Finding a Reason to Embrace Life in the Worst Place to Be During the Holidays |
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On Nov. 17, Abdallah Hadian, a civilian imam, strode into a state correctional facility in New York with a firearm. Moments later, he went into the administration building and placed the gun to his head.
Word of the 55-year-old imam’s suicide traveled nearly as quickly as the bullet that took his life.
In prison, no one bats an eye at hearing that an inmate killed themselves. This is especially true among fellow prisoners. Hearing that a fellow prisoner was stabbed to death, or overdosed, elicits a shrug, maybe a nervous laugh. Although we attribute such incidents to the violent and miserable nature of the place we inhabit, most people on the outside chalk these deaths up to the so-called mental health crisis inside correctional facilities, a phenomenon that gets significant attention. It adds to the unfair narrative of prisoners being bloodthirsty lunatics, a framing that benefits tough-on-crime politics.
As a prisoner, though, when you hear that a civilian staff member who left their family every day to go to the awful confines of prison—the same prison where Robert........