Dear Mom,

I can’t help but look around and notice everyone seems convinced that what’s breaking this country is disagreement. That if we could just convince the “other side” to see things correctly; vote correctly, think correctly, believe correctly, we’d be fine.

I don’t think that’s true anymore. The most destructive force I’ve seen, both inside institutions and out in the world, isn’t disagreement. It’s distance. Distance between the people making decisions and the people living with the consequences. Distance that looms so large no one feels responsible anymore.

As I examine this moment in time and place that is modern day America, where political lines are perhaps as deeply divided as we have ever witnessed in this nation’s history, I’d like to touch on the most fundamental belief I hold as to how to begin to repair any of it. That solution, I believe in my heart, lies not in converting every person to the same ideologies, beliefs, religions, or passions.

It lies in shortening the distance between us all, as human beings.

During my incarceration, I spent time in two county jails. I was sentenced to Jefferson County Jail as a result of the fallout from a lifetime of acute alcoholism, and resided in the Dane County Jail as a pretrial detainee, the result of the drug addiction that followed and replaced my alcohol addiction.

Madison, Wisconsin is home to the Dane County Jail. In many respects, Madison has more than earned its reputation as one of the more progressive, liberal cities you’ll find in this nation. Being a capital city, its county jail is also a larger institution, both in inmate population and allocated staff size.

I do not fundamentally believe that the Dane County Jail is staffed by purely terrible, immoral people based on what I experienced there, though those experiences were at times terrible and immoral. I believe the distance was too far between decision makers and the humans impacted by those decisions. Everything that went wrong was founded in policies, narratives, short “jail logs”, emails between staff I never met and most of all, shortcuts around human interaction.

Everything was run by layers of bureaucracy. While the lower-level seg cell I occupied for a month and a half was not at all physically far from the second-floor offices of the jail administrators, the distance between me and the people making decisions about my life was huge. It ultimately made my prolonged time in solitary not some huge conspiracy, nor awful people doing awful things because they were awful.

The distance between my cage and the administrative offices was not often traversed. Bureaucracy hummed along at its own pace, utterly unable to bridge that distance.As open records continue to come back from DCSO, the mess of narratives becomes at the same time more clear and more convoluted. Emails emphasize I was there for “mental health” reasons while in the same 24 hour period they explicitly state it was due to my “transgender status”. One deputy commented that I had delusions that I used to work for MPD. If only it was a bad dream. Another line of narrative justifies my extended stay in solitary confinement by noting that I was part of a murder for hire situation (true, but irrelevant at the time – while I’d been a victim of conspiracy to commit first degree attempted homicide in 2017, by 2024 the perpetrator of that crime had been sentenced with absolutely zero chance of his returning to Dane County Jail for seven years. As a cis man, he also had no chance of ever being housed with me at any time, should he have accomplished the virtual impossibility of leaving prison for the jail.)

The hodgepodge of these documentations show individual points of contact that in some places seem to conflict with each other, unsurprising when you take into account that each interaction is taking place in an institution in which, whether through choice or expediency, no one took the time to consider me as a human being. If there is one consistent lesson I’ve learned through my participation in and observation of every level of law enforcement and government, it is that the bigger it gets, the further the distance gets from “policy making human” to “impacted human”.

Following that experience, I was not optimistic when I got sentenced and discovered I was to spend the remaining months I had left to serve in the Jefferson County Jail. The county has not voted Democrat in a presidential election since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. It’s small and rural, a place one might assume I’d run into more trouble and less understanding as a transgender inmate. If Dane County – supposed “sanctuary county” for LGBTQ+ folks, had treated me with such indifference, what fresh hell awaited in Jefferson?

So you can imagine my surprise when, upon entry, a jail supervisor simply sat on the booking bench next to me, leaned in and asked frankly, “So, how should we explain this to the women?”

Diffusing tricky situations and conversations with dark humor is a time-honored tradition of most traumatized populations, first and foremost; addicts and first responders. “Simple; lady parts and a bad moustache. I’ll handle the rest of the questions,” I replied. And that was that.

Turns out that approach, when presented in a short, only semi-awkward conversation, worked without 46 days of solitary confinement. I spent almost no time in solitary confinement in Jefferson County.
Crucially, the jail was smaller, the interactions more face-to-face. Perhaps surprisingly, the difference in the way I was treated wasn’t about political ideology. It was the result of the simple act of looking into someone’s eyes and recognizing their humanity. It was basic conversations, face to face, with the people empowered to make decisions about my housing. With that, it was the ability to see our similarities over what makes me different.

Mom, in a day and age where our neighbors are being gunned down and ripped off the streets by masked federal agents, I’d hesitate to attribute this humane treatment to any inherent humanitarian impulse in the conservative movement as a whole. What I attribute this to, and want to emphasize, is that people who understand the human condition and are able to see it firsthand act with increased respect for basic human dignity.

That’s what it really boils down to – shortening the distance between human beings.
There’s a reason why I relate these ideas to the immigration enforcement actions that litter headlines across the nation these days. These instances illustrate a pervasive gap between communities and the institutions that are supposed to support them. One of the largest gaps is found between local law enforcement and the communities they serve. This nation now finds itself deploying armies of federal agents with zero attachment, history, vetting, or understanding of the communities they’re terrorizing. The human to human gap has grown so immense that it is inevitable that we are seeing such depravity at the hands of the government.

It’s time to entrust care and solutions back in communities, back into the connections we forge with our neighbors and fellow citizens.

The hint of fiscal conservative in me applauds that this doesn’t need to come in the form of allocating more money to government institutions. such as DOC, law enforcement or the federal government. There are longstanding, pre-existing, established community resources who are passionate about doing the work in our criminal legal system. They are the non-profits, religious communities and advocates who are our neighbors.

They instead find themselves hitting their heads against the walls of “security theater” rather than the work they compassionately wish to do. A county rich with progressive resources, in Dane County, will find itself met with a jail response of “let me ask my boss”, followed by silence. A shortened distance between two humans in a red county was, instead, handled humanely.

Mom, I don’t think anyone has to agree on every issue. Not only is it not possible – it’s not even desirable. Our diversity and our differences are what makes us strong, not something to be erased or overcome. We just have to agree that we are, together, human beings. The shorter the distance between human beings, the less we become dependent on entire political parties, different opinions and varied backgrounds to tell us who we are. We know who we are, and in 2026, I feel we undervalue our ability to understand one another.

Still me,

Eli