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JOE WILSON- VIETNAM VET
By Ike Griffin
Note: Names of individuals and institutions have been changed. Circumstances are real, and are encountered frequently enough to believe they are representative of any number of the incarcerated.
“Fifteen or twenty minutes of fuzzy thinking can ruin your entire life.” (Joe Wilson, Union Correctional Institution, Florida, 1990)
I have now known Joe for eighteen years. Our first meeting was at Union, where he was playing a guitar on a Kairos weekend. His rendition of “Lights of The City” first grabbed my attention. He was transferred from Union C.I. to Tomoka C.I., where he volunteered for the first Horizon class, initiated in 1999. Joe became a Peer Facilitator for a family pod of eight men.
Born in central Pennsylvania to a middle class family mid-way through the twentieth century, Joe’s childhood was unremarkable in the way that “normal” is unremarkable. Life did not present much of a challenge for Joe. “Normal” in America during the ‘50s could be pretty spectacular. However, Joe thought of himself as ordinary.
Possessed of a loveable personality, he put great store in quality of friendship and loyalty. He was reliable, responsible, and willing to sacrifice if called upon to fulfill his cultural vision of male virtue, that of protector of those who came into his sphere of caring. Unassuming as he was, he saw himself as good, not heroic.
After graduation from High School in 1968, Joe enrolled at Penn State intending to prepare for life as an electrical engineer. Difficulty in a required class convinced him that he had set his sights on the wrong career path. He dropped out of school to re-think his future. Responsibility and failure weighed on him intensely, and he enlisted in the armed services. Joe joined the U.S. Army hoping to regain his confidence after a poor start in school. The tide of popularity against the Viet Nam war did nothing for his self image. If you asked him, he would say that he was proud to wear the uniform and to serve, but the pride did not manifest itself in his feeling of acceptance, and he wore the uniform as little as possible when off duty.
Upon release from duty in 1975, Joe returned to Penn State. Student routine was familiar but things were different now. Students and faculty had nothing but contempt for the Viet Nam experience. Far from welcoming the returning warrior with grateful arms, student discussion would lead him to believe he was foolish for having not burned his registration card to pass the war in Canada.
Compared to Joe’s recent experience in Vietnam, current causes igniting student emotions seemed trivial and insignificant. Football games, pep rallies and college pranks left him cold. Joe felt disconnected. He was at a different place. Six or seven years older than his classmates, he was light-years ahead of them in experience. He longed for acceptance and belonging, but he felt isolated. Whereas he had the advantage of experience, it was he who felt he had missed out on something, though he could not imagine what that something might be. He longed for mutual experience with his peers upon which to build a relationship.
When spring break rolled around, Joe joined two girls, one particularly attractive coed named Elaine, and two boys, carpooling to Daytona Beach, Florida. During the ride down, Joe explained to the others that he had been in the military, which explained his advanced age. Pressed for stories of military service, Joe spoke of danger, his comfort with firearms. He revealed that, in fact he had a pistol in his duffel bag.
Accommodations were typically scarce and pricey in Florida during Spring Break. All five shared a two bedroom condo on the beach for the week. Tens of thousands of other students from across the country had crowded into Daytona Beach. The plan was to party on the beach day and night, sleeping only when exhausted. Any of their little group might or might not sleep in their condo on any given night. Beds were not assigned.
After a day of beach volleyball, beer, and sand-sprinkled sandwiches, sunbathing, and swapped stories, they built bonfires on the beach to continue the same routine into the night. Joe excused himself, already sporting more sunburn than he really wanted. He retired early to the condo, washed off the sand and flopped onto a bed.
Elaine woke Joe at two o’clock in the morning, shaking him urgently. “Wake up, Joe! Give me your gun! Damn it Joe, two creeps raped and beat me and I’m going to kill them! They just beat the shit out of me and then raped me. They took turns, beating me and raping me! I’m gonna kill them, Joe.”
Elaine’s bloody and bruised face told the story. She had puffy eyes, blood in her hair and a crescent shaped cut in front of her left ear that was still oozing blood. As Joe focused his own blurred vision on her, he thought, “No! I can’t let her have my gun. She’ll just hurt herself more.”
“I’ll go with you. You can’t do this alone. You’ll just get hurt.”
Elaine led him back up the beach about a half-mile, passing revelers in the dunes between the condos. Small groups of students were still around bonfires, though the night had finally turned quiet. Occasional laughter pierced the humid air, but most of the energy was spent for this night. At a dying fire near the dunes with salt grass growing in tufts, two male students were packing their tent into a Volkswagen van, apparently preparing to depart.
“There they are,” said Elaine. “They are the ones.”
Joe walked up to the two, who were not looking particularly confident by this time. He pulled his gun from the waistband of his jeans and said, “That girl you beat and raped had a friend.” He shot them both, picked up the spent cartridges from the sand, took Elaine’s hand cut through the sand dunes to the road.
“There they aren’t. Not any more, Elaine. Let’s get you to a hospital.”
The emergency room staff of the hospital began work on Elaine. Joe sat in a waiting room with a Methodist minister who had brought his wife in to be treated for what seemed to be food poisoning. Killing time, anxious and bored, they explained to one another why they were at the emergency room in the middle of the night. Joe, knowing full well the enormity of his actions, confessed to the minister all that had happened. “I think you need to pray about this,” commented the minister. So, Joe went into the chapel at the hospital and prayed about it. God seemed to say, “Tell the truth.”
Later that day, after taking Elaine back to the condo, Joe was stopped for driving erratically, like dozens of other students, on suspicion of DWI. Joe explained to the officer that the steering on his car was loose and needed to be fixed. They took him into the police station for breath analysis. As they were booking his data, Joe pulled the spent cartridges from his pocket and handed them to the arresting officer, and told them the truth.
Double Life… a few minutes of fuzzy thinking, acting on loyalty and compassion, can ruin your entire life.
Jack (Murph the Surf) Murphy had done time with Joe at Union. Jack told me that Joe was one of the most gentle men in the system. Jack claimed that if Joe had done his crime on Padre Island in Texas rather than on the beach in Florida, he might have been given a public reprimand and a private thank you for rendering swift justice.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Sunday, December 20, 2009
THE FLY
By Ike Griffin
Note: Names of individuals and institutions have been changed. Circumstances are real, and are encountered frequently enough to believe they are representative of any number of the incarcerated.
Lito was half a mile from the murder scene on the outskirts of Sanderson, Texas when he realized the enormity of what he had done. Chinga tu madre, Cabron! What have you done? Pinche gringa! She shouldn’t have stopped. Why the fuck did she stop?
Born Daniel Quiroz, Jr., the son of Daniel Quiroz, whose father Winslado Quiroz had migrated from Rio Verde, San Luis Potosi, Mexico to Southwest Texas during World War II, when ranchers short of cowboys, hired willing hands on the spot, “si tenian tarjeta, o no!”
Winslado had brought his wife and family with him in 1942 to this rather barren land north of the Rio Bravo and south of the high plains, the llano estacado, shaped by rills and canyons running down to the Rio Grande west of Del Rio, and shaded by very little other than mesquites and an occasional oak mott and willows where a canyon stream flattened out enough to trap permanent water. Winslado found work on a ranch situated on Meyers Canyon north east of Sanderson. They were given a shack down by the horse barn in which to live and raise their family. His wife helped in the big ranch house and the children had the run of the place if they didn’t wander too far.
As Winslado’s hair turned white, he grew a beard under his sad eyes, they began to call him “Old Christmas Winseslaus,” even though he was slight of build and had no stomach at all. He smiled a lot. By now, a row of labor houses had been built and old Winslado and his wife had the most prominent one close to the main ranch house.
Son Daniel played with the pigs and chased the chickens and dreamed of one day having his own ranch. As he grew older, he was assigned chores around the ranch and began to collect an allowance from the rancher, the same as his own son. When he reached sixteen, Daniel moved into the bunk house with other bachelor cowboys and earned a real wage. Though the salary was barely enough to buy clothes, tack, and a few beers with the other cowboys on the weekend, Daniel was a happy cowboy.
A fine hand with the stock, Daniel knew every fence, pasture, gully, and scrub oak mott on the twenty sections that made up the ranch. Daniel eventually met a girl from a neighboring ranch in Sanderson on a Saturday afternoon and married her after receiving assurances from his employer that he could move out of the bunkhouse and claim a recently vacated labor house, complete with indoor plumbing and electricity. It was smaller than his parents’ assigned house, and it was down at the end of the dirt road jutting off to the West from the main corral and stock barn, but it was newer, and it was all theirs to enjoy while they worked for the ranch from sun up to sun down and explored one another into the night. As a result of their exploration, Daniel, Jr. was born within the year. They called him Danielito, or Lito for short.
Lito grew up on the ranch, just like his father before him, except that, unlike his father, his birth was registered and the county truancy officer made regular rounds of the ranches, so Lito had to go to school in town. There they would not allow him to speak Spanish as he had every day of his life on the ranch. At school, Lito was told he had to use English, and even though the white kids, the gringos, didn’t laugh at him, he felt that surely they must think him stupid. He couldn’t carry on a conversation with anyone except in Spanish. In English, half the words came out with a Spanish twist.
At night, Lito would hang his head and explain that he couldn’t seem to learn anything, and even though his parents loved him with all their hearts, they could not help him learn English, because neither of them had bothered to learn English. It was not required working around the ranch.
The ranch owner and his family spoke English, but only to one another. Anytime they addressed the labor, it was in Spanish, even if it was a fractured Spanish. No rancher worthy of the title would admit not speaking Spanish! No matter how poor their communication, if they addressed the help, it was in Spanish, or whatever passed for Spanish on that particular ranch. At least half of the things used in everyday life on the ranch were called a chingadera or “that fuckin’ thing.” Prestame la chingadera, el martillo, Viejo! (Loan me the fuckin’ thing, the hammer, old man!) Traiga la chingadera, eso que usan a cortar los huevos de los becerros. (Bring the fuckin’ thing, that which is used to cut the testicles off the calves.) A big complicated piece of equipment, like a tractor or scraper, was a chingazo! If things went amiss, they were chingado.
