I'm Going to Prison

Discovering Girard in a Maximum-Security World

It was a difficult summer. My wife and I had to put a pet down, juggle demanding work and parenting, and face a difficult health diagnosis in the extended family. My dad’s dementia has continued its course. In the middle of it all, while carrying what often felt like a crushing weight, I was trying to finish a book.

In early August, I had an unexpected lunch with a friend at Hope College that I hadn’t seen in three years. He told me about the school’s degree program for men serving long sentences at the Muskegon Correctional Facility, about an hour’s drive north. I learned that one of the teachers had introduced my book Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, in a first-year seminar, in an effort to help the men think seriously about what it is they wanted—and to help them understand the way that conflict happens in the prison environment.

I was told that one student in that class became so captivated by mimetic theory that he tracked down and read everything he could find from Girard, exercising incredible resourcefulness to do so from behind bars, where there are extremely strict security protocols and restrictions.

I was floored. I had no idea my work had made its way behind prison walls—let alone that it had touched someone’s life so deeply, and that he’d taken such bold action to pursue the ideas.

“Would you be willing to go visit?” my friend asked. “It would probably make Carlos’s entire day—maybe his whole year.”

There was one ideal date to visit, he said: the convocation marking the start of the new academic year, August 26. That’s when the arduous procedure to be screened as a visitor is a bit easier for the college to fast-track and get me inside.

Normally I’d be back in D.C. by then, but circumstances around my dad’s health had kept me in Michigan. The other challenge is that my calendar is usually blocked out nine months or more, with very few days that even have five-hour blocks open at all. But—almost miraculously—that day, at the exact time frame of the event, was open.

I said yes.

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Fourteen years ago, I spent a year doing weekly prison visits to the young men at the Ventura Youth Correctional Facility in California. It was a maximum-security environment for violent youthful offenders—a brutal, formative experience that stretched me in ways few other things have. I’ve told stories from that year to friends countless times. California has since closed the facility, but it remains one of the most indelible experiences of my life. So when the invitation came to go to the prison in Muskegon, it felt like that old door had opened again.

The incarcerated man at the Muskegon prison, Carlos Garcia, had gone so far with his study of mimetic theory that he published an essay on positive mimesis and prison reform in Contagion, the international journal run by Girard scholars. (And I am proud to say that we are running an adapted excerpt of Mr. Garcia’s essay in the Cluny Journal today.)

The program leaders thought it best not to tell Carlos I was coming—it would be a surprise.

The day before the visit and on the morning of, I was buried in small crises and urgent requests. They were trivial in hindsight, but at the time they felt like obstacles conspiring to keep me away. In a way, they felt almost Satanic—accusing me of neglecting other responsibilities to make the visit. I recognized the pattern. But I had made a commitment. If I say yes, I show up—even if my tank is empty. Sometimes that’s the best I can do. And that’s what this day felt like.

So I drove to Muskegon.

The entry protocols were sobering. A guard drew an invisible mark on the back of my hand—it was visible only under black light—to prove that the same person who entered would be the one who left. I passed through vault-like doors and crossed the yard under armed escort, instructed not to speak with anyone until I reached the gymnasium where the ceremony was held.

When I finally met Carlos, he did a double take, then another. The founder of the program introduced the two of us, and finally it all clicked for him. We shook hands repeatedly (since we were instructed not to hug each other, we just shook hands like 20 times, over and over, while trying to squeeze our stories and background into a five-minute, rapid-fire conversation before the convocation ceremony started). Still, in that moment we exchanged as much excitement and affection as two men could under the watch of prison security.

Over lunch, I sat with Carlos and several other men, including a former Vice Lords gang member who had discovered mimetic theory through Carlos, and was trying to use it to help young men attracted to gangs recognize the real dynamics at work—and break their power.

They spoke about how the ideas reframed their lives, even within prison walls.

One story stuck with me: new corrections officers, they said, often began unconsciously mimicking the prisoners they supervised. Within months, some guards’ wives claimed not to recognize their husbands anymore.

Even at the security officer level, the dynamics of mimesis were plain—guards competing for status not only among themselves but also with the very men they were charged to oversee.

There’s more I could say about that conversation, but not everything needs to be or must be shared, and I’ll cherish the things that I now hold in the silence of my heart. I pledged to those men that I would support them and do what I can to help, and I mean it.

When I returned home, I took a long walk through my neighborhood, energized. I couldn’t sleep that night—I woke up and wrote in my notebook for hours. I realized I felt more at home with those inmates than I ever have in any D.C. think tank.

And I’ll be going back to prison.