🔵 By Timothy Brunner. Photo by lauragrafie.
There has been many, many groups offered in the different juvenile placements, detention facilities, halfway houses, jails, and prisons I have been in. they all offered education in areas specific to their topics but general in the way that each type of facility I named served a specific role within the same purpose.
I have been coerced into taking groups on anger management, stress management, alcohol and other drugs, drug and alcohol awareness, citizenship, critical thinking, critical errors, cycles of violence, violence prevention… but they all presented the same information, repackaged, regurgitated, and forced down my gullet as if I were a baby bird chirping for a meal.
I was definitely not that, though. Yes, if I refused to take a group I was marked with a negative stain when I would be considered for release.
There are a number of groups offered to educate offenders on how their crimes have consequences in the lives of others. “Victim awareness” is the most common terminology, but the name changes from time to time. The information does not change, though. We are taught how crime increases insurance costs through property damage that needs repaired: taxes increase due to the higher crime rates necessitating more police, prisons, counselors: property value declines because nobody wants to live in a crime ridden neighborhood. There is also information presented on how crime can change the life of a victim directly, but any personalized responsibility is absent. Every commit, inmate, prisoner, and resident is forced to take the group, yet each has a different case. It is not feasible to address each individual in such a setting, so the material is generalized.
The dynamic is the direct result of a prison industrial complex. Warehousing criminals and forming an economy dependent upon that level of incarceration. I do not believe this structure helps resolve the issue of crime generally or even the offender more specifically and I want to explain why.
I was arrested and sentenced to 6-14 years in state prison for firing a handgun at another person when I was 18 years old. I spent 8 years in prison for that crime, and I need this to be understood, unambiguously…
I was a worse person when I was released.
Angrier. Resentful. Entitled. Unequipped to live a responsible life in society.
Prison – Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections – took an 18 year old violent criminal and made him worse. Why? How?
During that 8 years of incarceration I was assigned to many groups that covered what was determined to be a curriculum appropriate to help correct my erroneous thought patterns. I was taught much of this generalized information but all that was required of me to pass any given group was to show up on time, remain for the entire time, puke out an appropriate response if called upon, and attend a set number of sessions.
Not one time was I required to discuss my actions in my case, detail my crime, or speak about my victims. This holds true even through my participation in well over 20 different groups over the years.
I get that with so many different people with completely different crimes, specificity is lost in the general material. I cannot grasp how a complete obliviousness to personal responsibility can persist through so many groups for so long.
Until I view it from the Prison Industrial Complex stand-point. The reason I have attended so many different groups that teach the same generic material is quite simply job security. There have been periodic studies that have deluded into why the Pennsylvania Dept. of Corrections has one of the highest rates of recidivism in the world. Such studies often result in these so-called “treatment groups” being discontinued due to the statistically evident failure in their mission. If attendees of said group return to prison more often than the abstainers, the group is not cost-effective.
Right?
No exactly.
The staff who run these failed and discontinued groups are never layed off. Instead, the material taught in a “Drug and Alcohol Awareness” group is repackaged as “Alcohol and Other Drugs”, and they teach this new group. Which is the same old group. Then every inmate is coerced into filling the seats in that group to assure that position is not lost. Nothing changed.
If the intent of offering the group now becomes the protection of the instructors position, how does that help correct the issue of the criminal behavior? It simply does not.
There is an interesting dynamic occurring in the PA Dc right now. There has been a severe shortage of staff since the pandemic which has caused the necessity of a drawing down of the overall prison population. PA has some 40,000 inmates in state prison, though I believe that to be lower at the moment. In relating this to the Industry that this prison system has become, I wish I had access to the actual numbers for this point, but I will rely on what I know from my perspective.
