The Fireworks Are for Your Freedom, But the Socks Are for Survival

Dear Reader (Friend? Comrade? Citizen? (Because, yes, it’s that time of year again),

Ah, July Fourth. Independence Day. The one day a year where we commemorate our hard won freedom

from British tyranny not by reflecting on civic responsibility or grappling with the structural decay of late

stage capitalism, but by setting off small legal explosives in suburban cul-de-sacs while eating meats

shaped into spheres and tubes and drinking American beer, which is legally obligated to taste like regret

and corn syrup.

You will, no doubt, be flooded with patriotic content this week. Grinning bald eagles. Red-white-and-

blue deviled eggs. Your cousin Steve’s Facebook post comparing fireworks to “the rockets’ red glare”

and references to the troops in a vague yet emotionally manipulative way. Somewhere, someone will

absolutely give a speech that manages to include both Martin Luther King Jr. and Ronald Reagan without

combusting from internal contradiction.

So here we are, amidst this sparkling pageant of freedomTM, to gently tug at your shirt sleeve with

something marginally less celebratory: New Beginnings Backpacks. Our ongoing, very real program that

assembles survival kits for people recently released from prison, many of whom are dropped back into

society with no money, no housing, and no plan beyond “don’t go back.”

We collect donations from lovely, well-meaning individuals such as yourself. And let me tell you... We’ve

seen some “things”.

Exhibit A: The Donated Items Hall of Fame (or: “What Fresh Hell Is This?”)

1) gently used children’s coloring book, missing the first 14 pages, featuring a Peppa Pig character that

may or may not be licensed.

2) A decorative pillow embroidered with “Live Laugh Love,” which would be perfectly fine if you had,

say, a couch, or a home, or the psychological energy to tolerate whimsical typography.

3) Half used paintbrushes, the stiff kind that have already died inside, like a former middle manager at

an insurance company.

4) A bottle of glitter glue. I don’t have the emotional strength to unpack that one.

Now, let’s be clear. We are grateful, truly, for every act of generosity. Even the glitter glue. It speaks to

people trying. But the truth is, we’re assembling survival kits, not entering contestants into a third grade

art fair.

Which brings us to socks. If there were a Mount Rushmore of practical charity items, socks would be

George Washington. They are the unsung hero of the wardrobe, the duct tape of human dignity. When

you are homeless, especially recently released from prison, socks are a lifeline.

Why? Because feet are both crucial and criminally underappreciated. On the streets, walking is

transportation, survival, flight, connection, and safety. You can’t afford blisters. Or fungal infections. Or

trench foot, which is a real and completely medieval sounding thing that still happens in 2025, mostly to

people we pretend don’t exist.

Good socks, a fresh pair, thick, breathable, moisture wicking, black or dark colored because white socks

turn into horror shows faster than you can say “public restroom”—can make the difference between

someone making it to a shelter or a job interview, and someone giving up and falling back into the only

system that will still take them: prison.

So, this Independence Day when you’re celebrating freedom, maybe think of the people who are “free”

but are living under bridges, maybe think of liberty as something more than a bumper sticker or a Bud

Light commercial. Maybe buy a couple packs of good socks (yes, the good ones, not the scratchy ones

from the dollar bin that feel like they’re woven from industrial-grade disappointment). Maybe send

them to us. Because nothing says life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness like not having to wrap your

bleeding feet in plastic bags just to make it through the day. Let’s build kits that don’t feel like a bizarre

yard sale aftermath. Let’s give people what they need to start over, without glitter glue. Let’s make

independence something more than fireworks shows and a hot dog.

And while the New Beginnings Backpacks are restoring some small modicum of agency in lives where

agency is largely a myth, (because here’s the truth you won’t see in the flyer copy or cheerful volunteer

orientation script: emergency shelters routinely turn people away for being too "mentally unstable," and

soup kitchens run out of socks before food), a second, quieter project is taking form in a corner of the

P3’s digital space. The “In Absence Of” storyboard, a collaborative multimedia installation that aims to

do something simultaneously more abstract and more intimate than the direct act of material charity: it

seeks to listen. Specifically, to ex-prisoners, recently released individuals who had agreed, sometimes

with reluctance and sometimes with the fervor of long restrained voices, to sit for a series of interviews

about what they had needed, not wanted, not vaguely desired, but fundamentally lacked before they

found themselves inside a carceral system that is, functionally and perhaps even by design, allergic to

nuance. P3 has had a practice run, though to call it merely a "practice run" is to misrepresent its spiritual

and procedural heft in the context of the ongoing In Absence Of initiative, and the interviewers weren’t

social workers or cops or even journalists, but rather a mixed cohort of artists, graduate students, and

one ex-nun who now makes sculptures out of decommissioned handcuffs. The goal is to build a kind of

emotional map of absence. The parental absence, the communal absence, the nutritional, educational,

psychological, spiritual, legal absences that accumulated like sediment until what remained of the self

was something a court could name and cage.

