I just posted a blog about the art of stillness, but I find myself scattered all over the place - the very opposite of still and focused. It is Monday when I am writing this. I am in the midst of doing normal Monday tasks, responding to phone calls, finishing up some arrangements for my departure Thursday morning to Pittsburgh and Wheeling, and wanting to write my daily blog. I keep practicing focusing on my breathing so that I can be still enough to listen to the muse just in case he/she decides to make a cameo appearance, but so far I am either not being still or the muse has given up on me and is off enjoying the sea on this lovely, sunny morning in Dunedin, Florida.
It has been a good morning for practicing acceptance of all that I cannot control including the fact that I am not going to be allowed to visit an inmate in a maximum security prison in Mount Olive, WV. This 32 year old inmate is a former client of mine who has been “in the system” since he was a pre-teen. He has no family or at least no family, which keeps in touch with him, and no friends who write or keep in touch with him. He has spent much of the first three decades of this life journey surviving with the tools he has picked up from others in institutions and during those brief times he has been on the streets on the outside. He has used alcohol and possibly other drugs, his size and his ability to fight as his primary survival tools. It is easy to see why he has, in the past, held on to these tools. Certainly, when available, alcohol and/or other numbing drugs have helped him avoid the pain of being with himself and his sense of aloneness. As we know these tools do not help for long and results in new problems, but they do help temporarily. Fighting is also a way to protect oneself on the streets and in institutions such as prisons. If one is good at fighting one has a certain power. It not only helps to protect one physically. It keeps people from getting too emotionally close. If one does not have people one can trust in one’s life, one has to do all can to keep other people from being too close emotionally or physically.
When one has been in the system for some time and has the reputation of being an effective fighter, other inmates learn that if they want to establish their place in the prison hierarchy they need to challenge people such as my client to a fight. If they win they then establish their place in the hierarchy. The person who lost must then re-establish their place or face getting treated very badly by the inmates who now feel that they can bully him (or her in a women’s prison)
It was not surprising to me that when this young man was out of prison for a short time he eventually relapsed and, while drunk, got into a fight, was arrested and returned to prison. It also was not surprising to learn that not long after he got to the maximum-security prison he was challenged to a fight, fought, and was then put in isolation. He has been in isolation for the better part of two years (I do not recall the exact dates). In isolation, my understanding is that he is in his cell 23 hours a day and not allowed to earn money at a prison job or have contact with other inmates. I have no ideal how the prison authorities have justified keeping him in isolation for so long or how they expect this young man to learn how to function well enough to stay out of prison in the future when he is finally released. Since the prison counselor has never contacted me and no one else has the prison seems to be able to tell me how they are justifying their treatment of this man, I only have what limited information the man has given me. He has not given me permission to appeal his case to the governor or others. It is possible that there is more to the story than he has told me. Certainly, it is possible that even with me he has not felt safe in telling me everything. On the other hand, he certainly seems to be very open in his letters to me.
I know that there is a part of him, which is hungry to learn. He reads everything he can get. Occasionally I have been able to send him some books and to keep money in his account for stamps. He writes letters, which indicates he is thinking about emotional and spiritual growth. He seems unable to tell me when he might be released or how the prison is justifying keeping him in isolation. My experience is that he is a very kind, bright, thoughtful young man who wants and deserves a chance to develop and share his talents. He is also committed to staying in recovery when he gets out of prison. He was committed to staying out of prison and to working a recovery program when he was released on probation or parole several years ago. Sadly there was not a placement, which provided him the guidance and supervision he needed to achieve his goals. He was accepted to live in a transition house managed by a very spiritual man, but transition houses do not provide the amount of guidance that a person who has been in prison much of his life needs if he is going to learn to live in the world as an adult.
I was able to go visit him over two years ago although the prison did not make it easy to arrange the visit. We were allowed a contact visit which mean that he was brought in with handcuffs and leg shackles. We were also under surveillance by a guard stationed so that he could see through the glass wall where we were visiting.
Since I will be traveling near the prison the end of this week I started two weeks ago to try to get permission to visit him. I kept getting shifted to different people who told me to do x,y or z, all of which I did. A couple of times individuals eventually returned phone calls but it was only to give me one more reason why they were not the one who could authorize a visit and would have to have someone else call me. Eventually, today Monday, yet one more person called me to tell me that there was not an active visitor form completed during the past three years, which I find hard to believe. They also could find no record of my past visit. Today I was told that I would have to write the inmate, have him send me another visitor form to complete. I am then to complete the form and then they will decide if I can visit him in the future. The problem is that I do not know when I again will be in that geographical area. It is over 900 miles from where I live.
Most importantly, I did not talk to anyone who seemed to have the slightest appreciation of the fact that I was staying in touch with this former client or anyone who seemed to have any concern for the welfare of this man. We might as well have been talking about some object, which can easily be discarded, ignored or destroyed.
It is interesting that I have just finished reading a novel by Jeffrey Archer, Mightier than the Sword. Mr. Archer is a man who was educated at Oxford and has served five years in the Britain’s House of Commons and twenty-two in the House of the Lords. He has written a number of books. The one I just completed has, as one of its characters, a man who as taken up the cause of an author in prison in Russia. The man is in prison in Siberia for writing what the Russians consider a subversive book it is a book entitled Uncle Joe, which is about what it was like to work for Joseph Stalin.
I was thinking of how much we and other so called Western nations have criticized Russia and some other countries for this harsh treatments of people who are convicted of a crime. Although the living conditions in the Siberian prison are undoubtedly much harsher than those of Mount Olive Correction Center and other prisons I have visited or worked in her in the United States, the attitude of many (not all) the staff that I have encounter does not seem much different than those Russian law enforcement people depicted by Mr. Archer in his novel.
Again, I am reminded that:
· Our so called system of justice is often about punishing those we are mad at, punishing those who are convicted of breaking a law whether the crime is a so called white collar one or a physically violent street one, punishing those who are mentally ill, or punishing those who are living with the disease of addiction.
· Very seldom is there any credible rehabilitation effort made. There are some wonderful exceptions, but for the most part underpaid workers understaff what treatment program that is available.
· When individuals in prison do not heal or get “rehabilitated” we blame the person and not the system. Another example of iatrogenic?
· The recidivism rate in this country is one of the world’s largest.
· I am powerless to fix this system just as I am powerful to “save” this inmate who I think is a very good man who has much to offer the wider community if given the tools he needs to function.
· The staff of the prison are doing exactly the job which we in the larger community have commissioned them to do
· I am not powerless to stand speak out with love. I must remind myself that if I fail to speak out I have joined the inmate in a prison built with my own fear or my self-righteous delusion that it could not be me in that isolation cell in that prison.
The bottom line is that we must all accept responsibility for creating a so called judicial system which satisfies our need to convince ourselves that we are living in a relatively safe and just society. To be sure, our society is much more safe and just than many others. The distance however between the myths we tell the actual facts and ourselves is very wide. It is this distance we must shorten if we are to create a safer and more just society.
The second lesson of which I want to remind myself is that I do not want to patronize the young man or others like him. I also do not want to patronize the men and women who work in the so-called judicial system in the United States. I believe and continue to tell the young man that he can use the time in isolation to claim the good man that he is, to practice articulating new truths and, thus, new tools for claiming his life when he is released. Today, in fact, no matter what the authorities do or do not do he can be a person of whom he is proud.
I also wan to treat all those working at the prison and in various parts of the judicial system as the essentially good people that they are. It is my belief that it is only when we treat each other as the persons we are beneath all the masks, labels and shields that we will begin to be the bright starts we can be.
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