Prison Story, Part Eleven

The other day, two guys got in an argument about prisoners judging one another for their crimes.  The culmination was one of them telling the other that his crime (dealing drugs) was just as low as rape.  The guy who said that was invited to a private place to deal with the matter physically, but realizing he had went too far and was not prepared to fight, he backed down.  The other slapped him in full view of dozens of people, and still he backed down.  That was the end of it.

I listened to the guy rationalize why he allowed that to happen to him.  He said that it wasn’t worth it, that getting into a fight would have perhaps delayed his release date, that he doesn’t care what others think about him.  He was lying.  The real reason – the only reason – he backed down from the challenge and did nothing when he was slapped was fear.  I’ve seen it a thousand times in this place.  I’m not a mind-reader, but it’s easy to see when someone’s trying to hide their fear.

I look at it like this:  If you truly believe that fighting in the wrong answer and you don’t want to get in trouble, then that’s your decision.  By all means, make it and stick to it.  I have nothing against that stance.  But if fear is the only reason, and you’re lying to yourself and others, then you need to sstop being a whining baby and man up.  There are worse things than a black eye.  There are even worse things than having to do thirty more days in prison because you throw down with a guy in the cell.

Perhaps the reason for fighting was frivolous.  Perhaps in this case, the guy brought it on himself by opening his mouth about such a touchy topic.  Perhaps out there on the streets, a real man always walks away from a fight.

In prison, it’s a matter of whether you want to allow yourself ot be victimized.  I fyou allow a man to slap you and do nothing about it, you’re almost certainly causing yourself more trouble than a simple fight (which most likely would have neatly resolved the issue, win or lose).  This place is full of vultures and bullies:  They’re all going to see you as a victim.  They’re going to think they can do anything to you and get away with it.  After all, if you didn’t put your hands up when someone slapped you, you’re not going to do it when someone steals from you, for example.

If a prisoner wants to truly rationalize his decision of whether or not to fight, he must take this into account.  Maybe you have to fight over something that would normally be silly.  Maybe you just catch someone in a bad mood and get into an argument of whether Mary Kay LeTourneau is a child molester or not (I once saw a fistfight over that).  But whether the original reason is stupid or not, once you’re in that far, you may have to suck it up and start fighting anyway, if only because it’s the smartest move in the long run.

How an Atheist Convict Defines Morality, Part Three

What morality means to me – what I strive for – is that I can never rank the value of my life above that of anyone else’s life.  As a humanist, I think this is easy to do.  (Indeed, I think it’s the logical conclusion of rational mind.)  As a convicted murderer, I will forever be looking up.  I do believe that there are people out there who’re much worse than I am, and therefore their lives are less valuable than mine.  But this is only because they themselves have lowered the value of their lives through the victimization of others, not because I have elevated mine above theirs.  As someone who strives to be moral, I refuse to do that.

If I think that everyone’s life has equal (or more) value than my own, I cannot possibly justify victimizing anyone, ever, for any reason.  I will not claim to be selfless human being – but I willclaim as my moral goal to never base the value of another’s life on my own interests.

This does not, however, mean that I will abdicate moral responsibility and judgement.  I can’t do that and expect to be a moral person.  No moral human being can reserve judgement, or they would walk on by as a child gets beaten to death.  Anyone with the tiniest kernel of moral sense can make definitive judgements such as, “I’m better than that person.  I’ll fight him to put a stop to it.”

As a humanist who doesn’t think there is any divine moral standard, I’m still capable of absolute judgements about the value of human life.  For example, though I accept the evidence for the theory of evolution, this doesn’t mean I think there is anything moral about it.  We can’t look to natural selection for gauge of life’s value, because the only thing of value to natural selection is passing on one’s genes.  In this case, the mot valuable people would be the ones with the most children.  Sexual slavery and no birth control or abortion would be the hallmarks of a “moral” society (similar to life under Old Testament laws, ironically.)

The age-old and extremely common methods of valuation such as ethnicity, nationality, and skin color are simple prejudices.  They do not determine anything meaningful about the value of a human being’s life.  Indeed, they are the height of irrationality, since these concepts become meaningless if you trace humanity back far enough into it’s past.  Gender doesn’t work either.  One doesn’t have to be a radical feminist to understand that whether a person has a Y chromosome or not says nothing about their intrinsic value as a human being.