What you are about to read is officially logged in our beta archive as P3's In Absence Of Initial Interview

Practice Run. This is not just bureaucratic documentation. This is a raw, human, improvisational

performance masquerading as institutional procedure. It is a ventricle of a larger cultural organism, a

tentative yet ferociously sincere attempt to surface narratives that institutional systems (carceral,

corporate, epistemological) have historically subducted beneath layers of euphemism, policy language,

and socially palatable omission. The subject interviewed herein, and if we can gently nudge you to

reconsider the word "subject" not in its cold, quasi-scientific usage but rather in the older, regal, even

feudal sense of one who has been subjected, was formerly incarcerated. A person who has, through the

geometry of state power and personal fate, moved through that most American of architectures: the

prison-industrial complex.

So, without further hedging, hedging being the default linguistic posture of any institution pretending to

transparency, here it is, P3’s Empathy Specialist opening up the In Absence Of conversation:

Hello and welcome to the first conversation in the In Absence Of series. God, what does that even mean?

Absence of what? Of freedom, of fairness, of fatherhood, of faith? Of choices? Of mirrors that don’t lie?

Or maybe it's the absence of pretending, the absence of forgetting. Maybe it’s about what’s left when

everything else has been taken away and you’re still here, breathing, bleeding, being. It’s funny, isn’t it,

or maybe not funny. That everyone here is wearing the same uniform, the same scowl, the same

generational trauma folded like origami inside the bones? But still. Still. I believe in this work, or at least

in the idea of it. I believe in stories. I believe there’s something sacred or at least salvageable in asking

someone to tell you who they were when no one was looking, when the world had turned its back and

they had nothing left but instinct and rage and maybe a pack of ramen they had to fight for.

And our guest, what is his name again? Prickly Pete. Not his real name, we don’t use real names here.

They said he did ten years in Pelican Bay, came out with more tattoos than teeth, started a mentorship

program for at-risk youth, which is such a strange phrase, isn’t it, like youth is a condition you can cure

with mentorship. But they also say he broke a man’s jaw over a chess game, so, balance, I guess.

Dualities. Uh–so, allow me to welcome our guest. H-hi P-Prickly Pete. So–uhm, my f-f-f-first question is

th-the—your time, in, uhm, in–in incarcerational context, th-the, uh, existential... con–consequentiality of

daily routine, did you—uh, perceive, it, like, like, th-the—th-the um... mechanizzzation of identity?

(Prickly Pete): Man, you ain ask me that like a real human bein, dawg. You try'na dress up a dead body in

sunday churchclothes, thass all. Say wut you mean. You wanna know if I went crazy behind bars or if I

found god in the paint peelin off the cinderblock, iss that it?

(Empathy Specialist): N-no—I mean yes—uh, b-b-but not, uh, not, not in the—uh—traditional theological

frame, more like a—like a Sartrean, uh, uh—epistemic crisis.

(Prickly Pete): Sartrean? You talkin bout that french mufucka wit the lazy eye an the greasy soul? Naw

bruh. I ain read none of that. I read shadow, you feel me? I read that mold in the corners when they turnt

the heat off in Feburary. You know what I read? My own breath, cloudin up cold air at 3:17 A.M. when

the dude in the next cell start screamin 'cause he see his momma bleedin again—but she been dead since

’96. Tha’s my literature. Tha’s my fuckin epistemology, whiteboy.

(Empathy Specialist): O-of course, of course, th-thank you, th-that’s, uh—extremely vivid. Uh, w-would

you say... your psychotic, uh, manifestations were... a symptomatic feedback of the—of the institutional

architecture itself?

(Prickly Pete): Say that agin. Slower.

(Empathy Specialist): Uh, do–do you, uh, th-think the prison made you worse, or—was the schizophrenic

already... structurally... uh... innate?

(Prickly Pete): Now we talkin. You tryna slice up the chicken an see if it’s the egg's fault, huh? Listen. My

brain? It’s like a broken TV that still get signal. Static all over but sometimes it show a truth so loud it

make your teeth itch. Prison ain't make me schizophrenic. It just turned the volume up. All the way to

goddamn eleven.

(Empathy Specialist): Th-that—that’s, uh, metaphorically p-powerful... An-and, uhm, c-could you describe

a specific, uh, episode, or, uhm—p-psychotic break?