Lito, at school, was disciplined again and again for using bad language. His reputation sank lower and lower in the minds of the school faculty and they individually and collectively spent progressively less time trying to teach him. Lito also suffered from his small stature. He was much smaller than the other boys and was not good at athletics.
When the county Truant Officer quit insisting that he go to school, Lito gave it up as a bad cause. He had never thought of it much before, but he began to think of gringos as the “others,” and the “others” always seemed to be comfortably standing where he wanted to be and where he couldn’t seem to reach because he did not know the rules nor have the tools to get there. His dad’s dreams of one day owning his own ranch began to haunt him. Late at night, his father had talked of having the fortune of owning his own little ranchito “de nada mas unas hectarias.” Though it had never been promised, Daniel dreamed that one day, the ranch owner would help him own something of his own after two generations of service to the ranch. That dream died when Daniel was killed in an accident while working on a windmill on the far side of the ranch. For whatever cause, he fell from the top and broke his neck. He had been dead for more than a day when the other cowboys found him.
Lito began cow-boying in earnest. He could ride well and handle a rope with the same dexterity he could drive staples into a fencepost or stretch sagging wire with a come-a-long, una chingadera.
Lito moved into the bunkhouse to become one of the ranch’s cowboys. During most of the year he shared the bunkhouse with only one other young Mexican, but during Spring roundup, the bunkhouse would fill every one of the ten beds. He saved enough to buy an old Chevy with slick tires and lots of miles, but it had a good body and no rust. Suffering from a poor self image, Lito began to take on a macho swagger, and bought some aviator glasses so people could not see his eyes. The other cowboys began to call him Mosca, Fly. The big mirrored aviator glasses on his small head really did make him look like a fly.
One Saturday night, after having spent the entire afternoon and evening in a local Sanderson saloon drinking beer with off-work cowboys and talking about how suppressed the Chicanos were by the Gringos, Fly headed home to the ranch. Beyond the edge of town, one of his smooth tires blew out, and of course, he had no spare, and no jack to lift the car even if he had a spare. He hoped some sympathetic soul would come by to help him, but none stopped. About midnight, an elderly grandmother was headed home after babysitting with her grandchildren, and stopped to offer aid. She loaned him her jack, and her spare tire, with the promise the spare tire would be returned the next day, Sunday, but only in the afternoon, because she always went to church Sunday mornings.
As Lito, the Fly, jacked up the car and changed the tire, he was having trouble focusing his attention on the job. He kept asking himself why it had to be an old white-haired Gringa who came to his aid? She represented the oppressor of his people. Perhaps twenty or thirty cars that passed that night, and she was the only one to come to his aide. She was the only one who recognized his plight and trusted him to take her good tire out of her own trunk on a promise that is would be returned. It wasn’t right.
After he lowered the car and removed the jack, he bashed her head in with the jack handle, put the jack into his trunk with the blown out tire, and left the scene.
Chinga tu madre, Cabron! What have you done? Pinche gringa! She shouldn’t have stopped. Why the fuck did she stop?
FERGUSON UNIT, TDCJ
1986
Lito, Fly, Quiroz stepped up to the microphone at the closing of the Kairos weekend and delivered a profound, if brief, report as to his thoughts of the weekend he had just experienced.
”Forgive my Englich, I no speak so good. They call me Fly because I so small and nobody see my eyes. Nobody know what I think. I wear this glasses so nobody see me. I take them off now for you. You good people an I want you see me. Tank you!”
At monthly reunions of the Kairos community at Ferguson, Fly would always find a chair next to mine. We didn’t talk much because his English was even more limited than my Spanish, but when there was time to tell our stories, we did find that we could communicate he told me the story and of his family history, but not his crime, not the one that brought him to Ferguson.
Our team of volunteers scheduled a two day retreat for the community every six months. These retreats are very intense, as we all comfortable with one another and for two full days, we eat, laugh and tell our stories. On this particular retreat, Fly followed me around like a dog that has miss-behaved and wants to make up. I could not turn around suddenly lest I run over him.
Following lunch one day, I sought a quiet place behind some filing cabinets and stretched out on my back for a short rest. After a bit, I felt a head lay down touching my head, crown to crown. I knew it was Fly, but nothing was said for several minutes. Fly spoke, “Ike, you the first gringo I trust.”
Gracias, mi hijito.
Fly told me of the night he crushed the skull of the kindly old woman who stopped to help, his deep regret, the guilt he carried for his role in class warfare. By confessing to me, he confessed to all gringos everywhere. By laying crown to crown, no shades were required, I could not see his face as he confessed, weeping as he did so.
Gracias, mi hijito.
Note: Names of individuals and institutions have been changed. Circumstances are real, and are encountered frequently enough to believe they are representative of any number of the incarcerated.
Lito was half a mile from the murder scene on the outskirts of Sanderson, Texas when he realized the enormity of what he had done. Chinga tu madre, Cabron! What have you done? Pinche gringa! She shouldn’t have stopped. Why the fuck did she stop?
Born Daniel Quiroz, Jr., the son of Daniel Quiroz, whose father Winslado Quiroz had migrated from Rio Verde, San Luis Potosi, Mexico to Southwest Texas during World War II, when ranchers short of cowboys, hired willing hands on the spot, “si tenian tarjeta, o no!”
Winslado had brought his wife and family with him in 1942 to this rather barren land north of the Rio Bravo and south of the high plains, the llano estacado, shaped by rills and canyons running down to the Rio Grande west of Del Rio, and shaded by very little other than mesquites and an occasional oak mott and willows where a canyon stream flattened out enough to trap permanent water. Winslado found work on a ranch situated on Meyers Canyon north east of Sanderson. They were given a shack down by the horse barn in which to live and raise their family. His wife helped in the big ranch house and the children had the run of the place if they didn’t wander too far.
As Winslado’s hair turned white, he grew a beard under his sad eyes, they began to call him “Old Christmas Winseslaus,” even though he was slight of build and had no stomach at all. He smiled a lot. By now, a row of labor houses had been built and old Winslado and his wife had the most prominent one close to the main ranch house.
Son Daniel played with the pigs and chased the chickens and dreamed of one day having his own ranch. As he grew older, he was assigned chores around the ranch and began to collect an allowance from the rancher, the same as his own son. When he reached sixteen, Daniel moved into the bunk house with other bachelor cowboys and earned a real wage. Though the salary was barely enough to buy clothes, tack, and a few beers with the other cowboys on the weekend, Daniel was a happy cowboy.
A fine hand with the stock, Daniel knew every fence, pasture, gully, and scrub oak mott on the twenty sections that made up the ranch. Daniel eventually met a girl from a neighboring ranch in Sanderson on a Saturday afternoon and married her after receiving assurances from his employer that he could move out of the bunkhouse and claim a recently vacated labor house, complete with indoor plumbing and electricity. It was smaller than his parents’ assigned house, and it was down at the end of the dirt road jutting off to the West from the main corral and stock barn, but it was newer, and it was all theirs to enjoy while they worked for the ranch from sun up to sun down and explored one another into the night. As a result of their exploration, Daniel, Jr. was born within the year. They called him Danielito, or Lito for short.
Lito grew up on the ranch, just like his father before him, except that, unlike his father, his birth was registered and the county truancy officer made regular rounds of the ranches, so Lito had to go to school in town. There they would not allow him to speak Spanish as he had every day of his life on the ranch. At school, Lito was told he had to use English, and even though the white kids, the gringos, didn’t laugh at him, he felt that surely they must think him stupid. He couldn’t carry on a conversation with anyone except in Spanish. In English, half the words came out with a Spanish twist.
At night, Lito would hang his head and explain that he couldn’t seem to learn anything, and even though his parents loved him with all their hearts, they could not help him learn English, because neither of them had bothered to learn English. It was not required working around the ranch.
The ranch owner and his family spoke English, but only to one another. Anytime they addressed the labor, it was in Spanish, even if it was a fractured Spanish. No rancher worthy of the title would admit not speaking Spanish! No matter how poor their communication, if they addressed the help, it was in Spanish, or whatever passed for Spanish on that particular ranch. At least half of the things used in everyday life on the ranch were called a chingadera or “that fuckin’ thing.” Prestame la chingadera, el martillo, Viejo! (Loan me the fuckin’ thing, the hammer, old man!) Traiga la chingadera, eso que usan a cortar los huevos de los becerros. (Bring the fuckin’ thing, that which is used to cut the testicles off the calves.) A big complicated piece of equipment, like a tractor or scraper, was a chingazo! If things went amiss, they were chingado.
Lito, at school, was disciplined again and again for using bad language. His reputation sank lower and lower in the minds of the school faculty and they individually and collectively spent progressively less time trying to teach him. Lito also suffered from his small stature. He was much smaller than the other boys and was not good at athletics.
When the county Truant Officer quit insisting that he go to school, Lito gave it up as a bad cause. He had never thought of it much before, but he began to think of gringos as the “others,” and the “others” always seemed to be comfortably standing where he wanted to be and where he couldn’t seem to reach because he did not know the rules nor have the tools to get there. His dad’s dreams of one day owning his own ranch began to haunt him. Late at night, his father had talked of having the fortune of owning his own little ranchito “de nada mas unas hectarias.” Though it had never been promised, Daniel dreamed that one day, the ranch owner would help him own something of his own after two generations of service to the ranch. That dream died when Daniel was killed in an accident while working on a windmill on the far side of the ranch. For whatever cause, he fell from the top and broke his neck. He had been dead for more than a day when the other cowboys found him.
Lito began cow-boying in earnest. He could ride well and handle a rope with the same dexterity he could drive staples into a fencepost or stretch sagging wire with a come-a-long, una chingadera.
