The first day of February 2021 was beautiful in central Chile, except in prison—where all days, months, and seasons run together behind tall walls. Imagine floating in the South Pacific, midway between New Zealand and Chile, on a small naval helicopter carrier. As the months pass, one becomes almost oblivious to the changes in weather and grows accustomed to the confined space. There is nowhere to go and nothing to do other than go out on the deck for a while. Now and then, a transport brings a friend or family member to visit a fortunate intern or conscript, and food and supplies arrive regularly to keep the floating island running. That is pretty much what prison is like. The confined space might as well be in the middle of the ocean. It makes little difference to the reos (inmates)—other than the need for the detention center to be close to loved ones so they can physically get there without tremendous (noting that it is still a significant) expense. One must learn to bide one’s time, and visitors must learn to adjust their relationship parameters.

That metaphor—the floating island, the naval carrier adrift on an indifferent sea—captured something essential about life in the Valparaíso penitentiary. The men aboard this vessel had no control over its course. They could not leave. They could not steer. They could only occupy their small portion of the deck and decide, each day, whether to do something purposeful with the hours or let the hours dissolve into the stupor that claimed so many of their fellow passengers. The Apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthians about disorder at the Lord’s table, put the matter with characteristic bluntness: “For in eating every one taketh before other his own supper: and one is hungry, and another is drunken” (1 Corinthians 11:21). The inequality Paul described in that first-century congregation was, in its own way, a portrait of prison life—some men starving for truth, knowledge, and purpose, while others drowned themselves in drugs, noise, and the slow narcosis of wasted time.

Reading as Resistance

If the mattress purchase in chapter 36 illustrated how prison life forces a man to plug one leak, the book supply chain illustrated how the black market oozes around you, whether you like it or not. You cannot will the corruption to stay in one channel. Plug it in one place—sleeping comfort, mattress procurement—and it springs out elsewhere: books smuggled under your jacket, sauces hidden in pizza-box linings, money transferred to inmates in distant módulos. Civilization in prison is not a state but a constant act of negotiation with a thousand small corruptions, none of which you chose but all of which surround you.

I read a lot of books in prison, over two hundred by the time I was released, “redeeming the time” (Ephesians 5:16; Colossians 4:5) as best I could. In fact, in my second year in jail, I was on my twenty-fifth book since being taken captive by Satan’s henchmen. And I realized that my reading supply line was serious business. During the last visitation, I had broken the rules, holding one book under each armpit—inside my jacket—as I walked, and had given them to Pamela at the visitation table without a hitch. I was not being rebellious. I just had to find a way to return the books she brought in through encomienda—ridiculous gendarme rules notwithstanding, including Colonel Molinet’s belief that a stack of books in a cell was a fire hazard—to avoid the accumulated weight in case I had to change cells.

The logistics of reading in prison warrant some description, as they illuminate the extent to which the system works against intellectual life. Books entered the prison through encomienda—the weekly delivery of food, clothing, and supplies that families left at the gate. They were heavy, and the space in the bags was limited. Every book that came in displaced something else: a jar of peanut butter, a bag of vitamins, a pair of socks. And once read, the books had to go back out—hence the smuggling operation under the jacket during the Valparaíso Penitentiary visitation. The supply chain depended entirely on Pamela’s faithfulness, María’s or Jana’s willingness to fill in when Pamela was occupied, and the quiet tolerance of guards who had better things to worry about than a Gringo walking stiffly with two paperbacks clamped against his ribs.

Most reos in 118 who did not read books—which was everyone other than Miami, Guillermo, Ismael, and occasionally Ricardo, and pedophiles Carlos and fireman Sergio—were fascinated and sometimes puzzled by those who did. Rubén asked me, “How can you read so much?” I replied that I was used to it, especially after reading stacks of articles and books during graduate school. Reading was the principal way that I received information, as opposed to the reos—and perhaps most people in society generally—who got theirs by listening to others, watching television or movies, and getting notifications at work.

This fact was evident in their reactions when they heard me chuckle at my book while I read. I remembered being so intrigued when I was around seven years old, watching my mother enjoy a book. Eventually, I developed an interest in books and began reading—although I did not become an avid reader until I entered college. It dawned on me that the reos reacted the way they did because they had never read a book—or at least not many. Yet, like little boys, they wanted to know what the story was about and what made me laugh so much. I told them, and they could not wait to hear more. If the book were not in English, some of them might have even gotten curious enough to pick it up and read it.

