A Calling Met With Cruelty

Authored by: Dr. David Z. Simpson

Iman Abdallah Hadian walked into Mercy Correctional Facility to bring light, faith, and healing. What he encountered instead was a system that crushed the spirit of those it confines and those asked to serve inside it. His death was not an isolated tragedy, but a warning—one we cannot afford to ignore.

A Calling Met with Cruelty

Dawn had barely broken when Iman Abdallah Hadian stepped into Mercy Correctional Facility that December morning, not as just another staff member, but a spiritual guide entrusted with shepherding men through the darkest moments of their lives. He was trusted to walk into some of the darkest corridors of the prison and bring light where almost none existed.  This was his calling, his purpose, and the role he carried with quiet dignity.

By 8:00 a.m., he was gone, dead by his own hand inside the superintendent’s office of the same prison where officers murdered Robert Brooks only months earlier. His death shook the walls, rattled the staff, and sent tremors through the incarcerated community. For a moment, the world looked. Then, as always, the world looked away. His suffering, his message, and his desperate final act were smothered by a culture trained to minimize tragedy whenever it comes from behind prison walls. But inside the prison walls, the impact lingered.

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“His final act was not weakness; it was a message. A warning. A truth the system could no longer bury.”

The Slaver Mindset: A Culture That Consumes Everyone Inside

America’s prison system operates under a culture many describe as the Slavery Mindset, a mindset that teaches us to ignore suffering, dismiss trauma, and normalize violence. It convinces the public that incarcerated people deserve whatever happens to them and conditions staff to believe their own pain is irrelevant. It even convinces spiritual leaders that their faith must bend to the institution. No training prepares a human being to carry God’s word into a place designed to break God’s creation.

Correctional officers, counselors, nurses, and chaplains all walk into the same morally poisonous environment each day, carrying Bibles, Qur’ans, prayer rugs, journals, healing words, and hope of helping someone rise above their circumstances. Instead, they are confronted with a machine that operates on punishment, fear, anger, humiliation, and silence. This system demands that everyone play a role, even when that role violates their personal values, moral code, and natural sense of humanity. Many leave each day wearing two identities: one created by the institution, and another held together only by love, faith, or ritual once they return home. To survive this imbalance, they live in emotional compartments, carrying burdens that often have no name. Iman Hadian lived inside that fracture every single day.

SIDEBAR: Understanding Moral Injury

Moral injury occurs when a person must witness, participate in, or stay silent about actions that violate their deepest values. It is a wound that affects the spirit as much as the mind. It often appears as emotional exhaustion, spiritual distress, guilt, internal conflict, and profound loss of purpose. It is common among soldiers, medical workers, and increasingly among correctional staff, but it remains almost entirely unaddressed inside American prisons.

The Spiritual Battle No One Saw Coming

Imagine waking up each day to serve the Highest while entering a system that destroys the very people you’re called to serve, where men begged for mercy and received punishment instead. Imagine reading scriptures about compassion while someone cries for help down a concrete corridor. Imagine offering forgiveness while knowing you watched a man being beaten on the floor only hours earlier. Imagine counseling someone on faith while the institution routinely violates the very principles you teach.

This is not ordinary work stress; this is spiritual injury. This is a moral conflict, a kind of internal war that leaves permanent marks on the soul. Those who knew Iman Hadian often said he was “stressed about work,” but that phrase cannot contain the truth of what he endured. He may have witnessed things no spiritual worker should ever see. He may have been pressed to limit prayers or religious services or ignore violations that directly contradicted both human rights and his faith. He may have gone home at night, pretending everything was fine while knowing the institution offered him no space to reconcile what he witnessed daily. That kind of tension crushes a man, not all at once, but slowly and painfully, from the inside out.

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“To survive, staff learn to split themselves in two, one identity for the prison, another for the people they love.”

The Day the Silence Broke

Some people break quietly. Some break privately. But Imam Hadian broke publicly, symbolically, and in the one place where the truth could not be hidden, the superintendent’s office. His death was not simply despair. It was truth made visible. It was a system exposing itself through the loss of a man who tried to hold it together with prayer, compassion, and faith. His final moments carried a message the institution refused to hear: the weight of this system is killing people on both sides of the bars.

And yet, even with such a visible tragedy, nothing changed within weeks. No policy shift emerged. No serious statewide review was undertaken. No meaningful investigation into staff trauma occurred. His life, and the truth he revealed, were absorbed back into the silence that had long defined America’s prison culture.

What We Cannot Ignore

Iman Hadan’s final act forces us to confront a truth we have long avoided. A prison system built on silence will sacrifice both the confined and the staff who watch over them. His death was not an indictment of his strength, but of the institution that demanded he choose between his faith and his job, between compassion and conformity, between spiritual survival and moral collapse. This was not simply one man’s breaking point; it was a warning that the structure itself is breaking.

If we let this moment fade, if we return to business as usual, we participate in the same silence that consumed Iman. We must examine the trauma prisons impose on both incarcerated people and the staff who carry out institutional mandates. We must confront the culture of normalized brutality, the spiritual injuries endured by workers, and the moral contradictions embedded in every corner of the system. Ignoring these truths only ensures that another tragedy like this will come, and soon.

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“We owe him more than a moment of shock. We owe him the courage to face the truth: this system is killing people.”

A Call We Must Not Turn Away From

To honor Iman Hadian is not to mourn quietly; it is to act loudly. It is to question, to expose, to challenge, and to rebuild. Redemption is not just for those behind bars; it is for the system itself. Iman’s death demands a kind of courage we can no longer postpone. The cost of silence is too high, and the weight of this system is crushing too many souls to ignore.

Iman Hadian’s story is a reminder that even the brightest lights can be dimmed by environments built on harm. But it is also a reminder that truth, once spoken or embodied, is such a profound sacrifice that it can ignite movements, shift conversations, and change futures. We must decide whether we will let that truth fade or carry it forward and demand a system worthy of the human beings who walked within it.

Authored by:

Dr. David Z. Simpson