2008 FIRST HONORABLE MENTION

BEHIND THE BARS
Diana Wildridge
16 years old, Alaska

Behind the bars of an American prison sat a man. He was small in stature, but had the practiced muscles of someone more disciplined than a man in jail would have been thought to me. Alone and dressed in the monotonous uniform of the government, his eyes were equally as dark as the room's very nature, and his skin, once a warm brown, grew clammy in the dim light.

Looking down at the cot covered in worn cotton sheets and tile floors that had been picked at by prison since passed, memories haunted the boys mind, and fears of what was to come.

How long had he been there? How long would he remain forgotten in this Godforsaken place with these Godforsaken murderers and robbers and thieves? At night he could see nothing, but day was not much better. Small things grew to be admired, but the vain lost purpose. Mirrors grew useless while their brass frames were vindicated from their pretentious shadow.

There could have been yelling again that night. The torment of the soldiers who never stood appeared not nearly as translucent when you were left to thoughts. Their cries were not that of mental strains, nor those of physical tears, but rather the screams of the children of a war which they hadn't had a say in to begin with.

It was the entire uncertainty of his crime that made him uneasy. There was no real sentence, no real arraignment, and no real freedom for a long as the system chose. And courts were far larger, far more important, than any man and his singular wellbeing. He understood that. He understood that his actions would receive consequences at one point or another. But he was better off here than dead.

America was meant for freedom. You could receive freedom to most everything you could covet, but when the bones of society were shown, the government doesn't like it when you don't do what your told. He was sixteen-years-old when he got the letter. But sixteen is too young, his mother had said, to play man's war games. "Run!" she had so wisely advised her son, but he had known no other home and sixteen was too young, also, for running way. So he had stayed.

No challenge was made when confronted. He had told everyone the truth. Why should a child be sent to war? Why should anyone, too young to smoke a cigarette, too young to vote, be sent off for death and despair? This was not the life he chose, and therefore that was not the life he lead. He had elected prison, and so here he sat, so unsure and so dark among rooms of forgotten men.