SCI Albion can house about 2,250 inmates. I originally came to Albion in 2006. at that time there were significantly less staff that ran this prison than there are now. For your own edification research any full and actual numbers if you are able, but here is what I can attest to. Our education department used to post one security staff (C.O) where there are now 3. activities still posts one C.O, but the two yard crews went from 3 C.O’s and 1 Seargent to 5 C.O’s and a Seargent, and there are 2 yards. After the pandemic, two additional yards were built to segregate the prison’s zones, and one C.O was added to each of these. In the medical dept. there used to be a C.O in the lobby and the infirmary. Now there is an additional C.O as a medical “rover” and another who stands in the medication line when it is running. A C.O is now posted in the laundry dept. dietary, and to run a body scanner that is only a couple years old. None of these 3 positions existed before.
If I stop there, it is 13 new positions, most of which have 2 shifts. I do not deal with the psych dept. or many counselors to say how many more of these staff are hired now as opposed to then. There are definitely more now, though. All of this growth, yet recidivism has not fallen. Now that the inmate population is down, though, there is every effort being made to fill all of those posts, not remove them, because every hope is in the inmate population reduction being temporary. This industry cannot be allowed to collapse.
One of the biggest reasons I have been thinking about these things lately is that there is now a glimmer of hope that I will some day be released from prison. I have been sentence to life without parole and in Pennsylvania that is a literal term… in the actual literal sense as opposed to pop-cultures horrendous misuse of that word. Quite literally!
Anyway, I have been living under the soul crushing weight of hopelessly accepting that no matter what I do for the rest of my life, be that one more day or one hundred more years, I … will … die … in … prison.
That has a profound effect on a person’s psychology. Setting aside the person deleterious effects that are my own responsibility, I am now whipsawed by a case in the PA Supreme Court that is likely to rule the harshness of my sentence as unconstitutional. The return of hope in my soul is like warm water on ice-cold hands. It is such a sweetly painful burn that I know is good, but still it scares me. How much more will a loss of that hope hurt after so soon of a return?
In a parallel vein of thought, I have been contemplating whether or not I am ready to be released from prison. I don’t ask this question from a personal viewpoint, as in “What would I do if I was released”, but from a more societal view of whether or not I would decide to commit another crime if I were released. This is the line of thought that led me to this entire line of thought.
Have I changed? If I have, how and why? Then, if I have changed, how could I express to a judge that I am not the same person I was 15 years ago when I was told I deserve to die in prison no matter what?
These are the questions that bring me to these thoughts. Inevitably, I am immediately confronted with the fact that I was released from places such as this before, and each time I returned after committing another cirm.e why would this time be any different? Is this time any different?
I look back on when I was released from prison in 2008, and I see a young man on a head long rush into trouble. I had spent 8 years in prison, but I was left with little direction other than from other inmates.
Would you believe that associating with the same type of people I had prior to being incarcerated did little to prevent me from being incarcerated again? Believe it.
I did attend all of the groups they coerced me into and I learned the information presented very well. Why didn’t that help when it is what all of the “experts” assigned me to correct my behavior? What is different this time?
The person I was at that time was only concerned with getting out. I didn’t care about anything other than that. The system failed in catching that and helping me to find a purpose to my life other than such an immediate objective. I had no plan for how to stay out.
I believe that one of the reasons for this is that the mass incarceration necessary to support a prison industrial complex diverts resources from any individualized corrective rehabilitation because there are too many people to treat with different issues that each needs addressed. Pennsylvania specifically has closed most of the state’s mental health facilities and drug and alcohol facilities. Instead, addicts and the mentally ill are simply policed until they can be incarcerated, which makes more money for the prison system at the cost of helping anyone in it.
This same principle of a lack of resources and overcrowding has repeatedly been found to be hamstringing this country’s public school systems for decades. In accord with this lack of individualized treatment or education, I never had to spend time addressing my personal issues. I only had to discuss the general material presented in the group.
What is different this time?
