Friction and Alignment

The heavy brass key, worn smooth by 18 years of friction, resists for a fraction of a second before the tumblers finally give way. I am leaning into the door, my shoulder meeting the cold steel, pushing against the vacuum of the hallway while 28 men wait behind me. There is a specific rhythm to this life, a cadence of clicking locks and heavy footfalls that matches the thumping in my own chest. Only five minutes ago, I managed to parallel park my sedan into a space that looked three inches too short, sliding into the curb on the first try with a precision that felt like a personal victory. It is a rare feeling in this job-that sense of perfect alignment. Usually, everything is slightly off, a degree or two out of plumb, much like the 108 essays sitting on my desk that claim to tell the truth but only offer a polished version of what the parole board wants to hear.

My name is Michael R.J., and I have spent most of my adult life as a prison education coordinator. People often assume my core frustration is the lack of funding or the ancient computers that hum like dying insects, but it is actually simpler and more devastating than that. The real friction comes from the persistent lie that education is a moral disinfectant. We are told, and we tell these men, that learning to read or mastering algebra will somehow scrub the stains off their history. But I have seen 48-year-old men find God in a grammar book only to use their newfound eloquence to manipulate the younger inmates. Knowledge is a tool, not a character trait. It is a sharp knife; you can use it to carve a flute or to cut a throat, and the knife does not care which one you choose.

The Weaponized Syntax

There is a contrarian reality I have to live with every day: the most educated inmates are often the most dangerous because they no longer rely on blunt force. They learn the geometry of the system. They understand how to weaponize the very language we provide them. Last year, I made the mistake of allowing a student, a man who had served 18 years for armed robbery, to assist in the curriculum design for our remedial writing course. I thought his perspective would bridge the gap between the administration and the cell blocks. Instead, he used the position to establish a sophisticated messaging network disguised as peer-review feedback. He was brilliant. He was literate. And he was still running a game, just with better syntax. I felt the sting of that failure for 58 nights, wondering if I had simply become a specialized trainer for more efficient criminals.

This realization changes how you look at a classroom. You start to see the 8 lights in the ceiling not as sources of illumination, but as markers of a cage. You begin to question the efficacy of every lesson plan. Yet, the work continues because the alternative is a silence that swallows men whole. I often think about the physical reality of sight-the way we perceive the world determines how we react to it. In this environment, where the fluorescent flicker is constant and the gray walls leach the color from your retinas, clarity is a luxury. I remember reading about the precision required in modern lens crafting, the kind of technological rigor found in hong kong best eye health check, where the goal is to eliminate distortion entirely. In here, distortion is the default. Every story I hear is filtered through layers of self-preservation and 28 different versions of ‘it wasn’t my fault.’

I find myself drifting back to the car. That perfect park. Why does it haunt me? Perhaps because the car went exactly where I commanded it to go. The variables were known: the turn of the wheel, the speed of the reverse, the distance from the bumper behind me. In the classroom, there are no known variables. I am dealing with 28 different ghosts and 28 different futures, all colliding in a room that smells like floor wax and desperation. We spent $878 on new textbooks this semester, and I spent 38 hours arguing that we ought to include more philosophy. My superiors wanted more vocational training-welding, plumbing, things with clear ends. They want the men to have hands that can build, but they are terrified of giving them minds that can question.

One of my students, a kid barely 18 years old, asked me if I believed people could actually change. He was holding a copy of ‘The Republic,’ his thumb marking a page about the cave. I wanted to tell him yes. I wanted to give him the ‘Today we talk about hope’ speech that they teach you in the orientation seminars. But the shadow of my previous mistake loomed too large. I told him that people don’t change their shape; they just learn to fit into different containers. It was a cynical answer, one that I regretted as soon as the words hit the air. I saw the light in his eyes dim by 58 percent. I had failed him by being too honest, or perhaps by being honest about the wrong things.

I remember a time, about 8 years ago, when a riot broke out during a mid-term exam. The sheer irony of men throwing chairs while others tried to finish their multiple-choice questions about the industrial revolution was not lost on me. I stayed in the room. I didn’t run. Not because I was brave, but because I was fascinated by the 18 men who didn’t join in. They just sat there, shielding their papers, determined to finish. Were they the ones who had truly changed, or were they just the ones who valued the credential more than the catharsis of violence?

Education in this context is a series of small, grinding movements. It is like that parallel park-you adjust, you check the mirror, you realize you are 8 inches too far from the curb, and you try again. You don’t get it right the first time, or the 18th time. But the 58th time? Maybe then the wheels align. I think about my own vision often. My eyes are tired. The strain of reading handwritten letters in dim light has taken its toll. I sometimes wonder if I am seeing these men clearly at all, or if my own biases have created a permanent blur. If I could go to a vision care lab and get a pair of glasses that stripped away the inmate number and the crime, would I even recognize the person underneath? Or is the crime so integrated into the identity that they are inseparable?

There are 488 pages in the manual I am supposed to follow, but none of them explain what to do when a man cries because he finally understands a metaphor. It happened last Tuesday. A man who had spent 28 years inside-more than half his life-was reading a poem about a bird. He didn’t see the bird; he saw the bars. He wept not for the bird’s flight, but for the fact that he had forgotten what the sky looked like without a chain-link fence cutting it into diamonds. In that moment, the frustration of the job evaporated. The contrarian view that education is dangerous felt thin. For 8 seconds, he wasn’t a convict. He was just a man looking at a bird.

But then the bell rang. The 8 lights overhead flashed, signaling the end of the period. The guards entered, the keys jingled, and the 28 men filed out in a straight line. The magic was gone, replaced by the cold, hard reality of the count. I stayed behind to straighten the desks. I found a pencil on the floor, chewed down to the nub. It felt like a relic. I thought about the 128 different ways that pencil could be used-to write a poem, to solve an equation, or to be sharpened into a weapon.

I walked out to the parking lot later that evening. My car was still there, perfectly positioned, a silver island in a sea of asphalt. I stood there for a moment, looking at the distance between my tire and the curb. It was exactly 8 centimeters. A perfect fit. If only the rest of the world followed the laws of physics so obediently. If only the 588 men in this facility could be slotted into society with the same ease and precision. But they are not cars; they are messy, breaking, beautiful things that don’t always want to be parked. They want to drive. And my job, for better or worse, is to give them the map, even knowing they might use it to find their way back to the very places that destroyed them.

I’ll be back tomorrow morning. I’ll turn that brass key again. I’ll face the 28 faces and the 108 essays. I’ll probably make another mistake, maybe even the same one I made 8 years ago. I’ll admit to them that I don’t have all the answers. I’ll tell them that I am still learning how to see, still trying to find the right lens to make the world stop blurring. I’ll acknowledge that I am flawed, that I once let my ego get in the way of a student’s progress, and that I am still trying to fix that 58-degree tilt in my own perspective. We are all just trying to align ourselves with something true, even if the truth is uncomfortable. The car is parked. The engine is off. But the journey, I suspect, hasn’t even begun to reach its destination. Is it possible to teach someone to see a world they aren’t even allowed to touch?