“I just don’t like how they denied me.”

Easy Waters, “One Day in the Life of a Jailhouse Lawyer,” Conundrums: Stories of Law & Justice

The man is going home. He still wants to talk about the letter.

In “One Day in the Life of a Jailhouse Lawyer,” the man who lives across from E knocks on his cell door. The parole board has ordered his release. In the meantime, a work release reviewer has turned him down. He comes to E holding the notice, waving it, as E sees it, like a white flag.

“I just don’t like how they denied me.”

How. The man could have said he didn’t like being denied. He tells E there is something about the way it was done that he cannot leave alone.

The notice gives reasons. It refers to his disciplinary record and the offenses for which he was convicted. He tells E that the reviewer considered his release incompatible with the welfare of society. Think about reading that judgment while preparing to return to the very society named in the letter.

E has a practical answer: the man has made parole. He is going home. Whatever the work release reviewer says, that fact matters more to E. And E, who spends his days helping other people interpret decisions, would like a little of his evening to himself.

I understand the impatience. There is also something worth hearing in the man’s insistence. Two parts of the same system have looked at his record for different purposes and reached decisions that sound, to him, as though they cannot both be true. He is left to work out the distinction at a cell door.

A list of reasons can still leave a person wondering how the decision was reached. A notice can name what counted against him without explaining how those facts bear on the opportunity he applied for. When two decisions seem at odds, an explanation should help him see where their purposes or standards differ.

Those of us who write letters denying admission, services, or opportunities can learn from this scene. We know the procedure because we work inside it. The person opening the envelope may be encountering it for the first time. Plain language about the deciding facts, the limits of the decision, and any available way to respond can make a difference even when the answer remains no.

None of that obliges E to spend every evening reading someone else’s mail. His irritation tells us something, too. People in prison rely on one another to make sense of official language. The work of explaining a decision belongs first to the people who made it.

The man thanks E and closes the door. He has learned what E thinks he should do: go home. The letter has told him what the reviewer thinks of his application. He is still the one who must carry both answers out of the room.

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About the Conundrums Quotations Project

CQ-047 reads a line from “One Day in the Life of a Jailhouse Lawyer,” in Easy Waters’s Conundrums: Stories of Law & Justice.

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