Resurrection

December 8th, 2023

She’s back.

My wife, Karin, got a call last night at about 8:30. I was lying in bed, holding our little grandson, Asher, and trying to get him to go to sleep. I could hear Karin speaking excitedly on the phone to someone. She sounded agitated. I just waited for her to burst into the bedroom.

She did. She told me,

“I have to pick her up! They released her from jail! Is Asher awake? I’ll take him along with me.”

Asher was awake. We got him dressed and I helped Karin to get him into the child seat in the RAV4. Then she took off like a bat out of hell. It was a cold, windy night, about 38 degrees, and the young woman was standing in the dark just outside of the county jail in downtown Milwaukee. She had not been dressed for cold weather when the cops busted her a week ago, and I was sure that she was shivering as she waited for Karin to rescue her.

Karin’s last comment to me before she burned rubber out of the driveway was,

“This seems really weird.”

Indeed. But then everything involving this young woman seems that way.

It took an hour for Karin to make the round trip from home to the jail and then back again. I was wide awake, and I had time to think. I wondered why the people who run jails tend to release people in the middle of the night. I had picked up this very same young lady from the Kenosha County jail at 5:00 AM one time. Back in 2017, when I got arrested for civil disobedience at a protest in Nevada, the cops cut me loose from jail at 9:00 PM. There seems to be a desire to cast the forgiven offender into the outer darkness.

Karin came back home and tucked the car into the garage for the night. The young woman was beaming with joy, mostly because she was reunited with Asher. Apparently, the powers-that-be had dropped the drunk driving charge against her. The assault on a police officer charge is still pending, but I suspect that will be dropped eventually too. If the prosecutor really wanted to burn her for assault, she would not be out on the street. She would be rotting in her cell.

The young woman related to us the story of six days in jail. Most of the time, she was in “administrative segregation”, which is a nice way of saying “solitary”. Because she was accused of a violent crime (assault), the staff at the county jail kept her by herself. They also kept her shackled whenever she left her cell. She told us that showering in shackles is less than pleasant. I can only imagine. The woman got a minimal amount of sleep, partly because a woman in another cell was continually moaning 24/7. That will put a person on edge.

On her last day in jail, she was placed in with the general population. On the evening of this last day, she was told over the loudspeaker to get dressed. It was at 8:00 PM. There was no explanation as to why she needed to be dressed, but that it pretty typical. Guards don’t explain their orders to inmates. They don’t have to.

Shortly after dressing, a guard came to her cell and told her brusquely to pack up her belongings. She did. Then she and a few other prisoners (note: inmates at this jail are referred to as “occupants”, as if they were renting a room) were told to deposit their blankets in a big yellow bin and put their trash into another one. The woman thought that she was being transferred to a prison. She asked a guard where they were going.

The guard replied, “You’re getting released.”

That confused the young woman. She said, “I’m not getting released.”

The guard told her, “Really? Do you want to go back to your cell?”

The woman quickly replied, “No, I’m good.”

I spent a mercifully short period of time in jail. I learned that, if somebody in authority tells you that you are being released, you do not question that statement. You do everything in your power to cooperate and expedite the process. Once you go out that last door, you keep going and never look back.

The woman is now free, at least temporarily. We can get back to a sort of normal lifestyle.

I asked her what she learned from this experience.

She replied, “Don’t drink and drive, and then drink again.”

I told her that the only way I could view her sudden release was as being divine intervention. Nothing else makes sense to me.

Will she be alright now? I have no idea. The underlying causes of her arrest have not been addressed. She needs help that was not provided in the jail, and that probably would not be provided in a prison environment. Prisons and jails are not about rehabilitation. They are simply storage facilities for human beings who have run afoul of society’s rules. If she gets healthy, it will have to be on the outside.

In the Bible is the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. It is curious that once Lazarus is raised, he is hardly ever mentioned again. We don’t know if he had the same problems after his raising that he had before his death. Nikos Kazantzakis, in his novel “The Last Temptation of Christ”, fills in the blanks about the post-resurrection life of Lazarus. It’s not a pleasant description. The point is that being released from jail or prison is a type of resurrection. The person getting out has a new lease on life. However, this new life does not mean that everything is okay. It just means there is a chance to start over.