The Devil They Know: Biography of an American Inmate

I think my saddest moment in prison came near the end of my term, when I threw out a question to the group gathered around my bunk. I asked them if they'd been hit growing up. Unsurprisingly, they all said yes, but the sad part was what they were hasty to add. "Oh but I deserved it. I was a bad kid." When I told them that as far as I was concerned, there was never any excuse to hit a child, they looked at me as if I was from Mars.

An educated person in prison might as well be from another planet. The way you talk sounds suspicious, condescending, reminding them of the judge who put them away or the teacher who sighed at them in class. So I learned to listen more than talk, and grew to understand the psychology of men who can't seem to stay out of jail. I was as curious as the next guy. If prisons are so unpleasant (and they are), why do so many keep going back?

To answer this question required a willingness to imagine a life with none of the advantages I took for granted growing up. This "biography," in its basic outlines, could serve to describe a huge cross section of the men I came to know in prison.

Our archetype is mostly raised by a single, poor woman. If it's his mother, she had him young, drinks or does drugs, smokes and has poor parenting skills -- at least until she becomes a devoted Christian or dies young. Very often, a grandmother or foster mother does the parenting. If he has siblings, they raise each other -- badly.

His father is largely absent, often in and out of prison himself. Stepfathers or boyfriends of his mother supply his few male role models, and they are more often than not, abusive. No one in his milieu even questions corporal punishment as the natural form of discipline, often with hairbrushes, belts and power cords. He is often sexually abused by an older man. He hates himself for being a victim, which perversely makes him less empathetic to those he will victimize, as his inner conclusion from these experiences is to abhor weakness, not violence. And he almost never sees a healthy and loving relationship between a man and a woman on which to model his own as an adult.

He experiences a great deal of loss early. Apart from parental abandonment, the toll in impoverished neighborhoods is high from lung cancer, diabetes, alcoholism, drug addiction and violence. Grief shows vulnerability, so it is internalized and bottled up. This invariably leads to acting out in school, which creates a vicious cycle of punishment and being tracked into undemanding or remedial classes. Even if he has a natural academic potential, it is undeveloped by teachers overwhelmed by large classes. Pressure is high to join gangs, where he at least doesn't feel stupid.

He finds relief in fantasy. Video games and TV are his first escape and they teach him simplistic, violent narratives and instant gratification. Already surging with testosterone, he tries alcohol and drugs. The stage is set. With almost no countervailing influences, obtaining fast cash through any means necessary is a completely logical choice for him. When he gets away with it, he feels powerful. For the first time he feels he has an impact on his world. Consequences are an abstract notion at best, older brothers and cousins and guys in the neighborhood seem to treat jail like a rite of passage, never revealing what a scary experience it is. The possibility of violent death is glamorized, or at least viewed fatalistically.

He believes drugs and alcohol are a non-negotiable necessity. Ninety-five percent of inmates can tell you exactly how, where and on what they will get loaded upon their release, even though it will often constitute a parole violation, sending them right back to jail. Sobriety, to most inmates, means sticking to beer instead of scotch, marijuana instead of heroin.

Social conservatives will point to men from disadvantaged social backgrounds who rise above their circumstances by studying hard, getting scholarships to college and moving into the professional class. But we take note of these individuals because they are the exception.

A system which punishes the poor for reacting unexceptionally to their poverty has created a criminal class which views prison as a sort of career. Like a boring factory job, they don't like it much, but they've concluded it's their lot in life. Periods of freedom are like rare vacations during which partying hard and spending as much money as possible seem like a completely rational response to a temporary break from incarceration.

What makes sense to an outsider is that a parolee stays off drugs and gets a job. But he is returned to the same neighborhood where his friends are, who instantly get him high and welcome him back to the fold -- whether selling drugs, credit card scams, stealing cars, etc. If he resists returning to that lifestyle, he usually gets a low-skill, low-paying job that barely allows him to survive, much less support any family. His alcohol or drug use inevitably causes him to lose the job and creates domestic friction.

Parole feels like a series of booby-traps, designed to trip the parolee up instead of support him staying free. He begins to accept returning to prison as inevitable, even a relief from the incredible stress of surviving on the outside. At least in prison his basic needs are met, and the traits he has the most trouble with, like aggression, are assets more than liabilities. It's not that he likes it, but he has the skills to deal with it.

Human nature is a funny thing. We are afraid of what we don't recognize. Crime, poverty and prison constitute a grim life, but it has the pull of the familiar. If these men don't get a sense of a different way to live early enough in life, they will continually choose the devil they know.

(Next: How to Break the Cycle of Recidivism)

Follow Mark Olmsted on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MarquisMarq

Comments

[Eclectic Radical]

"Social conservatives will point to men from disadvantaged social backgrounds who rise above their circumstances by studying hard, getting scholarships to college and moving into the professional class. But we take note of these individuals because they are the exception."