Lito moved into the bunkhouse to become one of the ranch’s cowboys. During most of the year he shared the bunkhouse with only one other young Mexican, but during Spring roundup, the bunkhouse would fill every one of the ten beds. He saved enough to buy an old Chevy with slick tires and lots of miles, but it had a good body and no rust. Suffering from a poor self image, Lito began to take on a macho swagger, and bought some aviator glasses so people could not see his eyes. The other cowboys began to call him Mosca, Fly. The big mirrored aviator glasses on his small head really did make him look like a fly.
One Saturday night, after having spent the entire afternoon and evening in a local Sanderson saloon drinking beer with off-work cowboys and talking about how suppressed the Chicanos were by the Gringos, Fly headed home to the ranch. Beyond the edge of town, one of his smooth tires blew out, and of course, he had no spare, and no jack to lift the car even if he had a spare. He hoped some sympathetic soul would come by to help him, but none stopped. About midnight, an elderly grandmother was headed home after babysitting with her grandchildren, and stopped to offer aid. She loaned him her jack, and her spare tire, with the promise the spare tire would be returned the next day, Sunday, but only in the afternoon, because she always went to church Sunday mornings.
As Lito, the Fly, jacked up the car and changed the tire, he was having trouble focusing his attention on the job. He kept asking himself why it had to be an old white-haired Gringa who came to his aid? She represented the oppressor of his people. Perhaps twenty or thirty cars that passed that night, and she was the only one to come to his aide. She was the only one who recognized his plight and trusted him to take her good tire out of her own trunk on a promise that is would be returned. It wasn’t right.
After he lowered the car and removed the jack, he bashed her head in with the jack handle, put the jack into his trunk with the blown out tire, and left the scene.
Chinga tu madre, Cabron! What have you done? Pinche gringa! She shouldn’t have stopped. Why the fuck did she stop?
FERGUSON UNIT, TDCJ
1986
Lito, Fly, Quiroz stepped up to the microphone at the closing of the Kairos weekend and delivered a profound, if brief, report as to his thoughts of the weekend he had just experienced.
”Forgive my Englich, I no speak so good. They call me Fly because I so small and nobody see my eyes. Nobody know what I think. I wear this glasses so nobody see me. I take them off now for you. You good people an I want you see me. Tank you!”
At monthly reunions of the Kairos community at Ferguson, Fly would always find a chair next to mine. We didn’t talk much because his English was even more limited than my Spanish, but when there was time to tell our stories, we did find that we could communicate he told me the story and of his family history, but not his crime, not the one that brought him to Ferguson.
Our team of volunteers scheduled a two day retreat for the community every six months. These retreats are very intense, as we all comfortable with one another and for two full days, we eat, laugh and tell our stories. On this particular retreat, Fly followed me around like a dog that has miss-behaved and wants to make up. I could not turn around suddenly lest I run over him.
Following lunch one day, I sought a quiet place behind some filing cabinets and stretched out on my back for a short rest. After a bit, I felt a head lay down touching my head, crown to crown. I knew it was Fly, but nothing was said for several minutes. Fly spoke, “Ike, you the first gringo I trust.”
Gracias, mi hijito.
Fly told me of the night he crushed the skull of the kindly old woman who stopped to help, his deep regret, the guilt he carried for his role in class warfare. By confessing to me, he confessed to all gringos everywhere. By laying crown to crown, no shades were required, I could not see his face as he confessed, weeping as he did so.
Gracias, mi hijito.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
LIFE IN PRISON
WHAT IS PRISON LIFE LIKE?
Ike Griffin
Life in prison is fearful, oppressive, boring and lonely. Prisons, being institutions of great autonomy, isolation and mystery, are fearful places for anyone entering for the first time, whether they enter as an invited guest or as a sentenced felon. The first impression more than likely proves to be quickly justified for the prisoner as the pecking order of prison society absolutely loathes leaving any situation ambiguous. A newcomer is subjected to two orientations; one is a formal presentation delivered by the administration, and the other is more informal, presented by a delegation of inmates. The “new boot” is rapidly brought to an understanding of the prisoners’ code and the current pecking order in place for that particular institution. The informal presentation is often punctuated with threats of, or real, acts of violence. Violence upon inmates is strictly forbidden by prison policy, but administrators cannot protect every inmate unless that inmate agrees to a special prison within the prison called Administrative Segregation. Even there, inmate-to-inmate violence is not unheard of. Fear walks with each inmate for as long as they are incarcerated.
Prison life is oppressive because prison procedures are designed to discourage and disallow individual decisions. Gone are the prisoner’s right to self-expression through personal appearance. Clothes, jewelry, hairstyle and facial hair are all regulated. Gone is any personal wealth an individual may have enjoyed in the free world. Gone is the freedom to communicate by fax or e-mail. Phone conversations are controlled and monitored, and letters are routinely censored. Privacy is a thing of memory. Showering is a public affair and relieving one’s bowels is performed within easy vision of anyone who cares to watch. One eats whatever is served in the mess hall, like it or not, and is allowed only ten minutes to dawdle. Since it is widely accepted that prisoners have come to prison as a result of acting on bad decisions, almost all decisions are removed from a prisoner’s daily experience.
Prisoners are lonely because community is discouraged. Separation and isolation of inmates is reinforced by a negative sub-culture within the prison, where the weak are preyed-on by the strong and sentimentality is viewed as weakness. Love does not happen without vulnerability and vulnerability is disastrous in a prison environment. The only relationships prevalent in prisons are connections based on domination. In such a relationship, neither the master nor the slave is nurtured. The master is served but not satisfied; the slave is allowed to exist by serving the master.
Prison routine is boring because of the unchanging nature of everyday life. One fear-ridden, oppressive and lonely day leads to another and another until a week of the routine is accumulated and that is followed by another week and another until a month has gone by, and that month joins a procession of like months until a complete calendar has passed. Prisoners who have accumulated five, ten, twenty or more calendars are so bored they do not even recognize the boredom. They eat, sleep and move through each day as in a trance, except they are forever vigilant lest some fearful danger befall them. Depression and paranoia are the illnesses of incarceration. Distrustful eyes dart here and there taking in every possible danger, hidden in an expressionless mask of a face. No one can be trusted.
WHAT IS THEIR FUTURE?
Absent programs to help the prisoners break free of isolation, fear and boredom, their future is severely limited. If nothing is done to help them make better decisions, they will continue to make bad decisions. If they do not learn about love, they will be incapable of receiving or giving love. If they do not learn something about parenting skills, they will continue to be sperm-donors for children who will more than likely grow up to be prisoners themselves. If prisoners are not taught social skills, they will continue to be anti-social, and will return time and again to prison, there to be a spending opportunity, or rather an obligation, for public tax dollars.
Ike Griffin
Life in prison is fearful, oppressive, boring and lonely. Prisons, being institutions of great autonomy, isolation and mystery, are fearful places for anyone entering for the first time, whether they enter as an invited guest or as a sentenced felon. The first impression more than likely proves to be quickly justified for the prisoner as the pecking order of prison society absolutely loathes leaving any situation ambiguous. A newcomer is subjected to two orientations; one is a formal presentation delivered by the administration, and the other is more informal, presented by a delegation of inmates. The “new boot” is rapidly brought to an understanding of the prisoners’ code and the current pecking order in place for that particular institution. The informal presentation is often punctuated with threats of, or real, acts of violence. Violence upon inmates is strictly forbidden by prison policy, but administrators cannot protect every inmate unless that inmate agrees to a special prison within the prison called Administrative Segregation. Even there, inmate-to-inmate violence is not unheard of. Fear walks with each inmate for as long as they are incarcerated.
Prison life is oppressive because prison procedures are designed to discourage and disallow individual decisions. Gone are the prisoner’s right to self-expression through personal appearance. Clothes, jewelry, hairstyle and facial hair are all regulated. Gone is any personal wealth an individual may have enjoyed in the free world. Gone is the freedom to communicate by fax or e-mail. Phone conversations are controlled and monitored, and letters are routinely censored. Privacy is a thing of memory. Showering is a public affair and relieving one’s bowels is performed within easy vision of anyone who cares to watch. One eats whatever is served in the mess hall, like it or not, and is allowed only ten minutes to dawdle. Since it is widely accepted that prisoners have come to prison as a result of acting on bad decisions, almost all decisions are removed from a prisoner’s daily experience.
Prisoners are lonely because community is discouraged. Separation and isolation of inmates is reinforced by a negative sub-culture within the prison, where the weak are preyed-on by the strong and sentimentality is viewed as weakness. Love does not happen without vulnerability and vulnerability is disastrous in a prison environment. The only relationships prevalent in prisons are connections based on domination. In such a relationship, neither the master nor the slave is nurtured. The master is served but not satisfied; the slave is allowed to exist by serving the master.
Prison routine is boring because of the unchanging nature of everyday life. One fear-ridden, oppressive and lonely day leads to another and another until a week of the routine is accumulated and that is followed by another week and another until a month has gone by, and that month joins a procession of like months until a complete calendar has passed. Prisoners who have accumulated five, ten, twenty or more calendars are so bored they do not even recognize the boredom. They eat, sleep and move through each day as in a trance, except they are forever vigilant lest some fearful danger befall them. Depression and paranoia are the illnesses of incarceration. Distrustful eyes dart here and there taking in every possible danger, hidden in an expressionless mask of a face. No one can be trusted.
WHAT IS THEIR FUTURE?
Absent programs to help the prisoners break free of isolation, fear and boredom, their future is severely limited. If nothing is done to help them make better decisions, they will continue to make bad decisions. If they do not learn about love, they will be incapable of receiving or giving love. If they do not learn something about parenting skills, they will continue to be sperm-donors for children who will more than likely grow up to be prisoners themselves. If prisoners are not taught social skills, they will continue to be anti-social, and will return time and again to prison, there to be a spending opportunity, or rather an obligation, for public tax dollars.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
PRISONER DEMOGRAPHICS
WHAT DO THEY LOOK LIKE?
