Around the perimeter of Jefferson City Correctional Centre, Missouri, one of North America’s maximum-security prisons, runs what they call a kill fence. It sits between two razor wire fences. It looks innocuous enough until you see the warnings informing you that it carries a lethal voltage. One touch, they say, and it’s lights out.
You have to wonder why it needs the razor wire fencing, let alone the numerous men with machine guns lurking in watchtowers. This seemed to me, as I was ushered through the metal detector, to be quite literally overkill.
As I handed over my phone and other items from my pockets, I tried not to think about the crimes committed by the men I was about to meet. Given the levels of fortifications, they were surely among the most heinous imaginable. They would surely have left multiple victims and their families devastated in life sentences of their own. But what I found inside shattered nearly every assumption I had smuggled in with me.
Re-examining the call to love the stranger
In 2015, one image of a three-year-old boy washed up on a beach in Turkey changed the way the world …