And conservatives continually fail to understand this fact because of their attitude that only the 'special' people capable of succeeding 'all by themselves' deserve to succeed. This attitude is spread heavily through the ideas of Ayn Rand and similar thinkers on the secular side of conservatism, and through oppressively Calvinist denominations on the religious side. Most evangelicals, charismatics, Pentecostals, and fundamentalists hold to varying level of predestinarian thought. Those destined for salvation are blessed in life, while those whom God has not blessed are clearly destined for something other than God. This feeds into the culture of superiority than powers conservative attitudes toward crime and poverty.

"A system which punishes the poor for reacting unexceptionally to their poverty has created a criminal class which views prison as a sort of career."

I would go one step further. I would say that system of corporate-­commercial­ism our economy as devolved into, and the 'managerial' culture that our society has evolved, actually criminalize poverty itself in many more ways than one might think.

[ReElectNoOne]

I have been an advocate and one-time lobbyist for reform in DC. I have 25 years of knowledge about the "system" and it is not good news for us.

I recommend people check out this site which I donate. I offer this as a resource for additional knowledge to those willing to learn more.

http://www.curenational.org

This is a grass roots organization that began in the early 70's in Texas and went national in 1985 and is presently establishing an international presence. They are officially recognized by the UN as well as having participated in some land mark prison law cases in Texas. They are a font of information for those who wish to learn more.

I want to note, please go easy on them if you contact them because they work with a small staff in a little office donated by a church in DC. Many states have their own chapters as well as some special interest chapters and a chapter covering Federal Prisons.

[Mark Olmsted - Huffpost Blogger]

Thank you for that info, ReElect

[skatoolaki]

Thank you so much for posting this link.

[pennywhite]

God, that was refreshing! I'm so tired of the Dr. Phil routine when it comes to assessing people's very natural responses to pain. Please keep writing.
And with prisons such a big business now, what is the hope for any kind of meaningful reform?

[rlugbill]

Thanks for the post. I have met hundreds of inmates. Most all of the people in prison are 1. poor and 2. poorly-educated.

Most also have 1. mental health issues and 2. substance abuse issues.

But, there are things that work to prevent people from falling into this situation and to help those who are already in it. We just aren't emphasizing those things enough because we are stuck with a paradigm that says that crime is an individual decision and therefore there is nothing that society can do to reduce it except incarcerate those who commit crimes.

If we changed the paradigm, we could implement some programs to improve things, but most people are not interested in understanding why people are in prison and are just afraid and want inmates to stay in prison. They don't want to do anything that might help inmates improve their situation, since the idea is to punish them, not to help them. If we just punish them enough, they will change their ways.

Not sure who is more pathetic- the inmates or the society that created them and allows this to continue.

[PatA]

Wow! Can we talk? I was a guard for awhile and had to quit that because I couldn't stand the corruption. I became a substitute teacher and everything you've experienced and write about it so on.
Your explanation for how someone can have no empathy for his/her victim answered a question for me. I had not been able to make the connection that you made.
I was very, very fortunate as I formed respectful relationships with my students and we talked about everything..and I do mean everything. Would you have believed that there are women in this day and age who haven't heard about menopause? I went to your basis A,B, C lesson for them. And some that had heard of it thought that it meant it ended your sex life....I could go on and on. The men revealed some pretty startling beliefs also.
There is no rehab because America is addicted to prisons and the private prison corporations are greedy, greedy, greedy. GEO is one of the worst for making a profit and spending pennies on offender services.
End of rant.

[yearlin]

excuses, excuses, excuses

[Sheria Reid]

You are confusing excuses with explanations. Human behavior doesn't take place in a vacuum. Like everything else in nature, who we are, what we become is a product of cause and effect. As Mark Olmsted acknowledges there are exceptions, but to point to those exceptions as evidence that our experiences are not a determinative factor in the choices that we make in life makes no more sense than concluding that all car crashes are survivable because some people do survive them. What Mark has provided is one of the more cogent assessments of the factors that make it more likely that someone will not only commit a crime, but become a permanent part of the cycle of crime and punishment. I look forward to his assessment of what can be done to stop the cycle.

[Mark Olmsted - Huffpost Blogger]

Not to mention this overarching fact: While 14% of our population lives below the poverty line, they produce 95% of our inmates. The richest 14% of our population doesn't even produce 1% of our inmates, not even close. To deny a causal link between poverty and dysfunction is to ignore basic reality.

[vintagefunk]

This was very enlightening. Thank you.

Would you be willing to blog more about your experience? And what can we do to begin to remedy some of this?

[Mark Olmsted - Huffpost Blogger]

I actually started the blog I write now in prison, the entries typed up by my sister. (The entries written in prison are no longer online, but will be going into a memoir.) I have written 2 articles about prison previous to this in the Huffington Post, and will be writing another soon--more solution-oriented. My regular blog is at www. thetrashwh­isperer.bl­ogspot.com

[Beth Riches]

This makes me terribly sad. How can we possibly correct such a broken system?