WHAT ARE THE DEMOGRAPHICS?
Ike Griffin
Further argument for our social ills stemming from our being unprepared to change from a rural culture to an urban culture can be found in the fact that crime continues to be an urban problem. Almost all crime, at least the crime for which people are caught, tried and sentenced in these post-modern times, takes place in urban settings. Broadly accepted corrections statistics vividly highlight the problem for us:
90% of prisoners come from urban settings.
95% of all inmates will finally be released back into society, having spent time in a graduate program for crime called “prison.”
90% of those released will go back to the community from which they came.
Most of them will re-offend.
The demographics of America’s prisons closely parallel the demographics of her most intensely urban settings. Bruce Katz, Chief of Staff at HUD from 1993 to 1996, outlined the affect of decentralization of urban economies.
“Now the decentralization of the economy has three kinds of spatial effects. The first is on the central city. What we’ve seen since the early 1970s is a growing, alarming concentration of poverty in the central cities. The number of people living in the neighborhoods of high poverty in this country grew from about 4.1 million people in 1970 to about 8 million people in 1990. These are the number of people living in neighborhoods of high poverty where the poverty rate is 40 percent or more. In certain cities like Detroit or Miami, literally 40 percent of the population, of the entire population, is living in neighborhoods of high poverty.” (Address by Bruce Katz, Congregations, the Government and Social Justice, a Brookings Community Development Summit, December 14, 1999, The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.)
Enduring consistency of these demographics has led police organizations to rely upon “profiling” as a means of limiting the scope of search and seizure procedures, thereby setting in motion a wheel of injustice reminiscent of a perpetual motion machine. While vastly more efficient than random sampling for police operations, the result of profiling tends to concentrate urban African American males in prison.
White males and others who populate rural settings tend to be winnowed out of the criminal justice process at several levels; first in the search and seizure process, then in the review process, where those coming from seemingly stable community situations tend to be remanded to their community more than those coming from high poverty/high crime communities. Of course, at the trial stage, those who have resources to throw into the defense effort have a distinct advantage over those of lesser means to escape being sentenced to prison. The wheel turns. Having experienced prison, they are more likely to re-offend, and the wheel turns. Those who are children of parents who have been incarcerated are more than six times more likely to experience prison, and the wheel turns.
As of 1998, forty-seven percent of the adult prison population was made up of African Americans. The percentage rose to a rumored fifty-four percent before retreating to about 50% in 2008. Yes, that’s right! Although African Americans come from less than fifteen percent of the United States total population, they make up near fifty percent of the prison population. They make up a lesser percentage of those receiving a death-sentence.
The American Correctional Association, using Bureau of Justice Statistics, reports:
RACE - INCARCERATED - DEATH SENTENCE
White - 34% - 46%
Black - 47% - 43%
Hispanic - 16% - 09%
All Others - 03% - 02%
WHAT ARE THE DEMOGRAPHICS?
Ike Griffin
Further argument for our social ills stemming from our being unprepared to change from a rural culture to an urban culture can be found in the fact that crime continues to be an urban problem. Almost all crime, at least the crime for which people are caught, tried and sentenced in these post-modern times, takes place in urban settings. Broadly accepted corrections statistics vividly highlight the problem for us:
90% of prisoners come from urban settings.
95% of all inmates will finally be released back into society, having spent time in a graduate program for crime called “prison.”
90% of those released will go back to the community from which they came.
Most of them will re-offend.
The demographics of America’s prisons closely parallel the demographics of her most intensely urban settings. Bruce Katz, Chief of Staff at HUD from 1993 to 1996, outlined the affect of decentralization of urban economies.
“Now the decentralization of the economy has three kinds of spatial effects. The first is on the central city. What we’ve seen since the early 1970s is a growing, alarming concentration of poverty in the central cities. The number of people living in the neighborhoods of high poverty in this country grew from about 4.1 million people in 1970 to about 8 million people in 1990. These are the number of people living in neighborhoods of high poverty where the poverty rate is 40 percent or more. In certain cities like Detroit or Miami, literally 40 percent of the population, of the entire population, is living in neighborhoods of high poverty.” (Address by Bruce Katz, Congregations, the Government and Social Justice, a Brookings Community Development Summit, December 14, 1999, The Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.)
Enduring consistency of these demographics has led police organizations to rely upon “profiling” as a means of limiting the scope of search and seizure procedures, thereby setting in motion a wheel of injustice reminiscent of a perpetual motion machine. While vastly more efficient than random sampling for police operations, the result of profiling tends to concentrate urban African American males in prison.
White males and others who populate rural settings tend to be winnowed out of the criminal justice process at several levels; first in the search and seizure process, then in the review process, where those coming from seemingly stable community situations tend to be remanded to their community more than those coming from high poverty/high crime communities. Of course, at the trial stage, those who have resources to throw into the defense effort have a distinct advantage over those of lesser means to escape being sentenced to prison. The wheel turns. Having experienced prison, they are more likely to re-offend, and the wheel turns. Those who are children of parents who have been incarcerated are more than six times more likely to experience prison, and the wheel turns.
As of 1998, forty-seven percent of the adult prison population was made up of African Americans. The percentage rose to a rumored fifty-four percent before retreating to about 50% in 2008. Yes, that’s right! Although African Americans come from less than fifteen percent of the United States total population, they make up near fifty percent of the prison population. They make up a lesser percentage of those receiving a death-sentence.
The American Correctional Association, using Bureau of Justice Statistics, reports:
RACE - INCARCERATED - DEATH SENTENCE
White - 34% - 46%
Black - 47% - 43%
Hispanic - 16% - 09%
All Others - 03% - 02%
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
PRISONERS
PRISONERS
WHO DO WE HAVE IN THERE?
Ike Griffin
We will always have the greedy gangster types in prison, but their numbers, as a percentage are hugely diminished. I focus here on life experience groups.
The largest group to be found in prison is those who have been sexually abused at an early age. That particular insult or trauma seems to almost guarantee anti-social behavior on the part of the abused. And, sexual abuse quite often becomes their personal crime profile. At a recent program in a youthful offender prison, it was revealed to me that all of the boys in the sex offender wing had themselves suffered sexual abuse as young children.
During seminars in adult men’s prisons, I refer to the accepted statistic that forty percent of the men in prison were sexually abused as children, and almost without exception, the men tell me that a more accurate percentage is twice that number. Whether the figure is forty percent or eighty percent, this is an incredible percentage. The widely accepted frequency of occurrence regarding sexual abuse as children among men living in free society is four percent. If that figure is true, then we can see that the occurrence of sexual abuse increases a child’s chance of experiencing incarceration resulting from criminal activity by an astounding one thousand to two thousand percent! Sexual abuse as a child can be seen as an almost sure ticket to criminal behavior sufficient to warrant incarceration. Heterosexual males are the primary perpetrators of this crime on children.
Two other experience groups are worth mentioning. The two groups are the homosexual and the Vietnam veteran. Both groups are incarcerated in greater frequency than their numbers in society would indicate. Although both groups fall far below the statistical importance of the abused child group, they should be noted because they help identify basic experience that can add to criminal behavior society. I believe that both these groups have suffered rejection by society leading to an identity crisis strong enough to turn them to anti-social behavior. One group is a state of being and is therefore endemic, the second is both experiential and time-related and therefore self-eliminating.
Yes, there is a lot of homosexual activity in prisons, but most of it is exercised by heterosexuals and is decidedly not voluntary. Homosexual activity abounds in prisons simply because there are no other outlets for sexuality. Homosexuals did not deliberately come to prison to participate in homosexual activity, and the large majority of those I have known hide the fact of their homosexuality even more closely in prison than they did in the free world.
And yes, Vietnam veterans were exposed to unusual forces introducing them to drugs while on active duty, but drugs alone did not bring them to prison in such great numbers. The argument for rejection being the causal experience for each group is further born out in the fact that both groups also experience an extremely high suicide rate.
WHO DO WE HAVE IN THERE?
Ike Griffin
We will always have the greedy gangster types in prison, but their numbers, as a percentage are hugely diminished. I focus here on life experience groups.
The largest group to be found in prison is those who have been sexually abused at an early age. That particular insult or trauma seems to almost guarantee anti-social behavior on the part of the abused. And, sexual abuse quite often becomes their personal crime profile. At a recent program in a youthful offender prison, it was revealed to me that all of the boys in the sex offender wing had themselves suffered sexual abuse as young children.
During seminars in adult men’s prisons, I refer to the accepted statistic that forty percent of the men in prison were sexually abused as children, and almost without exception, the men tell me that a more accurate percentage is twice that number. Whether the figure is forty percent or eighty percent, this is an incredible percentage. The widely accepted frequency of occurrence regarding sexual abuse as children among men living in free society is four percent. If that figure is true, then we can see that the occurrence of sexual abuse increases a child’s chance of experiencing incarceration resulting from criminal activity by an astounding one thousand to two thousand percent! Sexual abuse as a child can be seen as an almost sure ticket to criminal behavior sufficient to warrant incarceration. Heterosexual males are the primary perpetrators of this crime on children.
Two other experience groups are worth mentioning. The two groups are the homosexual and the Vietnam veteran. Both groups are incarcerated in greater frequency than their numbers in society would indicate. Although both groups fall far below the statistical importance of the abused child group, they should be noted because they help identify basic experience that can add to criminal behavior society. I believe that both these groups have suffered rejection by society leading to an identity crisis strong enough to turn them to anti-social behavior. One group is a state of being and is therefore endemic, the second is both experiential and time-related and therefore self-eliminating.
