Cue: The Blog

# Of Backpacks and the Radical Praxis of Not Giving Up on People: Dispatches from the Borderlands of Carcerality

Let us begin, if we can, with the Backpack. Not a backpack in the neutered consumer sense (LL

BeanTM or otherwise), not the nylon sheath slung over shoulders of middle schoolers and weary

undergrads alike, and certainly not the sleek, faux-minimalist commuter packs featured in the

digital lifestyle porn of YouTubers who refer to things as “game-changing.” No, what we’re

talking about here is a different beast entirely. This is the “New Beginning Backpack”, italicized

and capitalized not just because it is the name of a project but because it functions as all true

symbols do as a metonym for an entire ecosystem of interlocking violences, redemptions,

sociocultural scripts, and administrative Kafkaesqueries that we have all, wittingly or not, helped

construct. To the untrained eye, the Backpack might appear to be a practical bundle: socks (the

gold-toe kind that cling to dignity like a final shred of self-worth), a hygiene kit, shelf stable

nutrition that won’t make you gag, emergency blankets of the space age Mylar persuasion, a bus

pass, tampons, a prepaid phone, a folded note with shelter addresses and hotline numbers, and,

this detail might make you blink: a small, handwritten letter from someone who’s been “inside.”

A note not written by a volunteer coordinator or a particularly well-meaning youth pastor, but by

someone who knows, really knows. But if we allow ourselves to look, really sit with the

Backpack—not just glance past it on the way to our next philanthropic obligation or academic

panel on “reentry as liminality”, we begin to see it for what it is: a ritual object. A votive

offering. A material instantiation of care forged in a world increasingly hostile to tenderness. The

Backpack is the anti-panopticon; it does not surveil, it sustains. It is both a metaphor and a

metonym. It is what Walter Benjamin might’ve called a “constellation”, a site where history

coagulates, where the present intersects the ruins of every punishment theory that ever promised

justice and delivered only containment.

Now, let's back up. Or perhaps zoom out. Or both. Because the Backpack exists only because of

the ongoing ontological instability, nay, the outright semantic fraudulence of the term “freedom”

in the American carceral context. Yes, the parole board may stamp your paperwork. Yes, the

Department of Corrections may unceremoniously hand you over to the Greyhound gods with a

$40 debit card you’re expected to decipher like it’s a cursed relic. But as anyone who’s done

time will tell you (and as any sociologist worth their Marx should have tattooed across their

methodology section), release is not the end of punishment. It is merely its mutation. A new

genre of suffering. A system upgrade in the ever-evolving OS of disenfranchisement.

What is reentry, really, but a kind of bureaucratically managed abandonment? A managed

forgetting, performed under the guise of reintegration? If you’re lucky, you get out. But if you’re

lucky—or unlucky, depending on your appetite for irony, you get out and immediately meet the

concrete sidewalk instead of shelter, surveillance instead of support, a laminated list of shelters

you can’t reach because your prepaid phone doesn’t have minutes yet. And into this yawning

absence, this echo chamber of institutionalized neglect, someone places a Backpack.

Now, let's back up. Or perhaps zoom out. Or both. Because the Backpack exists only because of

the ongoing ontological instability, nay, the outright semantic fraudulence of the term “freedom”

in the American carceral context. Yes, the parole board may stamp your paperwork. Yes, the

Department of Corrections may unceremoniously hand you over to the Greyhound gods with a

$40 debit card you’re expected to decipher like it’s a cursed relic. But as anyone who’s done

time will tell you (and as any sociologist worth their Marx should have tattooed across their

methodology section), release is not the end of punishment. It is merely its mutation. A new

genre of suffering. A system upgrade in the ever-evolving OS of disenfranchisement.

What is reentry, really, but a kind of bureaucratically managed abandonment? A managed

forgetting, performed under the guise of reintegration? If you’re lucky, you get out. But if you’re

lucky—or unlucky, depending on your appetite for irony, you get out and immediately meet the

concrete sidewalk instead of shelter, surveillance instead of support, a laminated list of shelters

you can’t reach because your prepaid phone doesn’t have minutes yet. And into this yawning

absence, this echo chamber of institutionalized neglect, someone places a Backpack.

But friends, colleagues, peers interested in the study of state-sanctioned violence and the

intergenerational effects of institutional fracture, this is not where the story ends. Not even close.

Because where there is reentry, there is family. And where there is family, there is narrative.

Enter, stage left: Bonding Through Books. On the surface, the program is simple: Incarcerated

parents are given children’s books, time, and a modicum of spatial dignity to read to their

children during visits. But simplicity, as any good ethnographer knows, is always the Trojan

horse through which the complex invades the real. These moments of reading, soft moments,

humane moments, moments in which survival gives way to story, become acts of insurgency. Of

reclamation. They are textual umbilical cords thrown across the chasm of separation. The books,

real books, good books, not discarded school district rejects, go home with the children. The

voice, Mom’s voice, Dad’s voice...remains. We are, in other words, trying to stitch the family

narrative back together in a system that has weaponized silence. Because if prisons are, as

Foucault said (and we all love to quote Foucault, don’t we?), institutions that produce docile

bodies, then reading aloud, tenderly and lovingly, is the anti-discipline. It is resistance. And let’s

be honest, no amount of reentry programming, job training, or halfway house curfews can

compensate for a child hearing their father tell them a story in something other than the timbre of

survival.

Which brings us inevitably to Matt and Josh.

You won’t meet them at a gala. They won’t be at the wine and cheese fundraiser. They are not

here for your nonprofit board’s DEI photo-op. Matt and Josh are currently incarcerated. But they

are not waiting. They are working, now, from the inside, to disrupt the carceral-industrial status

quo. Together, they are creating a storyboard. It is called “In Absence Of?” This title serves as a

placeholder for a question that refuses to be resolved. Each episode will revolve around a

deceptively simple inquiry: What was absent? Not what happened. Not what law was broken.

But what didn’t happen? What was missing, denied, foreclosed? Was it love? Bread? Literacy?

Protection? A mother who wasn’t using? A school that wasn’t underfunded? A moment of

mercy? In asking these questions, not to excuse, not to justify, but to map the lacunae, we edge

toward something sociologically radical, a carceral discourse centered not on pathology but on

deprivation.

So yes. All of this is messy. It is chaotic. It defies best practices and benchmarks. It resists the

neat logics of grants and annual reports and all those philanthropic rubrics designed to turn

suffering into charts. But it matters.

In every Backpack, every book, every line of P3’s storyboard, there is an insurgent whisper: You

are not disposable. You are not forgotten. You are not too far gone.

And if you are still reading this, yes, you, curious reader, skeptical reader, maybe-even-jaded-by-

your-own-research reader—then maybe, just maybe, you are trying too.

In improbable and trembling solidarity,

The Team at P3

(Still standing. Still building.)