My writing on this blog generally focuses on marriage problems and communication skills. On a recent airplane fight, however, I sat next to Gloria (name changed to protect confidentiality), a tall, strongly-built Black woman who has worked for eleven years in the US federal prison system. I liked Gloria immediately, loved talking with her, and am pleased to be able to share the wisdom on life that she has gleaned from her work as a guard in one of America's most famous jails.
My questions are in bold print, followed by Gloria's thoughtful answers, with my thoughts in response in italics.
Who goes to prison?
I've always lived my life on the straight and narrow. We all want to believe that we are a good person. Yet just one decision separates us from someone who ends up in jail.
A person on this plane could get mad at a stewardess and "lose it," especially if he'd had a few drinks.
Let's say you had a drink, went to a store, purchased something and and in your alcoholic cloud you forgot to pay for it.
Let's say you and I are friends and I sell drugs, come to your house, and leave them there and you don't even know it. The police come to your house, and you're in trouble. That's conspiracy.
Even if I am just in the car when my friend had drugs, we got stopped...or I borrowed your car and you never told me. I never drank, never did anything wrong in my life, and end up in jail anyways.
How true, I mused, that actions we take innocently in life, often for perfectly good reasons, easily can end up with quite dreadful unanticipated consequences--if not jail, then illness, inadvertently hurting others' feelings, financial disasters.
What happens once you get to prison?
When you first arrive, it's frightening. After a while you get used to it.
The human capacity to adapt to difficult new conditions enables us to survive, just like plants and animals have to adapt to new climate and other conditions.
It's not a place though that anybody would want to go. No one would wake up and say today I want to go to jail. Everything is taken away from you. Every choice too. Some one else makes all the decisions for you, when you can go to bed, when you have to wake up, when you can watch TV.
How easily Americans can forget to cherish freedom. We're at risk for taking our freedoms for granted, like clean air and fresh water, which so many around our globe also lack.
Everyone who reads your blogpost should take a tour.
I'm an advocate of restorative justice, where wrong-doers meet those they've injured, have to apologize to their victim, learn from their mistakes and pay society back. I've long regarded jails as dreadful places. In fact though going and looking instead of just assuming sounds like a good idea to consider.
What's the routine at Alcatraz, where you work?
During the day if you are female you have to either go to school or work. For the men it's a whole different thing. You're there until you are designated the institution you then will go to. But at some institutions the men have to work or go to school too.
The women have work cleaning up the yard, the housing units, just manual labor for the prison. But you also can learn a trade.
It's up to you how you use your time. In that way, prison is like life. You can choose to rehabilitate, to figure out ways to keep improving how you live your life, or you can use your time doing nothing.
Hmm. When we let our kids waste away the hours playing video games, what are we teaching them about how to use their time?
Prison saves some people's lives. If you have been out living a life of crime you'll eventually end up either in jail or dead.
When you are on the streets you don't have time to think. When you are in jail you get a chance to stop what you've been doing and start again. About a third of prisoners use jail to turn their lives around. If you want to rehabilitate you can if you want to use your time to get better, working on yourself. Or you can do nothing and go home and make the same mistakes again.
Sounds a lot like marriage counseling, I thought to myself. If a couple begins to have marriage problems they can stop what they've been doing and use the counseling sessions to start again. They can rehabilitate themselves and turn the marriage around by using their counseling time to get better, each spouse working on themselves. Or they can do nothing beyond showing up in therapy and go home and make the same mistakes again.
How are the men different from the women?
The men mostly don't want any problems.
The women are more combative. They are more needy, and they challenge us, the guards, more than the men. They're more argumentative when we tell them to do something.
Do they make friends in jail?
You'd have to ask the inmates.
This is a woman who knows her limits; she knows what she knows and what she doesn't know. Impressive.
Re-entry is the emphasis of the prison system more than helping people make friends.
The prisons want to reduce recidivism by trying to educate and give the prisoners skills so they don't come back. With skills they can be more employable. Prisons offer them help getting the GED or college courses. Those who want it can really learn and grow.
You, and the readers of your blog, should volunteer at a prison. Go in and teach a class or speak on topics that interest you. There's always a need for volunteers, anything that can help inmates succeed. When you think about it, if these are men and women who are being released into the community, wouldn't you want them to be able to become productive citizens, living next to you?
Now there's a challenge for all of us. I do hope readers of this article take this point seriously. Think about what you might want to teach.
Jails aren't filled with bad people. Just people who made a bad decision.
I've met some interesting people that I wouldn't mind being my neighbor, and that I wouldn't have met if I hadn't been working at a jail.
There's some really bad people there too, men and women, mixed in with lots of good ones. Think about their crimes. A drug dealer, a CEO of a company, it doesn't matter what your crime is, you're still in jail. My crime isn't worse than yours. We both did something wrong and we're in jails.
Jail is hard for anybody. Nobody wants to be locked up. No matter white collar crime or street crime.
Therapy, it occurred to me, is for people who feel locked up in a bad situation, or locked in bad feelings like anxiety or depression or resentment, or in a marriage with upsetting interactions. There's lots of kinds of jails in life.
Should there be alternatives to jail?
Could they learn just as much without jail time? Without inmates in jail I wouldn't have a job, :-).
But would they turn themselves around without jail? I couldn't say.....
What I will say though is that the three strikes laws seem unfair to me. Some of the prison sentences people are given aren't justified by the crime. For instance with three strikes you steal something, even something small, and you spend the rest of your life in jail.
A lot of the sentences that people get are too long. People in jail for selling drugs especially, or for getting caught with some drugs.
Some crimes justify prison. But some people get more time for selling drugs than a person who killed somebody. There's a lot of injustice in the justice system.
The result of three strikes plus long sentences is that the prisons are overcrowded. It's expensive for the states to pay for all the people doing jail time. It's real hard on their families, the ones who have a spouse and kids at home who need their help. And it's tough on the prisoners, especially the ones who don't really deserve it, to be locked up with no freedom. You don't realize how precious freedom is until you lose it.
Drug sentencing really needs reevaluating. You have people in jail with masters' degrees, smarter than you and I put together.
Still, prison is like life. It's what you make of it. If I went to jail and I wanted to get my life together, I'd work on it. They have psychologists there, but some people just don't want to look at themselves, to try to learn new ways, to change.
You're a psychologist. Haven't you in your work ever had a patient that just doesn't want to change? It's who they are. It's no different with people in jail. Change only comes if you want to change...
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Denver clinical psychologist and marriage counselor Susan Heitler, PhD has authored a couples skills quiz and book, workbook and online program for couples that teach the skills for marriage success.