Yes, there is a lot of homosexual activity in prisons, but most of it is exercised by heterosexuals and is decidedly not voluntary. Homosexual activity abounds in prisons simply because there are no other outlets for sexuality. Homosexuals did not deliberately come to prison to participate in homosexual activity, and the large majority of those I have known hide the fact of their homosexuality even more closely in prison than they did in the free world.
And yes, Vietnam veterans were exposed to unusual forces introducing them to drugs while on active duty, but drugs alone did not bring them to prison in such great numbers. The argument for rejection being the causal experience for each group is further born out in the fact that both groups also experience an extremely high suicide rate.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
THE ROAD TO PRISON
THE ROAD TO PRISON
BUILDING A NEGATIVE CULTURE
Ike Griffin
U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics release December 7, 2009: the United States of America can count almost 2 million in its jails and prisons, and 5.1 million more under Community Corrections of the criminal-justice system, on probation or parole or awaiting trial. This is the highest number that any country on earth has ever achieved at any time in our known history. The United States not only holds the numerical record, but the highest percentage record as well. We are the incarceration capitol of the world! With four percent of the world’s population, the United States claims twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners.
WHAT LED US HERE?
Over the past three decades, the prison population profile has changed from the archetypal gangster model once portrayed in cinema by Edward G. Robinson. In the first half of the twentieth century, most of those in prison were there for either crimes of passion, or for crimes committed in pursuit of riches; that is, gangsters. America was still largely a rural society, guided by Northern European mores. Gangsters, driven by greed, set aside family traditions and values in pursuit of a fast track to the American dream. Kidnapping, bank-robbing, high-jacking, extortion, confidence games, prostitution, gambling, bootlegging, were popular crimes for those in a hurry to “be somebody” in a competitive environment that admires and honors success.
The last half of the twentieth century brought rapid migration and transition from rural-based to urban-based society. Rather than building urban community, America opted for urban sprawl. Urban development moved toward bedroom communities with homes on the largest possible lots, leading to dependency upon the private automobile. Education was organized toward ethnically biased districts. This all contributed to further isolate individuals, families, ethnic groups and communities. Our institutions became a collection of ghettos representing various races, religions, ideologies and social mores. In such an environment ethnic gangs replaced parental guidance.
Today’s convict is younger, a school dropout, and comes to prison as a result of drug and alcohol use or commerce. Drugs and alcohol, however, are more symptom than source when related to the origins of criminal activity by individuals. Gangs, drugs and alcohol are vehicles rather than cause. Abuse and absentee fathers is the common link relating eighty to ninety percent of the incarcerated population. There are inmates who come from loving families, but they are rare. It is not so rare to find inmates with families that love them, but there is normally a family member from the past, now more than likely gone, who did the damage before departing the scene. Sometimes, the offending party is still in the family and in denial of any complicity, thus rendering problematic re-unification of the family.
Typically, today’s inmate was abused, physically or mentally, at a very young age, usually before the age of eight. Children seem to be able to cope with an abusive environment quite well. They learn to fend for themselves, hide during times of extreme tension in the family and appear during more relaxed times. They know when to be quiet and when to complain. As small children, they tend to mask their feelings and besides, they do not have an adults capacity for destruction. Abused children grow into puberty pretty well intact as civilized human beings. It is during puberty that the problems begin to surface.
Puberty is doubly hard on an abused kid. Their bodies tell them that they need intimate relationships with others and their experience tells them they can be hurt, that they cannot trust people in a close relationship. Tension between the need for intimate relationship and distrust of intimacy brings enough pain to the maturing individual that alcohol and drugs are sought as an escape from their experience. Concurrent with the self medication, anti-social behavior brings them into conflict with the criminal justice system.
HENRY’S STORY
Henry’s grandmother told me, “Every child deserves at least one good parent – Henry didn’t have even one.”
PAUL’S STORY
Paul, a young man accepted into Mensa International while still incarcerated, told me one night as we spoke of forgiveness, “I can forgive everyone but my father. That, I could never do.”
JAMES’ STORY
James said, “I had good family support! My grandmother tried hard to bring me up right. Mama worked and couldn’t get by very often – she always promised to come for birthdays and bring me a present, but she always called at the last minute and apologized. I didn’t know my dad, but Mama told me some things about him.”
JEREMY’S STORY
Jeremy left home at the age of ten after being repeatedly sodomized by his stepfather. He grew up on the streets, found a “sugar-daddy” who took him in but led him into drug delivery and male prostitution. After his first arrest, his older sister agreed to give him a home, but he had to sleep in the closet among the shoes and was threatened with expulsion if he didn’t remain quiet while his sister entertained her “boyfriends” in the bedroom. Tried as an adult, Jeremy was sent to a men’s prison at age fifteen. As a frail and attractive inmate, Jeremy was “used as a woman” in prison just as he had been in the free world. Now thirty-two years old and no longer frail, Jeremy has worked his way into influential jobs within the prison that protect him from abuse. He has adopted abstinence as his approach to sex in prison, the only viable option for a heterosexual.
BUILDING A NEGATIVE CULTURE
Ike Griffin
U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics release December 7, 2009: the United States of America can count almost 2 million in its jails and prisons, and 5.1 million more under Community Corrections of the criminal-justice system, on probation or parole or awaiting trial. This is the highest number that any country on earth has ever achieved at any time in our known history. The United States not only holds the numerical record, but the highest percentage record as well. We are the incarceration capitol of the world! With four percent of the world’s population, the United States claims twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners.
WHAT LED US HERE?
Over the past three decades, the prison population profile has changed from the archetypal gangster model once portrayed in cinema by Edward G. Robinson. In the first half of the twentieth century, most of those in prison were there for either crimes of passion, or for crimes committed in pursuit of riches; that is, gangsters. America was still largely a rural society, guided by Northern European mores. Gangsters, driven by greed, set aside family traditions and values in pursuit of a fast track to the American dream. Kidnapping, bank-robbing, high-jacking, extortion, confidence games, prostitution, gambling, bootlegging, were popular crimes for those in a hurry to “be somebody” in a competitive environment that admires and honors success.
The last half of the twentieth century brought rapid migration and transition from rural-based to urban-based society. Rather than building urban community, America opted for urban sprawl. Urban development moved toward bedroom communities with homes on the largest possible lots, leading to dependency upon the private automobile. Education was organized toward ethnically biased districts. This all contributed to further isolate individuals, families, ethnic groups and communities. Our institutions became a collection of ghettos representing various races, religions, ideologies and social mores. In such an environment ethnic gangs replaced parental guidance.
Today’s convict is younger, a school dropout, and comes to prison as a result of drug and alcohol use or commerce. Drugs and alcohol, however, are more symptom than source when related to the origins of criminal activity by individuals. Gangs, drugs and alcohol are vehicles rather than cause. Abuse and absentee fathers is the common link relating eighty to ninety percent of the incarcerated population. There are inmates who come from loving families, but they are rare. It is not so rare to find inmates with families that love them, but there is normally a family member from the past, now more than likely gone, who did the damage before departing the scene. Sometimes, the offending party is still in the family and in denial of any complicity, thus rendering problematic re-unification of the family.
Typically, today’s inmate was abused, physically or mentally, at a very young age, usually before the age of eight. Children seem to be able to cope with an abusive environment quite well. They learn to fend for themselves, hide during times of extreme tension in the family and appear during more relaxed times. They know when to be quiet and when to complain. As small children, they tend to mask their feelings and besides, they do not have an adults capacity for destruction. Abused children grow into puberty pretty well intact as civilized human beings. It is during puberty that the problems begin to surface.
Puberty is doubly hard on an abused kid. Their bodies tell them that they need intimate relationships with others and their experience tells them they can be hurt, that they cannot trust people in a close relationship. Tension between the need for intimate relationship and distrust of intimacy brings enough pain to the maturing individual that alcohol and drugs are sought as an escape from their experience. Concurrent with the self medication, anti-social behavior brings them into conflict with the criminal justice system.
HENRY’S STORY
Henry’s grandmother told me, “Every child deserves at least one good parent – Henry didn’t have even one.”
PAUL’S STORY
Paul, a young man accepted into Mensa International while still incarcerated, told me one night as we spoke of forgiveness, “I can forgive everyone but my father. That, I could never do.”
JAMES’ STORY
James said, “I had good family support! My grandmother tried hard to bring me up right. Mama worked and couldn’t get by very often – she always promised to come for birthdays and bring me a present, but she always called at the last minute and apologized. I didn’t know my dad, but Mama told me some things about him.”
JEREMY’S STORY
Jeremy left home at the age of ten after being repeatedly sodomized by his stepfather. He grew up on the streets, found a “sugar-daddy” who took him in but led him into drug delivery and male prostitution. After his first arrest, his older sister agreed to give him a home, but he had to sleep in the closet among the shoes and was threatened with expulsion if he didn’t remain quiet while his sister entertained her “boyfriends” in the bedroom. Tried as an adult, Jeremy was sent to a men’s prison at age fifteen. As a frail and attractive inmate, Jeremy was “used as a woman” in prison just as he had been in the free world. Now thirty-two years old and no longer frail, Jeremy has worked his way into influential jobs within the prison that protect him from abuse. He has adopted abstinence as his approach to sex in prison, the only viable option for a heterosexual.
Friday, December 4, 2009
HARDENING THE HEART
PRISONS – UNGODLY!
A Hard Place
By Ike Griffin
Prisons, by design, are built to isolate wrongdoers from society. For the majority of the voting public isolation is the acceptable goal of criminal justice systems. Abandoned is the general practice of optimistically referring to prison in optimistic terms like reformatory or penitentiary. “Corrections” has lost its meaning in relation to what is expected of the department. Expectation wanes that the correctional system will or can correct behavior or address rehabilitation. The expected function of the Criminal Justice system has been reduced to that of assuring citizenry that wrongdoers will be separated from the good people of our society. Nothing more is really required. We do not want prisons in our back yards and we do not want wrongdoers living among us. Following this dictum of the voting public, corrections in America has tried to build enough prisons in remote locations to warehouse wrongdoers.
