A Journey Into The Mind of A Prisoner

Let’s take a journey into the mind of a prisoner, a prisoner serving life that never physically hurt anyone. Try to experience his deprivation. Stuck in a cell with a stranger, waking up year upon year, everyday him realizing how so very much he lost and is doomed to lose. One day at a time, for years to come. How he was such a stupid, blind fool. How horrible it is to hear that another loved one has died. Someone he has missed for years. How wrong and unjust the police are, even as they get to drive home every day and celebrate on their weekends just to come back and day after day mind rape him and those like him while they’re condemned to have forever lost those precious years of their one and only life. What a thought to overcome having had invested so many days and years, building relationships just to have them all frozen only to perish into faded memories. Remembering all his valuable possessions he’s lost, etc. How much of that is i internalized? What are they able to minimize and accept as unimportant? Is it a practical move? I think so, internalizing that prison isn’t such a bad alternative, thereby saving yourself a never-ending mental rape, filled with anguish, loss and sorrow, is much more sustainable. I believe the justice system forces him to either make a sane transformation into acceptance or to live in excruciating anguish and/or commit suicide, He cannot live normally realizing with clarity everything he ever loved and had been is one way or another eternally stolen (even if by the person he used to be). True hopelessness. There is absolutely zero he can do to change what is lost and will be lost.

Then there are those that make it free. For them, we have special laws that threaten their lives eternally. Well, though labeled rehabilitated, they are rarely ever completely free, completely out, Living with the constant realization that you have a possibility of life in prison for even, say, being accused of taking someones candy, car, or of threatening them, At the end of it all, these people wind up right where the cynic prison official would want them.

The term Cognitive Dissonance is most easily described as the discomfort caused in, or by, the mind that is believing in the truth of two ideas which are contradictory to each other. Generally, our minds attempt to make sense of the world. Our minds are not good at dealing with contradictions, the discomfort that results is called cognitive dissonance. People move to relieve themselves of this discomfort. Often people become blind with events, possibilities or tragedies which do not fit into the narrative instead of confronting such discomfort.

Much of an x-prisoners mind takes to the illogical, but very practical, view that the loss of time, as unique as it is, was not all that devastating. The rest of the mind logically fears prison and a life sentence. Here one’s own fear can sabotage the mind. Because his/her logical fear at some time or another will arouse some cognitive dissonance. With his/her self-deceptive minimization of pain regarding his/her ten years in prison. Now he/she must forever feed the – non-coinciding with reality – idea that this loss was not devastatingly perverse. And yet do this in a way that hopefully would bring him back to that very same place his psyche must work so hard to coexist in happy peace with.

If this isn’t frustrating enough, on top of the daily physical pain and discomfort of prison life, and the resulting adaptations, add the possibility that his psyche simply began equating pain and let-down as pleasurable. As crazy as this sounds, the subconscious may do this in an attempt to deal with severely painful situations. To say it simply, with the pain attached to the whole affair, his/her rehabilitation better have taught the convicted how to be pretty creative.

We all have known the frustration and the anger it has caused us. As an example could be when a tool, appliance or machine, even a person, “acted” in a way you felt went against what was reasonable. You felt it wasn’t doing what it was supposed to or should have done no matter how hard you tried. You felt personally attacked – often illogically – and as it reminded you of your true helplessness in life you blamed it, maybe even felt like throwing, breaking, or somehow retaliating against it and the perceived injustice it “caused.” Though it may not have been enough to overcome your patience, imagine minute after minute, day after day of it.

The blinding contrast between a human beings continually deteriorating flesh and the permanent iron-bared caves of the mountain of concrete that we were locked in was mind-bending. Furthermore, to fathom that only money was what was temporarily halting the construction of more of these structures made it hard for me to see just exactly what humanity meant, where it existed, where it had stopped, and where did it begin.

Is there any necessity in our prisons in our systems arbitrary punitive sentences or the existing Three Strikes Law? Here is a little history lesson. It involves the historic case (1963) Gideon vs. Wainwright which allowed Florida prisoners convicted without representation to be released early before they were certified “rehabilitated.” In terms of crimes committed there were no distinguishable differences between the released and those who were still condemned to complete their whole sentence -- only then to be released with the label “rehabilitated.” Some years after, the ruling study of this event done by C. Eichmann, published since 1966 revealed an alarming truth: Those who served their complete term, far from being rehabilitated, were twice as likely to return to prison as those released early!

In today’s atmosphere of pulling every penny, we can’t afford to lose (including those from education with its tragically high-interest rate) to punish in the most outdated, illogical, fashion practically conceivable. We can no longer continue to keep our eyes and fists closed. As it is today, they blatantly encourage their two-strike possessing prisoners to slave in groups of nearly twenty in the public, watched by only one fire captain and no police of any sort (twenty prisoners, remember, at $50,000 per inmate a year would be one million dollars annually – just twenty!)

This takes place at the same time they continually and successfully deny the use of modern (job-murdering, millions-of-dollars-saving) technology to do essentially the exact same thing. But more on this later.

At the time of the Eichman study, 45 years ago they may have felt they had no alternative but to build more of the same -- but with ever-increasing studies condemning it. Technology outdating it. Excessive costs invalidating it. And different approaches all around the world successfully running circles around it. It’s time we see it as what it is: Barbarian-like, unproductive slavery for our cash – an extremely successful way to rip us off.