I then realized that not only was I floating in the “South Pacific,” I was also largely cohabitating with men who were little more sophisticated intellectually than the occasional dolphins, whales, sea lions, or porpoises that might pass by our carrier. Those men were not only in prison physically; their minds had likewise been fettered. Strolling the “heliport” with me, Miami noted that these reos only knew how to regurgitate or parrot the information they received. Few, if any, ever advanced to the next level of analysis and critical thinking, much less to the ensuing level of being creative and generating a novel thought or something new.

I marveled at how closed, mysterious, and maybe even frightening the world must be for benighted men with such limitations, and I was thankful that I had escaped such a plight—recalling from Colossians 1:13 that God “hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son.” That deliverance is not merely spiritual. It includes—for those who have eyes to see—a deliverance of the mind. The Gospel does not make every believer a scholar, but it does liberate the intellect from the tyranny of ignorance, superstition, and the endless recycling of received opinion. In prison, where the darkness of intellectual poverty compounded the darkness of physical confinement, the difference between a reading man and a non-reading man was as stark as the difference between a man with a lamp and a man groping in a cave.

The Parrot, the Dolphin, and the Porpoise

Miami also directed me to watch chapters 5 and 6 of season 4 of Vis a Vis, a Spanish television series. He said that Spain had the same unjust judicial and penal system as Chile, rife with perverse incentives, revolving doors, waste, and corruption—despite Spain’s superior infrastructure. It was easy to keep captive the nearly mindless class of reos and machucados living by instinct, impulse, and who almost blindly followed orders while confined on the somewhat fascist “high seas.” And indeed, something like ninety-nine percent of them fell into this hapless, beleaguered class.

This situation came to light when Sergio came in with a draft escrito (official request) for all “core” 118 reos to sign, initiating collective action to help them preserve their early release or parole benefits from being revoked. Miami, Rubén, Ismael, and I were willing to go along, but only Miami and I saw the unprincipled futility of calling in a prison psychologist and convincing her that we needed to be paroled by confessing to crimes we never committed. The rest of the reos were just like the metal ball bouncing rapidly between the bumpers in an old pinball game before eventually dropping into the hole. They possessed about the same level of collective power over the evil, arbitrary, and capricious penal system as a group of cows did over a dairy farmer.

Later on, I was reading my book when I heard a 100-peso coin (less value than a U.S. dime) from the poker table hit the floor and roll toward the doorway. The mystified players—Sergio from 118B in particular—searched in vain to find it until one of them finally moved the little table next to the door, three meters from the poker table, and found it. So much energy and manpower spent on recuperating such a trifling sum! Only in a prison economy with hapless participants would such an otherwise wasteful quest to recover seven American cents make sense.

The contrast was the point. While the poker players scrambled on their knees for a coin worth less than a stick of gum on the outside, I sat reading John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany—a novel dense with theological irony—and the gulf between those two activities measured the distance between hunger and drunkenness in Paul’s formulation. Not drunkenness on alcohol, necessarily, though that existed too, but drunkenness on emptiness—the narcotic stupor of a life without purpose, without ideas, without the discipline of sustained attention. “One is hungry, and another is drunken.” Some of us hungered for truth, for knowledge, for the exercise of the mind God gave us. Others were drunk on the numbing routines of prison life—cards, television, gossip, drugs—and scarcely knew they were starving.

Good Food Among the Hungry

Nonetheless, basic sensibilities often prevailed. One thing that all the reos and machucados could understand and appreciate was good food. At breakfast, I shared some nacho-cheese-flavored chips and warm quesadilla fragments with the gang, topped with the guacamole I had made the night before. At lunchtime, I filled celery sticks with peanut butter before their watching eyes, while their mouths watered as Miami heated the four chicken-beef-cheese-guacamole burritos I had prepared the night before. Once again, the cuisine was a hit. They marveled, too, as I ate a Caesar salad with peeled, sliced apples, celery, lettuce, and cheese. Such mixtures were rare in Chile, but given my track record, they believed me when I told them it was delicious.

Parrots, like dolphins and porpoises, are content to follow along or remain captive as long as they are well-fed. Why were Chilean prisoners any different? Sometimes I felt little different than other prisoners in this respect. Yet that observation—that good food could bridge the gap between the reading man and the non-reading man, between the thinker and the merely existing—was itself a theological insight. The incarnation teaches us that the spiritual and the material are not enemies. Christ fed five thousand before He preached to them. He ate with tax collectors and sinners. He instituted the Lord’s Supper around a table. A shared burrito on a prison patio was not the Lord’s Supper, but it partook of the same logic: the material provision creating the conditions for fellowship, and fellowship creating the conditions for truth.