At the same time, mandatory minimum sentences were established for judges to impose for specified crimes, and sever limitations were placed on “gain time” earned by prisoners for good behavior. Prison sentences have been lengthened to a point where prison construction threatens state budgets and there is an emerging public awareness that visible government programs, such as education and care for elderly, that have strong voiced constituencies, are being curtailed because of funding demands for corrections, a largely invisible function of the government wii a mute constituency. Resentment against public funds expended on prisoners has been a natural consequence. Finite tax revenues are spread over governmental functions, and when expenditures for incarceration began to equal that spent on education, resentment erupted into demands for more Spartan treatment of prisoners.
Critical choices had to be made against applying money for rehabilitative programs for inmates in favor of holding a growing, and aging number of offenders isolated from society, portending disastrous long-term consequences. Intellectual, moral and financial bankruptcy sits squarely at the end of that road because almost all these offenders will return to society, worse off than when they left.
UNGODLY PLACES
Isolation is the core contributor to prisons being ungodly places. The creator made us in such a way that we thrive in community, and conversely we wither and die in isolation. One might surmise that since prisons are notoriously overcrowded, real isolation should be impossible. Such is not the case. Most residents in prisons do not even know one another’s names. They know someone’s “handle” or a rumor about another prisoner, but intimacy in prison is discouraged and even prohibited. For many years, it was against prison policy for prisoners to converse with one another. Congregation rules were, and are, strictly enforced. A popular parody on scripture concerning prison life says, “Where two or three prisoners are gathered together for any purpose, an officer will be there amongst them.”
Pictures from the 19th century show prisoners walking single file in a large circle in the exercise yard wearing blinkers that prevent them from seeing anywhere accept straight ahead. Even today in the United States there is a tendency in prisons for the residents to not look one another in the eye, to not acknowledge a glance, be it friendly or hostile. One often sees residents standing side-by-side carrying on a conversation without glancing at one another, holding their gaze straight ahead. Neither are prisoners expected to touch one another except in violence. Isolation is built into the ethos of the system, drawing the residents ever deeper into a dark pit of lonely solitude, eroding their souls. State-of-the-art electronically operated super-max prisons are models of sterile isolation. The cruelest examples of these prisons are built completely underground, thus not only isolating the prisoner from other people, but from nature as well. Gone are glimpses of sky, clouds, birds and occasional animals. Present are the hardest and most durable of human manufacture; concrete, iron, tile, stainless steel. Prisons are ungodly places by design.
Isolation does not just apply inmate to inmate. Prisons have rules discouraging rebuilding relationships with family and loved ones in the free world. It is against federal prison rules and most state prison rules for prison volunteers to have contact with the family of the inmates with whom they are working inside the prison. These rules were formulated in pursuit of efforts to eliminate negative alliances, i.e. escape plots, illegal commerce, etc., and they are justified as such. Sweeping everything into the same trashcan, they effectively eliminate efforts to rebuild positive support structures as well.
Most prison volunteers are religious volunteers. Prison personnel say that eighty-to-ninety percent of all volunteers who come into a prison represent one religious faith or another. Ram Cnaan of the University of Pennsylvania, writing for a study done on the correlation of church attendance and social volunteerism, verified the belief
“…that religious organizations and ‘relationships related to religion’ are clearly the major forces mobilizing volunteers in America. Even a third of secular volunteers – people who did not volunteer for specifically religious activities – relate their service ‘to the influence of a relationship based on their religion.’ Sacred places, it seems, serve civic purposes.” BROOKINGS REVIEW, What’s God Got To Do With The American Experiment? By E.J. Dionne, Jr., and John J. DiIulio, Jr., page 6
At the same time, these volunteers are prohibited from having contact with family members of the incarcerated. Since God wills us for community and religious volunteers feel drawn to help heal relational wounds hindering the growth of isolated inmates’ souls, and since volunteers are prohibited that role, we see how prisons tend to be ungodly places.
Gangs are by far the most prevalent social structure in prisons. Gangs have become so pervasive in the prison culture that several states have built gang-control prisons where movement and communication are further restricted. Spontaneous gangs are invented and formed stemming from a deep need for belonging, a need shared by all humanity. Given the environment from which they find root, the vast majority of these gangs, these sub-cultures, are negative in nature, further refining and dividing the residents. Blacks isolate from whites, whites from Hispanics, Hispanics from Asians. Christians hold contempt for Jews and Islamics, heterosexuals hate homosexuals, achievers loathe underachievers, and on and on.
Prisons thus become negative sub-cultures where the strong intimidate the weak. Love is held in contempt. Warmth, relationship and kindness are relentlessly squeezed out of prisoners in a continuing downward spiral of depression, desperation and destruction. Prisons become schools of crime and incubators of more crime.
OPPORTUNITY AND THE COURSE OF HISTORY
Michael Quinlan, former Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, told me years ago:
1. The media drives the machine. Fear and the spectacular sell newsprint and air-time, therefore events engendering fear and violence are exaggerated in the media.
2. A misinformed populace then elect politicians based on their misinformation and fear.
3. Politicians know the policies don’t work, but they cannot speak the truth and at the same time avoid being eliminated from public office at the ballot box.
4. Legislators, in pursuit of positive press, pass ever more restrictive laws and policies to be carried out by the departments of corrections.
5. Professionals in corrections know the policies are flawed, but they are paid to carry out, not shape, policy.
This, then, is our environment of opportunity! The good news is that many criminal justice professionals know that the mandate given them by society does not work, and brave souls among that group are doing their best to demonstrate change within the system. Only the brave lead the way actively as change agents in the corrections environment because prevailing peer pressure still reflects an overwhelming public mandate to warehouse prisoners.
The good news today is that state budgets are ravaged, requiring tough on crime policies to be revisited. Truth is dawning that years of being tough on crime has an untenable price-tag. Taxpayers are demanding states be “smart on crime” rather than tough. The economic issue may force the right thing to be done.
A Hard Place
By Ike Griffin
Prisons, by design, are built to isolate wrongdoers from society. For the majority of the voting public isolation is the acceptable goal of criminal justice systems. Abandoned is the general practice of optimistically referring to prison in optimistic terms like reformatory or penitentiary. “Corrections” has lost its meaning in relation to what is expected of the department. Expectation wanes that the correctional system will or can correct behavior or address rehabilitation. The expected function of the Criminal Justice system has been reduced to that of assuring citizenry that wrongdoers will be separated from the good people of our society. Nothing more is really required. We do not want prisons in our back yards and we do not want wrongdoers living among us. Following this dictum of the voting public, corrections in America has tried to build enough prisons in remote locations to warehouse wrongdoers.
At the same time, mandatory minimum sentences were established for judges to impose for specified crimes, and sever limitations were placed on “gain time” earned by prisoners for good behavior. Prison sentences have been lengthened to a point where prison construction threatens state budgets and there is an emerging public awareness that visible government programs, such as education and care for elderly, that have strong voiced constituencies, are being curtailed because of funding demands for corrections, a largely invisible function of the government wii a mute constituency. Resentment against public funds expended on prisoners has been a natural consequence. Finite tax revenues are spread over governmental functions, and when expenditures for incarceration began to equal that spent on education, resentment erupted into demands for more Spartan treatment of prisoners.
Critical choices had to be made against applying money for rehabilitative programs for inmates in favor of holding a growing, and aging number of offenders isolated from society, portending disastrous long-term consequences. Intellectual, moral and financial bankruptcy sits squarely at the end of that road because almost all these offenders will return to society, worse off than when they left.
UNGODLY PLACES
Isolation is the core contributor to prisons being ungodly places. The creator made us in such a way that we thrive in community, and conversely we wither and die in isolation. One might surmise that since prisons are notoriously overcrowded, real isolation should be impossible. Such is not the case. Most residents in prisons do not even know one another’s names. They know someone’s “handle” or a rumor about another prisoner, but intimacy in prison is discouraged and even prohibited. For many years, it was against prison policy for prisoners to converse with one another. Congregation rules were, and are, strictly enforced. A popular parody on scripture concerning prison life says, “Where two or three prisoners are gathered together for any purpose, an officer will be there amongst them.”
Pictures from the 19th century show prisoners walking single file in a large circle in the exercise yard wearing blinkers that prevent them from seeing anywhere accept straight ahead. Even today in the United States there is a tendency in prisons for the residents to not look one another in the eye, to not acknowledge a glance, be it friendly or hostile. One often sees residents standing side-by-side carrying on a conversation without glancing at one another, holding their gaze straight ahead. Neither are prisoners expected to touch one another except in violence. Isolation is built into the ethos of the system, drawing the residents ever deeper into a dark pit of lonely solitude, eroding their souls. State-of-the-art electronically operated super-max prisons are models of sterile isolation. The cruelest examples of these prisons are built completely underground, thus not only isolating the prisoner from other people, but from nature as well. Gone are glimpses of sky, clouds, birds and occasional animals. Present are the hardest and most durable of human manufacture; concrete, iron, tile, stainless steel. Prisons are ungodly places by design.
Isolation does not just apply inmate to inmate. Prisons have rules discouraging rebuilding relationships with family and loved ones in the free world. It is against federal prison rules and most state prison rules for prison volunteers to have contact with the family of the inmates with whom they are working inside the prison. These rules were formulated in pursuit of efforts to eliminate negative alliances, i.e. escape plots, illegal commerce, etc., and they are justified as such. Sweeping everything into the same trashcan, they effectively eliminate efforts to rebuild positive support structures as well.
