Party Cancelled

Words by Lisa Donovan

September 9, 2026
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Originally published in Issue No. 14 of The Bitter Southerner Magazine

The recipe for “jail cake” varies depending on the provisions of your particular detention center. The general ingredient list involves Hydrox, Oreo, or Duplex cookies — filling removed and saved for the frosting, cookies crushed with just enough hot water, Fanta, Mountain Dew, or Sprite added to make into paste for either a stand-alone cake or cake base that you can top with a vending machine Honey Bun bouffant. There are endless and various combinations of flavors and binders from the mess hall, such as powdered milk, sugar packets, coffee creamer, powdered coffee, hot cocoa mix, peanut butter, cream cheese, and breakfast cereals that you can add for embellishment.

One thing about humans is that, even in a cage, we find ways to celebrate being alive, to celebrate each other, to acknowledge that there is something more than just survival or a state-sanctioned value, punishment, or decree of our worthiness, our humanness.

Since January 2025, the United States has imprisoned more than 3,800 children within for-profit ICE detention centers. It has been reported that, of those, at least 600 have been detained alone, separated from their families and caretakers, from anyone who knows them intimately, safely, tenderly.

I make a lot of birthday cakes, for my family, for friends, and for strangers who pay me. Turns out, if you have even the slightest tilt toward decency or even the faintest regard for humanity, when your country keeps children in cages, this becomes all you can think about, cake after cake, as you make the batter, build the layers, frost the sides. By the time you’re festooning the frosting with fresh flowers or candles, you’ll likely be overcome with such grief that you’ll helplessly search the internet to figure out what provisions are being allotted to the people our country is putting in these for-profit cages, to see if it’s even possible for anyone to make these children a birthday cake should they find themselves ringing in their fifth, seventh, or 11th birthdays in these American prison cells.

Lots of folks who hide behind God and country have the keys to those cells in their pockets.

Lots of folks who don’t like to be treaded upon are sure doing, and allowing for, a lot of treading these days.

Lots of folks are trading in their humanity for a weak and dangerous bastardization of patriotism, hiding their xenophobia, racism, hatred of women, hatred of anything-they-think-is-reducing-their-supremacy behind the flag at the urging of our current, dollar store commander-in-chief.

Historian Timothy Snyder wrote in his 2017 book, On Tyranny, that tyrants know they can ride patriotism into a grotesque perversion of power by relying on something called “anticipatory obedience.” Power cannot be abused without loyalty, a loyalty typically built on fear-based nationalism and ignorance. What we seem to fail to learn from history is that this anticipatory obedience, not necessarily power-hunger megalomania, is what actually leads to unthinkable horrors, including children in cages.

Ironically, Stephen Miller, architect of much of this administration’s immigration agenda, justifies the incarceration of innocent, law-abiding adults and children in for-profit detention centers by saying, “At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands” — stoking fear and playing with ignorance to distract and justify acts and policies that history might rightfully one day define as crimes against humanity.

Of course, none of this happened suddenly. Right-wing authoritarians have been trying to spin this fear for most of our existence as a country. Since the turn of the century, they have found their foothold using old tricks of the trade. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, was built post 9/11 as a safety measure against terrorism. If you go to the ICE website today (brace yourself), you’ll be treated to a carefully written timeline with videos that open to symphonic swells of violins, with patriotic History Channel–level deference to its humble beginnings and Boy Scout values. Any good go at tyranny needs a little state-sanctioned propaganda. And, as “anticipatory obedience” would have it, lots of Americans took their marching orders (and incredible signing bonuses) feeling like great heroes for the cause.

As a mother devastated by the obvious terror of it all, and with the onslaught of other unthinkable dangers being presented by the so-called leaders of this country, it is the children I find myself fixated on. I wonder, often, if other Americans have some version of this, their own final straw in how much this country has made us tamp down our compassion, our regard for liberty and justice. In our 250th year, is this what we’ve amounted to? Is this what Americans, almost lazily, most certainly numbly, are willing to tolerate being done in our name?

I started this essay with some idea that I could write a clean and tidy, potentially overwrought, purple prose conjecture about a mother’s love being strong enough to protect a child against these atrocities, about how one might cobble together a prison cake for their child in defiance of the great grift of America. But this is not a time for sweet bows being wrapped up over crime scenes. There is no logic or sense, or defiant survival to romanticize regarding the country we find ourselves living in. There is no poetry here to mine.

The only thing to do as we ring in our 250th year is to point at the thing and say its name clearly. To shame those who still make nice about what and where we are in the scope of things. There is no celebration to make. Maybe the occasion, and our collective obedience, should only be marked with a cake cobbled together with vending-machine found objects that hold no nutrients, and are consumed blindly and foolishly without any consideration for health, life, or longevity. But, honestly, I don’t even think we deserve that. The symbol of prison cake, a small and maybe cheap metaphor for resilience of spirit, is not something we’ve even earned. Perhaps when we’ve defied the facism sitting on a recliner in our living rooms, have risen up against the billionaire oligarchy convincing us that Brown people are making us poorer, and remembered how to fight for our name and honor again, perhaps then, then we can have cake.   ◊