would place ourselves on kites and thus generate a desire for freedom. I don't know if they have done statistics, how much the significance of flying kites is. But the significance of those invisible spiritual levels seemed to be minimal, for every prisoner showed great pleasure with the kite, clumsily and conscientiously making the kite, and at that moment the prison seemed really quiet. Simple wooden strips, pieces of paper, rags and other materials, through our hands, have life. When the piece of kite floats lightly in the sky, in their eyes, the kite seems to be transformed into a pure soul, washed by the spring wind and purified the dirt. And I just thought, my kite is flying higher than the third one. What prisons really deprive is not only physical freedom, but spiritual autonomy. At this time, I can finally be alive for a short time.

In 2010, I was assigned to work in a machinery factory, which has been lost, and now only produces some simple enough equipment for prison, and the people who are sent here are activists who are about to be released from prison, at least people who are trusted by the prison guards. On the first day of arrival, I encountered a contraband inspection. The new arrival was a young soldier. He tossed my bed and table bucket almost pretentiously until he saw the leather bag. Like discovering a new continent, he flashed his eyebrows, pinched his wallet, and shook out the books inside. After finding out that it was just a Bible and some notes, he was a little disappointed. He opened the Bible, scanned his notes in boredom, and found that there were only cookie-cutter confessions in it, so he hastily closed them. I didn't believe in the Lord, the Bible was sent to me by my mother, and I believed in my mother, so I believed in the Lord again. He looked up, his eyes touching me, somewhat dodging. After a moment's hesitation, he sorted out the notes again, stacked them with the Bible, held them in both hands and handed them to me, the corners of his mouth clamped, as if he wanted to say something, and shyly did not say it after all. Alas, after all, he was still just a young child.

Last summer, my fellow inmate was sick and applied for medical treatment abroad, the prison guards and soldiers watched and went to the hospital, and once they left, they never came back, and at night we gathered around the brightly lit cell to pray for him. May he be a good man in the next life, free from imprisonment. Those of us, more than fifteen years of hard labor, longing for freedom and alienation from the world create a situation of great embarrassment, going to prison in our prime, and when we get out of prison, we are old and dizzy, and the world is no longer the same world as it was. Lao Wang, he squatted here for more than 20 years, and now he is about to be released from prison, a man in his 60s, hugging us and crying when he left, he wanted to be here all year round, and later heard that he froze to death on the street.

The moment I walked out of prison, I looked back at the layers of closed prison doors, and also closed a world, closed my fifteen years.