Most prison volunteers are religious volunteers. Prison personnel say that eighty-to-ninety percent of all volunteers who come into a prison represent one religious faith or another. Ram Cnaan of the University of Pennsylvania, writing for a study done on the correlation of church attendance and social volunteerism, verified the belief
“…that religious organizations and ‘relationships related to religion’ are clearly the major forces mobilizing volunteers in America. Even a third of secular volunteers – people who did not volunteer for specifically religious activities – relate their service ‘to the influence of a relationship based on their religion.’ Sacred places, it seems, serve civic purposes.” BROOKINGS REVIEW, What’s God Got To Do With The American Experiment? By E.J. Dionne, Jr., and John J. DiIulio, Jr., page 6
At the same time, these volunteers are prohibited from having contact with family members of the incarcerated. Since God wills us for community and religious volunteers feel drawn to help heal relational wounds hindering the growth of isolated inmates’ souls, and since volunteers are prohibited that role, we see how prisons tend to be ungodly places.
Gangs are by far the most prevalent social structure in prisons. Gangs have become so pervasive in the prison culture that several states have built gang-control prisons where movement and communication are further restricted. Spontaneous gangs are invented and formed stemming from a deep need for belonging, a need shared by all humanity. Given the environment from which they find root, the vast majority of these gangs, these sub-cultures, are negative in nature, further refining and dividing the residents. Blacks isolate from whites, whites from Hispanics, Hispanics from Asians. Christians hold contempt for Jews and Islamics, heterosexuals hate homosexuals, achievers loathe underachievers, and on and on.
Prisons thus become negative sub-cultures where the strong intimidate the weak. Love is held in contempt. Warmth, relationship and kindness are relentlessly squeezed out of prisoners in a continuing downward spiral of depression, desperation and destruction. Prisons become schools of crime and incubators of more crime.
OPPORTUNITY AND THE COURSE OF HISTORY
Michael Quinlan, former Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, told me years ago:
1. The media drives the machine. Fear and the spectacular sell newsprint and air-time, therefore events engendering fear and violence are exaggerated in the media.
2. A misinformed populace then elect politicians based on their misinformation and fear.
3. Politicians know the policies don’t work, but they cannot speak the truth and at the same time avoid being eliminated from public office at the ballot box.
4. Legislators, in pursuit of positive press, pass ever more restrictive laws and policies to be carried out by the departments of corrections.
5. Professionals in corrections know the policies are flawed, but they are paid to carry out, not shape, policy.
This, then, is our environment of opportunity! The good news is that many criminal justice professionals know that the mandate given them by society does not work, and brave souls among that group are doing their best to demonstrate change within the system. Only the brave lead the way actively as change agents in the corrections environment because prevailing peer pressure still reflects an overwhelming public mandate to warehouse prisoners.
The good news today is that state budgets are ravaged, requiring tough on crime policies to be revisited. Truth is dawning that years of being tough on crime has an untenable price-tag. Taxpayers are demanding states be “smart on crime” rather than tough. The economic issue may force the right thing to be done.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
HOW DID WE GET IN THIS MESS?
HOW DID WE GET INTO THIS MESS?
ORIGINS OF PREVAILING PHILOSOPHY GOVERNING PRISONS
by Ike Griffin
WELCOME
“ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE” is chiseled above the prisoner entrance to Dartmoor Prison in England. This admonition, aptly applied to the prison environment, is a phrase borrowed from an inscription over the Gates of Hell in Dante Alighieri’s classic, “Inferno”.
I AM THE WAY INTO THE CITY OF WOE.
I AM THE WAY TO A FORSAKEN PEOPLE.
I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL SORROW.
SACRED JUSTICE MOVED MY ARCHITECT.
I WAS RAISED HERE BY DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE,
PRIMORDIAL LOVE AND ULTIMATE INTELLECT.
ONLY THOSE ELEMENTS TIME CANNOT WEAR
WERE MADE BEFORE ME, AND BEYOND TIME I STAND.
ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.
The phrase is echoed throughout, and sets the theme for, the 19th century Australian classic, For the Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke . Its message is quite clear; “having been found guilty of violating the laws of our society, life as you know it is finished!” That succinct assessment of life in prison is not applied exclusively to prisons of an earlier age. The same notation may be seen, less conspicuously, in other prison reception areas, occasionally in the United States. The phrase is repeated and recognized among correctional professionals and reflects a deeply entrenched attitude regarding prisoners and their plight. Harsh as it is, the phrase echoes public sentiment.
America was born during the industrial revolution, a period which brought the need for foreign sources of raw materials to supply factories of industrial Europe. England, along with the other maritime powers, hastened to colonize Africa, the Americas, Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. England achieved the greater voice in North American culture and our legal system was largely derived from the English model. Corrections in the United States inherited much of its methodology from the British Prison Service.
“Punishment in English criminal law was intended to be quick and public to serve as a deterrent to other crime. Thus, forms of punishment ranged from shaming display- the pillory, mutilation, branding, public stocks, and ducking stools–to severe and aggravated capital punishments-hanging, drowning, burning, burial alive, or decapitation…”
Two methodologies are worthy of examination because they readily demonstrate contrasts in financial and rehabilitative efficiency; 1) holding prisoners in public stocks in the town square, and 2) transporting prisoners out of sight and mind. The first was perhaps the most efficient correctional procedure ever devised by man. The second is the most costly and destructive to any society that chooses to adopt the concept, and it prevails today as philosophical guide for our correctional systems.
THE PUBLIC STOCKS
The public stocks approach represented the most efficient method for punishing the crime perpetrator because, while it cost the community little, it provided all the elements essential to positively influence behavior:
1. establishment of authority
2. punishment of the offender
3. victim/perpetrator confrontation or satisfaction
4. forgiveness
5. acceptance of the perpetrator back into society.
After a perpetrator had been found guilty, he could be sentenced to the public stocks, normally located in the town-square. Displaying the hapless perpetrator, pilloried on public exhibition, was humiliating, demeaning, and was considered punishment by all who witnessed the spectacle. The very act of being publicly punished in the town square, available to public scorn, clearly and demonstrably established the authority of the community to punish violators of their laws, reminding the offending party, the community and potential crime perpetrators, of that authority and also vividly demonstrated the consequences of crime. The local citizenry was free to tell the prisoner what they thought of his criminal behavior, to low-rate and scorn him, but they could not physically hurt the prisoner. They were absolutely free to verbally abuse him, but could not physically strike him. Victim/perpetrator confrontation occurred in a natural, anticipated manner, extremes held in check and tempered by public visibility. Confrontation between perpetrator and victim, the two most intimately involved parties to the crime, was integral to the process.
Sympathetic and compassionate souls among the community had the opportunity to occasionally provide a drink of water or even spoon-feed the hapless prisoner. If they did not come to the prisoner’s aid, the prisoner received nothing, for he was absolutely helpless in his condition and nothing was provided for his comfort by the authorities.
A helpless and powerless condition was then, just as it remains today, fertile ground for the possibility of transformation. Absent a broken condition, there is scant chance of transformation in any of us, and possibilities for transformation extended beyond hope for the prisoner to include the community. If a single individual from the community demonstrated compassion, it began a creative transformation. A seed of compassion often generates a life of its own, first working jointly on the prisoner and on the person offering compassion, but then spreading throughout the entire community, following the creative nature of the universe.
Having been the recipient of compassion, the prisoner could then recognize a reality of the creative order; that is our dependency and reliance upon one another. As the sun set on the third day of punishment, the local sheriff or constable, in the company of a clergy or local church authority, would typically approach the public stocks. The sheriff would, with some local fanfare and ceremony, unlock the constraint and the clergy would bless the individual and add an admonishment to “go and sin no more.”
Having vented their anger and frustration directly at the offender, the offended were more apt to be able to forgive. Clearly, they would view the offender with suspicion and be wary upon future chance meetings, but they were more inclined to accept the offender back into the community, having had the opportunity to display their own wounds and personally view administration of punishment.
From all reports, recidivism in conjunction with corrections administered via the public stocks was not much of a problem. Once experienced, the public stocks were not often re-visited. The cost, as mentioned, was minimal.
TRANSPORTATION
Transporting British prisoners out of sight and mind helped populate these colonies. For 150 years beginning in 1615, English prisoners were transported aboard “hulks” to indentured servitude in the American colonies, ending with the outbreak of the War for Independence in 1776. English were then forced to transport their prisoners on the longer voyage to Australia. Australia and America thus became beneficiaries of both the English genetic pool and British judicial philosophy.
British judicial philosophy was shaped by the Battle of Hastings, when the Norman, King Richard, prevailed in the field of battle and set up a new order, later outlined in the Magna Carta and signed at Runnymede on June 15, 1215. That celebrated document not only gave rights to serfs, previously governed by rules set forth by their individual landlords, who may or may not have possessed a benevolent bone, but the document also removed victims from the crime/punishment equation. The Magna Carta established the judicial philosophy that all crimes, regardless of the victim, were henceforth seen as offenses against the King’s peace.
From that day forward, all accused perpetrators came against the full weight of the King’s court. Regardless of whether the accusations against them were for stealing a loaf of bread from the baker or robbing a bank, whether for carelessly injuring someone or cold blooded murder, whether it be for domestic violence or public terrorism, all accused faced the might of the government’s court. Regardless of an individual’s ability to defend himself, the full weight of the King’s Court came against him. If the accused was found guilty, the king then had the right and the duty to punish the perpetrator, along with the right to confiscate assets belonging to the guilty in compensation for the costs of conviction and punishment. If the accused had personal resources to throw into a defense effort, the court contest was more evenly balanced. If limited or no personal assets were available for defense, whatever was perceived as best for the king’s interests usually prevailed.
The disproportionate nature of resources available to trial contestants may seem unfair, but it was a marked improvement and a definite step up from the church-sanctioned “trial by ordeal” that prevailed during the Dark Ages of European history. “Trial by ordeal” meant that specific ordeals were imposed, such as keelhauling, ducking, or carrying a red-hot ingot for a prescribed distance, as trials for specific crimes. If the accused lived through the ordeal, or healed rapidly, it was proof that they were not guilty, that God was on their side and had protected them, just as God had protected Shadrach, Meshack, and Abednego when they were accused of disobedience to Nebuchadnezzar and thrown into the furnace.
