Bringing home Guantánamo

Any weekday morning they step off the buses under the Queensboro Bridge – dozens of prisoners released from the New York prison system. Clouds of white breath leave them for the air. Hard men, most of them. A few women. It is fascinating to watch their first moment of freedom. One might expect to see their lungs swell. A tiny skip in their steps. Or their arms open to a loved one. But they look rigid mostly, like they've forgotten how it is to move in this space.

Their hands go down deep into their pockets and they pull out old packets of cigarettes. It looks as if there is fire springing from their hands. The smoke seems to loosen them. They look along the wide grey boulevard. A bodega. A pawn shop. A bare café. The thrum of early morning traffic.

This is it: life on the outside again, freedom after years behind bars, but it's not exactly a walk-off part into the confederacy of hope.

New York is a shining city and I often sing of it, my adopted home. The presumption here is that everyone's life has a meaning. It's a literary idea, as if there's a possible continuity of promise. But every now and then we all must reacquaint ourselves with the darker sides of things. The crack houses. The homeless in the subway tunnels. The prisoners stepping off the buses, looking around, wondering just what they've come back into, especially on a cold morning when their hearts must feel frozen to the walls of their chests.

I watch them descend the buses, then follow them into the bodega. I stand by the rack of cheap cakes and listen. A young man, Charlie, has just come downstate from the prison in Gowanda. Another, Leroy, calls out that he knew his cellmate there. A man with a teardrop tattoo passes Leroy a number for a job as a Happy Trails bus driver.

The loops of their conversations mesh and collide.

Leroy introduces Charlie to Bernard. Bernard just did a spell in Riker's. He knows Charlie's brother who's doing hard time in Attica. Teardrop Tattoo goes on a riff about the painted cells in Dannemora with Leroy's cousin. Leroy says that the warden's wife in Dannemora was known to walk around with a runner in the back of her tights. They laugh and say that she is well-known for being able to suck a golf ball through a 50-foot hose.

The bell on the shop door clinks. The men all fall silent. It's another ex-prisoner from a different bus. And yet within moments they have made a link – "Hey, man, were you in Bedford Falls?"

It strikes me that they and, by extension, I, am part of a prison nation.

For these men, the jail cell is the actual norm. It's like a visit to the dentist, a sort of long-term root canal. Arriving home is the curiosity.

At any one time there are two million Americans behind bars: this is almost twice what there was ten years ago. Nationally, one in ten black men in their twenties are in jail cells. To make matters worse, the average state parolee is 35 years old, has a substance abuse problem, no high school diploma, has been inside for three or four years, and will be back in prison within three years. Increasingly under the Bush regime there has been a dismantling of enlightened social legislation. The dependence on the simplistic notion that you can lock away your evils shows a distinct lack of moral acuity. The fantasy of Bush's America is that you can hide what you don't like. For a place that talks a lot about "freedom" it's strange how little of it there actually is.

I can't helping thinking, as the shop empties out, that there's a sense that there's an inner Guantánamo going on as well as the larger public one – that the detention centre exists because another, domestic, long-term Guantánamo has been around for years. Americans aren't stunned by Guantánamo because they're used to it, either consciously or not.

Patrick Kavanagh once said that there are two types of simplicity – the simplicity of going and the simplicity of return, the latter being the ultimate in sophistication. And yet watching the prisoners return on these cold winter mornings it's hard to think that they're returning to what, for others, is a city of absolute promise. One can only hope that the prison bus service, Happy Trails, might actually, one day, live up to its name.

Colum McCann's column for Round Midnight with Donal O'Herlihy on RTÉ Radio 1 (11.40pm) goes out every Tuesday night