elite|fitrea is proud to release a cover of Nine Inch Nail’s B-side Home.
elite|fitrea’s Home re-imagines the lyrics as coming from a former inmate as he ponders his place in society. Thoughts of recidivism occur to every inmate from time to time, especially when they face homelessness, discrimination, stress, or duress.
Prisons are so disconnected from the real world, and sentences are often so long, that the experience creates people with habits and personality traits that make it that much harder for them to reorient and integrate back into society. This is a growing problem for society because mass-incarceration creates such people at an industrial scale.
Here’s something to consider: prison is a traumatizing experience. People know this because they joke about “Bubba,” prison rape, race gangs, physical violence, extortion, murder and other things. They chuckle about it and forget that these people will be out of prison eventually, whether it be 5 years, 10 years, or twenty years down the road.
People dismiss the human toll because they see it as just when felt by the guilty. Especially because it is meted out by the unquestioned authority of the state. But the experience of incarceration, for some inmates, is not so wildly different from, say, that of the Ariel Castro kidnapping victims.
Prison leaves its inhabitants disconnected from their own humanity, as well as from their own emotions. This disconnection makes it harder to form friendships, relationships, to solve life problems, or even to resolve a traumatic life history. Disconnection from one’s humanity makes recidivism more likely.