BIRTH OF NIMBY
The practice of punishment via the public stocks was soon abandoned after the revolution in a spirit of freedom and perhaps an unconscious need to re-invent things British into a more American mode. The Quakers of Pennsylvania came up with the idea of the penitentiary, or place for the penitents. Left in a cell with a table, a chair and a Bible, prisoners were expected to find redemption.
Transport of long-term prisoners was not an option for the American colonies, but the philosophy remained. Away from the day-to-day scrutiny of the public, prison colonies run by Britain had developed into institutions of highly autonomous nature. Closed to public visibility, prisons were regarded as mysterious places associated with fear and dread. This colonial philosophy regarding incarceration may be seen manifest today in the United States as “Not In My Back Yard,” (NIMBY). The concept engenders a “them and us” mentality that makes difficult, if not rendering impossible, the elements essential to positively influence behavior:
1. authority of the community is diminished (they cannot deal with us),
2. Punishment becomes invisible to the community and denied by the perpetrator,
3. Victim/perpetrator confrontation does not happen and there is no satisfaction,
4. hope of forgiveness is lost,
5. no compassion is seen and successful re-entry into society highly unlikely.
And yet, we continue to be driven by the philosophy even though it has not been effective as a restorative force in society and the costs are reaching a prohibitive level.
ORIGINS OF PREVAILING PHILOSOPHY GOVERNING PRISONS
by Ike Griffin
WELCOME
“ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE” is chiseled above the prisoner entrance to Dartmoor Prison in England. This admonition, aptly applied to the prison environment, is a phrase borrowed from an inscription over the Gates of Hell in Dante Alighieri’s classic, “Inferno”.
I AM THE WAY INTO THE CITY OF WOE.
I AM THE WAY TO A FORSAKEN PEOPLE.
I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL SORROW.
SACRED JUSTICE MOVED MY ARCHITECT.
I WAS RAISED HERE BY DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE,
PRIMORDIAL LOVE AND ULTIMATE INTELLECT.
ONLY THOSE ELEMENTS TIME CANNOT WEAR
WERE MADE BEFORE ME, AND BEYOND TIME I STAND.
ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.
The phrase is echoed throughout, and sets the theme for, the 19th century Australian classic, For the Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke . Its message is quite clear; “having been found guilty of violating the laws of our society, life as you know it is finished!” That succinct assessment of life in prison is not applied exclusively to prisons of an earlier age. The same notation may be seen, less conspicuously, in other prison reception areas, occasionally in the United States. The phrase is repeated and recognized among correctional professionals and reflects a deeply entrenched attitude regarding prisoners and their plight. Harsh as it is, the phrase echoes public sentiment.
America was born during the industrial revolution, a period which brought the need for foreign sources of raw materials to supply factories of industrial Europe. England, along with the other maritime powers, hastened to colonize Africa, the Americas, Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. England achieved the greater voice in North American culture and our legal system was largely derived from the English model. Corrections in the United States inherited much of its methodology from the British Prison Service.
“Punishment in English criminal law was intended to be quick and public to serve as a deterrent to other crime. Thus, forms of punishment ranged from shaming display- the pillory, mutilation, branding, public stocks, and ducking stools–to severe and aggravated capital punishments-hanging, drowning, burning, burial alive, or decapitation…”
Two methodologies are worthy of examination because they readily demonstrate contrasts in financial and rehabilitative efficiency; 1) holding prisoners in public stocks in the town square, and 2) transporting prisoners out of sight and mind. The first was perhaps the most efficient correctional procedure ever devised by man. The second is the most costly and destructive to any society that chooses to adopt the concept, and it prevails today as philosophical guide for our correctional systems.
THE PUBLIC STOCKS
The public stocks approach represented the most efficient method for punishing the crime perpetrator because, while it cost the community little, it provided all the elements essential to positively influence behavior:
1. establishment of authority
2. punishment of the offender
3. victim/perpetrator confrontation or satisfaction
4. forgiveness
5. acceptance of the perpetrator back into society.
After a perpetrator had been found guilty, he could be sentenced to the public stocks, normally located in the town-square. Displaying the hapless perpetrator, pilloried on public exhibition, was humiliating, demeaning, and was considered punishment by all who witnessed the spectacle. The very act of being publicly punished in the town square, available to public scorn, clearly and demonstrably established the authority of the community to punish violators of their laws, reminding the offending party, the community and potential crime perpetrators, of that authority and also vividly demonstrated the consequences of crime. The local citizenry was free to tell the prisoner what they thought of his criminal behavior, to low-rate and scorn him, but they could not physically hurt the prisoner. They were absolutely free to verbally abuse him, but could not physically strike him. Victim/perpetrator confrontation occurred in a natural, anticipated manner, extremes held in check and tempered by public visibility. Confrontation between perpetrator and victim, the two most intimately involved parties to the crime, was integral to the process.
Sympathetic and compassionate souls among the community had the opportunity to occasionally provide a drink of water or even spoon-feed the hapless prisoner. If they did not come to the prisoner’s aid, the prisoner received nothing, for he was absolutely helpless in his condition and nothing was provided for his comfort by the authorities.
A helpless and powerless condition was then, just as it remains today, fertile ground for the possibility of transformation. Absent a broken condition, there is scant chance of transformation in any of us, and possibilities for transformation extended beyond hope for the prisoner to include the community. If a single individual from the community demonstrated compassion, it began a creative transformation. A seed of compassion often generates a life of its own, first working jointly on the prisoner and on the person offering compassion, but then spreading throughout the entire community, following the creative nature of the universe.
Having been the recipient of compassion, the prisoner could then recognize a reality of the creative order; that is our dependency and reliance upon one another. As the sun set on the third day of punishment, the local sheriff or constable, in the company of a clergy or local church authority, would typically approach the public stocks. The sheriff would, with some local fanfare and ceremony, unlock the constraint and the clergy would bless the individual and add an admonishment to “go and sin no more.”
Having vented their anger and frustration directly at the offender, the offended were more apt to be able to forgive. Clearly, they would view the offender with suspicion and be wary upon future chance meetings, but they were more inclined to accept the offender back into the community, having had the opportunity to display their own wounds and personally view administration of punishment.
From all reports, recidivism in conjunction with corrections administered via the public stocks was not much of a problem. Once experienced, the public stocks were not often re-visited. The cost, as mentioned, was minimal.
TRANSPORTATION
Transporting British prisoners out of sight and mind helped populate these colonies. For 150 years beginning in 1615, English prisoners were transported aboard “hulks” to indentured servitude in the American colonies, ending with the outbreak of the War for Independence in 1776. English were then forced to transport their prisoners on the longer voyage to Australia. Australia and America thus became beneficiaries of both the English genetic pool and British judicial philosophy.
British judicial philosophy was shaped by the Battle of Hastings, when the Norman, King Richard, prevailed in the field of battle and set up a new order, later outlined in the Magna Carta and signed at Runnymede on June 15, 1215. That celebrated document not only gave rights to serfs, previously governed by rules set forth by their individual landlords, who may or may not have possessed a benevolent bone, but the document also removed victims from the crime/punishment equation. The Magna Carta established the judicial philosophy that all crimes, regardless of the victim, were henceforth seen as offenses against the King’s peace.
From that day forward, all accused perpetrators came against the full weight of the King’s court. Regardless of whether the accusations against them were for stealing a loaf of bread from the baker or robbing a bank, whether for carelessly injuring someone or cold blooded murder, whether it be for domestic violence or public terrorism, all accused faced the might of the government’s court. Regardless of an individual’s ability to defend himself, the full weight of the King’s Court came against him. If the accused was found guilty, the king then had the right and the duty to punish the perpetrator, along with the right to confiscate assets belonging to the guilty in compensation for the costs of conviction and punishment. If the accused had personal resources to throw into a defense effort, the court contest was more evenly balanced. If limited or no personal assets were available for defense, whatever was perceived as best for the king’s interests usually prevailed.
The disproportionate nature of resources available to trial contestants may seem unfair, but it was a marked improvement and a definite step up from the church-sanctioned “trial by ordeal” that prevailed during the Dark Ages of European history. “Trial by ordeal” meant that specific ordeals were imposed, such as keelhauling, ducking, or carrying a red-hot ingot for a prescribed distance, as trials for specific crimes. If the accused lived through the ordeal, or healed rapidly, it was proof that they were not guilty, that God was on their side and had protected them, just as God had protected Shadrach, Meshack, and Abednego when they were accused of disobedience to Nebuchadnezzar and thrown into the furnace.
BIRTH OF NIMBY
The practice of punishment via the public stocks was soon abandoned after the revolution in a spirit of freedom and perhaps an unconscious need to re-invent things British into a more American mode. The Quakers of Pennsylvania came up with the idea of the penitentiary, or place for the penitents. Left in a cell with a table, a chair and a Bible, prisoners were expected to find redemption.
Transport of long-term prisoners was not an option for the American colonies, but the philosophy remained. Away from the day-to-day scrutiny of the public, prison colonies run by Britain had developed into institutions of highly autonomous nature. Closed to public visibility, prisons were regarded as mysterious places associated with fear and dread. This colonial philosophy regarding incarceration may be seen manifest today in the United States as “Not In My Back Yard,” (NIMBY). The concept engenders a “them and us” mentality that makes difficult, if not rendering impossible, the elements essential to positively influence behavior:
1. authority of the community is diminished (they cannot deal with us),
2. Punishment becomes invisible to the community and denied by the perpetrator,
3. Victim/perpetrator confrontation does not happen and there is no satisfaction,
4. hope of forgiveness is lost,
5. no compassion is seen and successful re-entry into society highly unlikely.
And yet, we continue to be driven by the philosophy even though it has not been effective as a restorative force in society and the costs are reaching a prohibitive level.
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