Productivity (how much a person produces in their life, in the form of goods or services for others) is also out.  It makes for a neat little synthesis of laissez-faire capitalism and evolutionary theory, but it obviously cannot be accepted as a moral standard.  A serial killer might be an extremely productive individual.  Indeed, perhaps his victims are people who refuse to produce anything.  Not only would he be a great producer himself, but he would be helping general productivity by removing those who only consume the work of others.  Besides, you can’t objectively measure someone’s potential productivity – a person might be unproductive their entire life, yet later produce a great product or service that eclipses many others.

None of these methods for measuring the moral value of human life are any good.  In fact, you can be pretty sure that if someone is using one of these methods, that person is a good example of what is not moral.

Prison Story, Part Eight

The other day I was talking to someone I know vaguely.  It was pointless small talk, since neither of us had anything important to say, and we weren’t very familiar with one another.  What I suddenly realized, though, is that small talk in prison is radically different than ordinary small talk that people out there on the streets experience.

Small talk in prison consists almost entirely of complaint.  In this case, the guy complained that the water in the shower wasn’t hot enough, the pressure wasn’t great enough, and how the “State” never does anything about it.  In the chow hall, the comments would be about the quantity and/or quality of the food.  In the dayroom, it’s the way the officers are acting.  In the gym, it’s the lack of equipment or recreation time.

Prisoners can always bond over their common complaints about prison life, sentences, judges, officers, and fellow prisoners.  Among people meeting for the first time, it just goes without saying.  It’s how you’re acceptted into a certain mold: a typical prisoner with an us-against-them mentality.  Even a white supremacist and a black separatist can share common ground in their criticism of the way this is or that is.  I’ve seen it repeatedly; I still see it everyday.

More than just a male bonding exercise, it’s also a way for the guys to find validation.  People generally don’t want to be around those who argue with them and disagree with things that they find important.  Most of us would rather surround ourselves with enablers and yes-men than with critical thinkers.  It gets so common and accepted among prisoners that the complaints don’t have to be valid or even logical.  For example, I remember a prisoner once complaining about a power outage during the time he wanted to watch a football game.  With a straight face, he complained that the “State” had purposefully turned off the power so that we would be punished by not being able to catch a football game.  His immediate companions either nodded along and agreed or simply didn’t say anything.

The way I see it, this is indicative of a much more serious problem among prisoners than simple whining.  Everything in your environment is “out to get you.”  You deserve more than you’re getting.  Someone is always screwing you just for the hell of it, just because they can.  I won’t take this as far as paranoia and conspiracy theories, because the main issue is that a sense of self-entitlement becomes normalized.  These prisoners begin to think that they’re “owed” something.  A common argument I hear is this: “Well, the ‘State’ took away my freedom and that’s the price I pay for my crime, so now they have to treat me well, give me everything I want, and answer all my complaints.”

No, actually they don’t.  You victimized someone, and now you’re sitting in prison (possibly for years or decades) costing the taxpayers money and doing nothing but whining.  You’re the one who owes, not the other way around.

This sickening notion of self-entitlement must be dispelled among prisoners because we need a strong sense of responsibility more than anyone.  And we’re never going to get it if our social discourse consists disproportionately of meaningless complaint.

Prison Story, Part VII

Last night a guy I know came up to me and asked me to sign a Get Well card.  I’m friendly with this guy, but I don’t know him very well.  He’s about twenty years old.  I asked him who it was for.  The answer was that a member of his family has cancer, so he’s sending this card after getting pretty much everyone he knows to sign it.

I looked at the card for a moment, and it was absolutely full of messages from convicts.  Convicts who didn’t know the guy’s relative one bit, who had never met the person with cancer and never will.  Yet, the card was choked with a few sentences from all of these guys, messages of well-wishing and good humor.  There were so many that I had to sign on the back of the card!

I had never seen anything like this before.  I’d signed a birthday card for guys in here, but nothing like this.  One thing that struck me: From the messages I imagined that the person receiving the card will probably think that their incarcerated relative is a part of one big prison community.  Almost like being away for camp or being in the Army, a situation where all your buddies look out for you and care about what you care about (your family, for instance).  It was strange to think of prison in that way, but that’s the impression I got.