One of the most significant differences is that any reason for pretense was brutally stripped away. I have no reasonable expectation to ever leave prison. That removed any interest I had in participating in this system. It is almost amusing to consider this now, but the system feels the same way: Many groups and educational classes will not accept lifers because we are considered a waste of resources.
If the system rejects me, I also reject the system. I filled my time with what I chose instead of what was chosen for me. I read a lot. I wrote to organize my thoughts. I went to church. I exercised. All of these things created a healthy lifestyle, but I didn’t really do it consciously. I was just filling dead time. Until the dead started to take up my time.
Some of the things I would read, or hear in church started to cut deeper into my heart. One thing that I found plenty of time for was simple introspection. Sitting in a cell, quietly, with nothing to do and a troubled soul is a haunting experience. It was in such a place that I came face to face with a man my sister had written to me about. I didn’t know him at the time but that was because I was blind.
After my arrest, my sister wrote a letter explaining how she couldn’t imagine living in a world where her baby brother would be in prison forever. Never coming home, never meeting his nieces and nephews, never having children of his own. Such a world was empty for her. It was within a week that she died from an intentional overdose.
Sitting in a cell, alone and hopeless, I finally saw how heartlessly selfish I was. I had to face the fact that no matter how I justified, minimized, or made excuses for my actions, my sister killed herself because I made the world an unlivable place for her.
Can you imagine what a crucifixion is? I can, and it’s not this. This was just a scourging. A precursor. A single step on a journey that Dante couldn’t describe. I doubt I can, either.
My mother had a complete mental breakdown over the dual shock of losing me, then her daughter. She refused to speak to me and descended into an alcoholic heaven of numb ad blissful ignorance. I don’t blame her. I almost envy her.
A couple years later my older brother died from a heroin overdose, my cousin died from a fentanyl overdose with her face in the toilet, then someone who taught me what true and unconditional love was hung herself the day after she celebrated my 31st birthday. She had turned 30 three days before that. Loss has always been a part of my life, but up until this point personal responsibility was not. I am ashamed that my focus at that time was still so self-centered, but that is the truth of it. I only came to value something when it was no longer there. That is a telltale sign of a narcissistic entitlement… taking things, people, for granted.
The personal loss and my finally recognizing my own responsibility was a first step, though. It is a step that the groups offered here not only neglect, but work against. We are not allowed to focus on our own losses or victimization because we are told that we are minimizing or justifying our crime. Then we are told not to talk about our victims because that is an attempt to glorify our crime or denigrate our victim further.
Maybe there is a validity to that idea on a certain light, but I know it prevented me from empathizing with my victims because I just blocked them from my thought processes completely. Later, when I decided to write off the system that had decided it was a waste of resources, I systematically rooted their influences out of my thoughts. What happened after this was a self realization that broke me in a way that should have happened long ago. It was only through my own pain that I was able to grasp the pain I have caused others. Only in my own loss could I comprehend the loss I imposed on others. I was forced to admit to myself that I was the epitome of the person I professed to hate. I hated myself.
The cross was what Christ chose for himself. I am coming to understand that my cross is what I have chosen for myself. I know what it is to be crucified because it is I who place myself in that crucible to be purified. God bless the pain that burns away my impurity!
Over the 15 years I have been serving this sentence, I sought to believe a better person because I could no longer look in the mirror without seeing what my sister did. When she saw that man, she wrote him a letter that introduced me to him. Hello, me, I am you.
When I was able to accept that pain I was able to see that I had done the same to so many other people who didn’t deserve it. My own personal loss led me into a recognition of the loss I have caused others.
No group helped me in that and no hope of release from prison drove that process.
If I ever were to go before a judge to be re-sentenced for my crime, I still wonder how I could express any of this. Maybe such a complex and deep sense of guilt can’t be adequately expressed. Perhaps being treated as a waste of resources has convinced me of that.
I do know that the person who committed the crime I am serving this sentence for has died under that sentence. If I were ever to be released, it would not be the same man leaving who came in.
Despite this place and all it teaches.