December 29, 2020, was 118’s scheduled visitation day, and only a dozen of us went—regulars Cristián, Mauricio, and Francisco (Pancho) from 118, along with Marcelo and a few other rancho mozos, plus Jorge and Patricio (another disabled man on crutches, called Pato) from 118A. Twelve reos (inmates) in total. We arrived late, led by Cisternas, and then had to go back and wait in the módulo until the visitors arrived. We thus lost about forty minutes of visitation—especially me, who had to stay on the patio after making a special request to Cisternas to go to my cell and brush my teeth, only to be forgotten. The rest went on before me.

Forty minutes may seem a small thing to the reader who has never sat in a prison waiting for the one face that makes the week endurable. But when visitation is limited to two hours, every minute stolen is a wound. I had not seen my wife, Pamela, in nearly nine months. Nine months of concrete walls, steel doors, bad water, worse food, Castro’s petty tyrannies, chess matches against men whose company I did not choose, and the relentless, numbing sameness of institutional life. Forty minutes lost from a two-hour visit is not an administrative inconvenience. It is cruelty by bureaucratic indifference—the kind of cruelty that prison systems inflict daily without even noticing.

The Dual Meaning of Visitation

The Apostle Peter employs the word “visitation” in a passage that has haunted me since my incarceration: “Having your conversation honest among the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation” (1 Peter 2:12). The theological commentators have long debated what Peter means by “the day of visitation.” Some understand it as the day of God’s gracious coming—the moment when He opens the eyes of unbelievers through the visible conduct of His people. Others interpret it eschatologically, as the final day of reckoning. Both readings are sound, and I suspect Peter intended the resonance between them.

But there is a third meaning that only a prisoner truly grasps. In the Chilean penal system, visitation day—el día de visita—is the hinge upon which the entire week turns. Men live from Saturday to Saturday. They endure the monotony, the degradation, the bad food, the petty humiliations, the court postponements, and the slow erosion of hope because Saturday is coming. Someone will appear. A face will be seen. A hand will be touched. A voice will say something that is not an order, not a threat, not manipulation, but an expression of love from outside the walls. For the prisoner, the day of visitation is both a temporal mercy and a foreshadowing of the greater visitation to come—the day when God Himself will deliver His people from every prison, temporal and eternal.

That December morning, as I waited on the patio while the others went ahead, I was acutely aware of both meanings. God had visited me in my affliction through His Word, through prayer, through the Providence that sustained my life and sanity behind bars. And now Pamela—my faithful wife, my most consistent human link to the world beyond the walls, without rival until I got to Casablanca in October 2022, where Valentín could help shoulder the burden previously borne by Pamela and María—was about to visit me in the plain, physical, embodied sense that every prisoner craves.

A Sight for Sore Eyes

All but one of the visitors were women—mostly wives or girlfriends. A smiling (behind her mask) and gleeful Pamela was waiting for me, seated on a white stool at one of the ten new, round, white, plastic tables the gendarmes had bought. Hers was located right next to the entrance. Other than her coronavirus mask, she was nicely dressed with new sparkling silver shoes—bought on sale in Reñaca—and with just the right amount of makeup. She was a sight for sore eyes, and I had missed her dearly. We had not seen each other, and of course had no marital intimacy, for what seemed like an eternity.

Each table and pair of stools was set in a white-tape chalk box, with two taped Xs indicating where the stools were to be placed. There was a gel alcohol dispenser on the wall. The visitors were to sit across from each other, separated by the width of the plastic table—as though disease could be contained by a few feet of air between two people who have been forcibly separated for nine months. The noise level was so loud that even Pamela had difficulty hearing and understanding. Two rotating guards, mostly officers, took turns watching from the doorway, and the cameras always focused on the room, with pacos keeping an eye on things during visitation.

The scene was at once deeply moving and profoundly absurd. Here were a dozen couples—most of them husband and wife, or as near to it as the machucado world allows—seated at plastic tables in a loud room under surveillance cameras, separated by tape marks on the floor, wearing masks over the faces they had not seen in months, attempting to conduct in two hours what free people accomplish in the ordinary rhythm of daily life: the maintenance of human connection. The state, having taken everything else—liberty, dignity, privacy, autonomy—was now attempting to regulate the distance between a man’s hand and his wife’s cheek. It was a scene that would have been farcical if it had not been so painful.

Pamela’s Ordeal

Pamela had arrived by Uber before 10:00 a.m.—there was confusion about the start time, with the prison website saying one thing and the reos in 118 being told another, the latter being correct. Her ingress went without incident, other than that the line to get inside was atrociously long and slow-moving, mainly composed of flaite women—a Chilean term for women from the urban underclass—connected to módulo 115’s machucados, who had a visitation scheduled the same day. Módulo 115 was assigned to accused men who were repeat offenders of the same crime and was one of the dirtiest and most violent módulos in the prison. Still, Pamela managed to get along fine with the women, chatting and exchanging useful information.

She went through the humiliating motions before the female paco in charge of inspecting visitors—lifting her top and non-padded bra (since padding could be used to smuggle items in), then dropping her drawers and squatting so the female paco could see if a cell phone would fall out of an orifice. None did. She brought nothing inside besides her identification card and some facial tissue. She was not allowed to bring me anything, except for dropping off an envelope containing 40,000 pesos at the service window before entering, and she could take nothing from me back out.

I recount these details not for their shock value but because the church that wishes to understand prison ministry must understand what faithful visitation actually costs the visitor. Pamela’s weekly ordeal—for she came every week she was permitted—included a four-hour round-trip on local buses at just over 1,000 pesos per ride (versus 23,000 pesos or more for Uber), the physical search, the long line among women whose world she did not share, the confusion about times and rules, the prohibition of ordinary items like Caesar salad dressing and raspberry jam, and the emotional strain of seeing her husband in a place where he did not belong and being unable to do anything about it except show up again the following week.

This is the cost of faithful spousal presence, a cost most churches never acknowledge, let alone support. When Christ says, “I was in prison, and ye came unto me” (Matthew 25:36), the verb “came” encompasses everything Pamela did on those Saturdays: the early rising, the bus ride, the line, the search, the plastic table, the mask, the noise, the two hours that were never long enough, and the bus ride home to an empty house. The church that sends a donation but never helps a prisoner’s wife get to the prison has fulfilled only half the command. The other half requires bodies in motion—real people making real journeys to real walls.

Breaking the Rules of Distance

I did not know what to expect, other than that I could bring nothing to the visit. I thus had to hide my cash under the insoles of my dress shoes—I could not leave it all in my cell, where it might get stolen. I brought my light jacket, and that was it; I laid it on the table after I arrived. I was wearing the same violet plaid collared shirt I had worn during my trial, along with olive pants.

Pamela and I were eager to touch each other, as were all other couples in the room. Soon, the no-kissing, no-hugging, and no-touching rule was widely broken, as some couples moved stools off the Xs and sat closer to one another. Doing so was natural, despite the health ministry’s cruel orders to the contrary. The gendarmes seemed to understand the need for physical contact and affection and were relatively lax in enforcing the rules. I had not felt the soft female touch from my wife or any other woman for so long—not even a handshake—that feeling Pamela’s smooth skin was almost startling.