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.