Community Re-Entry by Darrell Van Mastrigt

Artist Statement: When I first heard the theme of Let's Get free's 8th Art show I was intrigued. A question was posed, "How do we refuse while inside the belly of the beast?" My first immediate thought was that we are all inside the belly of the beast and that we all need to Defy the Designs of the beast. Almost every single one of us prisoners would not be in prison if we Defied the Designs of our negative popular culture. Popular Culture is also a prison of Design. Can any one of us reasonaby believe there is not a design behind the amount of alcohol and drugs flowing in our communities. We' laughably declare wars on drugs and drunk driving. We make ourselves feel better by using slogans like "drink responsibly." I'm pretty sure something very similar was said by the first trader who gave a Native American that first bottle of "Firewater" before stealing everything they had, raping their land, and attempting to commit genocide against them. Seems to be still happening against many Americans, doesn't it? Although many illegal drugs are easy to get by design, many of us also get suckered into the design in completely legal ways. Our doctors claim there's a cure for everything, a magical pill that solves every problem. A drug seems available for every conceivable problem. Is it really a mystery why millions of people take drugs (legal and illegal) and/or use alcohol to seek enjoyment and alleviate (for a few hours) their mental, emotional, physical and social woes? In today's popular culture alcohol is everywhere, illegal drugs are as easily available as-he air we breath, and it would be crazy to argue that our society hasn't designed it that way. A vast majority of people in prison were under this design and influence of alcohol and/or drugs when found in the situation they were trapped in or perpetrating the crime(s) they committed. As I kept thinking about this Design idea in our popular culture, more and more examples jumped out at me. The proliferation of guns and other weapons in our communities. The normalization of violence in our culture and social media. Masculine and machismo thinking and influence. The over-policing and high arrestlconviction rates in impoverished and primarily minority-based communities. The corresponding number of prisoners serving long sentences in prison who are from impoverished, primarily urban, and predominantly minority-based communities. Even Tookie Williams, and thousands of others, who founded and promoted a lot of these designs, realized later that they needed to dissuade others from falling into these self-destructive designs. Something as simple as the popular culture design of "Keeping up with the Joneses" is one needing defiance. I could go on and on and on. Once you start seeing these designs, it becomes quickly apparent the negative nature of most of them is based on selfish hedonism. WNe are encouraged to take what we can from any situation without feeling responsible for the repercussions. As we become more self-absorbed in the design, we start ignoring family, loved ones, community and any greater good. In fact, any view of God or a higher power and greater works becomes irrelevant to any part of our lives. These popular culture designs are so destructive that children, family, and community, all take a backseat to self-indulgence. It is pạrt of the design. All the ways the design manifests (violence, fear, addiction, low self-worth, destructive ideologies) creates negative results. No matter how much time and energy a person expends hoping for a positive result, if their decisions and choices are inherently selfish then the outcome will be destructive. A couple other signs of a negative design in play are when there's an offer for immediate gratification or the design itself is primarily an introverted ideology. Yet, it is even more easy to identify negative designs around us by asking ourselves one question: ARE MY CHOICES AND ACTIONS DENYING ME THE ABILITY TO SEE THE NEEDS OF OTHERS AND HOW WE ARE ALL RELATED TO EACH OTHER? Prison is definitely designed to be the belly of the beast. We failed to Defy the Designs that put us here. But prison itself is not the only prison we are trapped in. We can all work at identifying the negative, destructive designs around us, Defy those Designs, and commit to creating new designs based on positive values to become the best we can to share and support with our families, our communities and the world around us.