Why prison isn't built to rehabilitate a man. There is a virus that exists in prison, it threatens to cement our characters and personalities in that which we are already labeled as, convicts. Criminals!
I watch young men come to prison from good families, they have never really been in trouble or lived in criminal or drug infested enviroments. Maybe one day they were hanging out with a friend and just got a bad idea to break in to a house. Maybe they needed money for games and couldn't ask their parents because they had already gotten so much this month. So they make this bad decision to break in to this house, they get caught and some judge feels like teaching them a good lesson. Maybe that judges house was broken in to weeks before and he is still feeling a certain type of way about it. So he sentences this guy (we will say he is 18) to 2 years in prison. As everyone knows there are basic rules that inmates tell other imates that seem important and must be followed. One rule obviously is don't ever tell on anyone. So this 18 year old kid has just learned that he better never tell on anyone or something bad will happen to him. He's told to always mind his own business. This is the first step to him possibly becoming a life long career criminal.
Society doesn't work that way. if someone hurts you or steals from you the normal thing to do is to report it to the police. A civilized society only works if there are rules and protections in place to keep people from hurting other people. If you´re walking down the street and you see 3 guys harassing a woman and trying to steal her purse, the normal and right thing to do is to say something right? Call the police or possibly help her yourself. By prison rules you should mind your own business and definitely not tell on anyone. So this 18 year old is learning these antisocial lessons.
The next rule is never let no one punk you. Some one calls you a bitch or pushes you and you feel obligated to react with violence. But if you´re in society, shopping at Walmart and some guy bumps in to you and says "watch where your going punk", you can't just hit him? You would go to jail.
So this 18 year old kid spends 2 years in prison with his mind being systematically taught these things. The pure pressure from other inmates and even the possible threat of harm if you don't live by these rules make the odds of him becoming this person very likely. It takes a strong and brave person to reject all this garbage and live by a set of values and morals that are in complete opposition of this criminal virus. That is how you know if a man in here is serious about being a good man and not living a lifetime of crime.
Even the guards are sometimes infected with this virus. You often hear guards joking with inmates about being snitches. I have even seen a guard take a kite (a note written by an inmate telling on a other inmate) that was given to him secretly by an inmate and he read it over the intercom and put the inmate who gave it to him on blast. Or I´ve seen guards hang the kites on the window of the bubble where the officers sit so that everyone can read it.
There are so many little rules that the majority of prisoners try to force everyone to live by, but the behaviour that these "rules" display are antisocial and part of a larger criminal mentality. I hate watching it consume guys who come in here and to pay the penalty for a bad decision they made and would probably learn their lesson and never do it again if it wasn't for this virus in here. It doesn't touch everybody, some guys get through by staying in the shadows, keeping to themselves, but those are the minority.
I was the poster child for a convict. It ran through my veins as pure as my own blood. I learned it early and became it completely. I have spent a lifetime of incarceration and misery because of it. I can't begin to count the number of people I have infected. I was the last person any young decent person who came in here for making a mistake but wanted to do right could of come in contact with. I was the lead professor in this school. There are no words I know that can articulate how sorry and shameful I feel. I can't take it back, I can just do my best and put twice the amount of effort in to helping those young men as I did in to poisoning them. A man will become a better man only in spite of prison, not because of it.
If you thought prison was set up in a way a person who truly wanted to be better could take advantage of you would be wrong. Everything about the way prison is set up and the people who run it are in direct opposition to what you would create if your goal was to not only punish a person, but give them the opportunity to grow, heal, and change for the better. It would be logical and understandable for you to think to yourself "of course he is going to say that, he is in prison and just blames everything else and he just probably hates the guards". I understand if these are your thoughts when you read my take and perception on prison and I can't prove to you that I am not speaking out of bitterness towards prison because I'm angry that I am in here. All I can do is tell the truth and hope that somehow you can sense it, feel it, or the very least allow your mind to fairly consider my perspective.
On the cover of the rule book at this facility they write that their motto is that they understand that we are not here to be punished but have been sent here as a punishment and that they understand the difference. They don't! Or they don't care. It is very clear that 90% of the people that work here have the mindset that the definition and complete reason for their job is to catch us and get us in any way at every single chance possible. You can literally see their obsession with it. Some of them are so bad with it that they actually create a black negative cloud of hostility and misery in here.
Some days guys fear coming out of therir cells to get their food trays or their medication. They don't want to walk by these officers out of worry that they are going to disrespect and harass them and put them in a possible position where they could respond wrong. Can you imagine having to worry so much that you don't even get your medication or your meals? This is no exaggeration, I feel it myself all the time.
I have a class that I go to, my psychologist teaches it. It´s a class for people who have suffered severe trauma in their lives. I was on my way to class the other day and I was standing and waiting for the door to the day room to be opened and this female officer says to me "why are you just standing there psycho? go to your retard class". I have never spoken to this officer before. I have never done anything to give her a reason to talk to me like that. I just " yes mam" and went about my business. I was sitting in class and it was bothering me. It was eating at my stomach. My psych noticed and asked me what was wrong, so I told her what happened and after class she went and said something to the officer. The next day that same officer went in my cell to do a "shakedown", they normally do routine searches of our cells to make sure we don't have contraband, so when she was done and told me I could go back to my cell her exact words where " go lock down snitch".
When I got to my cell she had destroyed everything. She even dumped all my salt, pepper, and coffee in to my sheets. She threw my pictures of my family all over the floor and you could see boot tracks on them from where she stepped on them. This is just one small example of the majority of these officers mentality. The very last thing they see when they look at us is a human being. This just causes so much bitterness and mistrust for the inmates, mix that with the lessons of antisocial criminal behaviour being pressed on them by their peers and the recidivism rates and crime statistics of ex prisoners make more sense.
97% of all prisoners locked up in america right this moment are going to get out at some point. They will be your neighbor, your coworker, a person in line behind you at the store, or in a car next to you at a stop light. They may be someone you care about falls in love with or goes to school with. It just seems like we would care more about who these people will be when they are released?
It seems like after all these years of spending billions of taxpayers money and warehousing human beings we would figure out a better way. People make bad decisions, but every single person in here has a family, they have friends, they have a past and future, they have a heart and brain, thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams, regrets, they are not just the one bad thing they chose to do. They don't deserve to be thrown away.
I started this conversation to say that prison is not built to rehabilitate a person. In it´s current form it makes more people worse than better. Your tax dollars pay for that. It´s just something to think about next time your voting for something in regards to prison reform. It takes an unusually strong and dedicated man to live In here and actually succeed in changing his life. Succeed in changing himself in to a better human being. This isn't the place where very many decide to become honest or chose to live a life in service to others for the better.
Sometimes I still can't believe that I actually am the man I am today. I can't begin to explain to you how thankful and blessed I am. This is nothing short of a miracle that took place in my life. But it wasn't the kind of miracle where you just lay your hands on someone who is paralyzed and say "stand up and walk" and then they walk. This miracle took an amount of work that is unfathomable. A work that is never finished. It took the help of so many people. This definitely happened in spite of me being in prison, I hope that one day we have a system that that works as a bridge that helps lead from bad or broken to good and successful. Today it only leads from bad to worse. I hope you read this and don't think that I am blaming prison or making excuses for people who have chosen to commit crimes, responsibility begins and ends with the individual, but two things can be true at one time.
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