(Prickly Pete): Break? Naw dawg. It ain’t like a stick, it don’t snap. It’s more like... oil in the water. I was

standin in the yard, watchin a pigeon wit a broke wing draggin hisself in the dirt. And all of a sudden, the

pigeon start talkin. Not like, squawkin. But talkin. In my daddy’s voice. Said, "You gone rot in here like I

did. You gone become metal. You gone rust." An I looked up? The sky was blinkin. Like a bad lightbulb.

An nobody else noticed. They just kept playin chess, spittin, cursin at ghosts.

(Empathy Specialist): A-astounding... A-and, uhm, d-do you think, uhm, th-these, uh—v-visions—

communicated truth, or w-were they mere, uh, neurological, uh, byproducts?

(Prickly Pete): You ever stare at a flame too long?

(Empathy Specialist): Uh–uhm... n-no, I—I don’t think so.

(Prickly Pete): It tell you somethin. Not with words. With heat. With how it move. That’s how the voices

is. They don’t tell lies or truth. They tell wounds. You gotta feel 'em, not study 'em.

(Empathy Specialist): F-fascinating... Th-thank you, thank you. I–I—I believe this will make a—uh, robust

addition to my thesis on penal psychodynamics.

(Prickly Pete, quietly): Long as you don’t write me like a fuckin ghost story.

-End of transcript-

Let us take you now gently, almost cinematically, like the sad pan of a Ken Burns camera across a

battlefield strewn not with bodies but with folding chairs and unclaimed juice boxes, into the

multipurpose/visit room of the minimum-security Bolduc Correctional Facility, which on this particular

Sunday had been temporarily repurposed into a magical storytelling space, a term used with great

earnestness on the laminated flyer that had been taped to the wall next to the vending machine, where

Funyuns go to die.

The event, officially titled “Bonding Through Books: Family Literacy Hour,” had been planned for six

weeks. The idea, in theory, was simple and lovely and devastatingly optimistic: parents in custody,

especially those whose kids don’t or can’t visit often, would get to have someone (in this case, a

professional Book Fairy in sparkly wings and orthopedic flats) read children’s books aloud to a roomful

of visiting kids while the parents observed, cried silently, and maybe recorded video messages afterward

to send home.

Only the kids never came. Not one.

At 1:03 p.m., the Book Fairy, whose civilian name was Pam, a retired librarian with a mystical devotion

to early literacy and a trunk full of glitter wands and laminated Where the Wild Things Are visual aids, sat

in a vinyl chair, waiting. She fluffed her tulle. She practiced her smile in the dark reflection of the

vending machine glass. She cleared her throat, once, twice, like an actor preparing for a stage cue that

was not coming.

By 1:17 p.m., it became clear that the optimism had curdled. No small footsteps were approaching. No

correctional officer opening the side door to wave in a flock of children holding visitation forms and

clutching plush animals like relics. It was just Pam and the three P3 staffers (one full-timer, one

AmeriCorps volunteer who was deeply hungover, and one curious inmate who’d wandered in thinking

there was a GED sign-up). They waited. They waited longer. They called the front desk. They asked again

about the visitor log. The AmeriCorps kid suggested maybe they read to the parents instead, except no

parents had come either, because without children, without the incentive of emotional contact, without

the flickering hope of being seen as something other than a number in the system, many of them had

simply opted not to show.

Eventually, around 1:46 p.m., Pam packed up her picture books, still unread, still crisp from her morning

ironing. She moved slowly, like someone folding up a dream made of soft cloth and sequins. The wings

came off last.

No one said much on the walk back out of the visit room. There was a moment, just outside the

administrative building, when one of the P3 organizers, Abbe, who once coordinated mergers and

acquisitions but now mostly manages morale, asked if they should maybe try again next month. The

question hung there, inert. Like a soap bubble in a windless room. The kind that doesn’t pop but slowly

sags into collapse. You should know this wasn’t anyone’s fault. The kids didn’t come because life is

complicated, especially when it involves court-mandated guardians, buses that don’t run on Tuesdays,

paperwork that gets lost, and grandparents who gave up trying to navigate the prison visitation system

years ago. Hope is a brutal architecture to build when every door is locked behind a different form.

We tell you this not for pity, and certainly not to elicit the kind of empathetic performance we’ve all

been trained to produce online. We tell you because this is what programming looks like sometimes. It

looks like a grown woman in fairy wings sitting in a room full of empty chairs, still trying to believe.

The work goes on. Not because it always works. But because sometimes, against the odds, it does.

Yours in the slow and absurd art of trying,

The P3 Team

P.S. You can donate @ peacefulprisonsproject.org/donate. Or just buy the socks directly and ship them

to us. For the love of all that is decent, no more coloring books.