Usually, when people think of prison communities or “brotherhoods,” it elicits negative images of gangs and race-driven groups.  And that would be accurate most of the time.  I’m wary of that type of situation.  I don’t even like the us-against-them mentality, where prisoners consider every day to be a struggle between some cohesive inmate group and the prison employees and administrators.  I don’t see why anyone would ever do something as foolish as trust their peers in this place enough to entertain such an idea.

But last night there was good example of that notion of a prison “community.”  Being asked to sign that card and seeing all those messages really threw me for a loop.  I wanted to write about this because if it surprised me, maybe it would be surprising to some others out there.  I can imagine many who might never even consider that such a thing might happen in prison.

How an Atheist Convict Defines Morality, Part II

I never understood why religious people say that morality can’t exist without a god.  If we live in an existential universe, isn’t it the logical conclusion that every single human is not only equal in value, but also incredible precious and fragile?  Indeed, can it not be said that the notion of an existence with Abraham’s God takes away the value of human life and bases it solely upon how obedient each person is?

I said before that I think morality is the position that your life is at most equal in value to the lives of others.  The “at most” part is very important.  No moral person can claim that his or her life is greater in value to the life of another.  They wouldn’t be moral anymore, would they?  Imagine if even a pillar of selflessness such as Mother Theresa got on TV and started shrieking that she is worth more than any ten human beings, that her life has much more value than the lives of others because she has done so much humanitarian work, that her life should be saved even if the cost is ten innocent lives.  Could she still be said to be a moral person?  Absolutely not!  A moral person would invariably do the exact opposite: willingly sacrifice him- or herself to save ten lives.

On the other hand, Mother Theresa’s life is certainly worth more than the life of, say, Adolf Hitler.  No one could possibly argue with that.  But it’s not Mother Theresa who raised the value of her life above his.  Remember, if you’re moral, you can’t do that.

A person can, however, lower the value of their own life.  That’s what Hitler did.  He did it by becoming a victimizer (a rather prodigious one).  When you make a choice to victimize someone, you’re claiming that your life is more valuable than theirs.  You’re using your opportunity to take away their opportunity.  This is unjust because your need to victimize cannot possibly outweigh another’s need to be left alone.  Serving your own self-interest is not immoral, but doing it at the expense of another’s self-interest is.

Raising the value of another’s life is what truly selfless people do.  For example, if forced to save the life of either a ninety-year-old with cancer who has lived a full life or an eighteen-year-old on his way to college, I believe that all of us would choose to save the kid.  Indeed, if the elder volunteered to sacrifice himself to save the teenager, he would be a hero – like a mother who sacrifices herself so that her child can live.

On the other hand, try to imagine that child demanding his higher status, demanding that his mother willingly give her life to save his, demanding that his life is worth more than hers and her duty is to protect it even at ultimate cost.  It leaves a bitter taste, does it not?  Perhaps the child is even right, but does it make him moral to claim such a thing?  Is it possible for a son to be a moral human being if he believes that his life has more value than his mother’s life?

My anser would be a resounding “No.”  It is, however, possible for the mother to be moral if she believes that.  Double standards are not always bad things.

Prison Story, Part VI

Sitting in prison, I’ve accumulated a certain amount of cynicism.  For example, I now refuse to listen to my peers who complain about how little the jobs pay, how bad the food is, how lacking the commissary is, the fees we have to pay for various services, etc.  This is for two reasons: 1) I committed a crime and so I deserve to be here, so everything unsavory I have to deal with is my own fault, and 2) I live off taxpayer money, receive free health care, and never have to pay a bill.

They cynicism comes in when I see some of my peers who refuse to get a job in here and instead rely on the friends and family members to send them in money (to buy junk food, coffee, rent a TV, and so on).  They even complain when these checks are late.  They make statements like, “I’m not working in the kitchen for the State,” as if they’re above scrubbing pots, but have no problem robbing some innocent person and buying Sudafed to make meth.

Certainly I’ve asked my friends and family for help before, but I’ve always worked, and I don’t see any excuse why others shouldn’t.  I have very little sympathy when they relegate themselves to the level of a dependent.

But the other day, I called up a couple of my relatives and asked them for twenty-five thousand dollars.  Needless to say from the preceding paragraphs, it was difficult.  I even rehearsed saying the words beforehand, and my heart started to pound when it came time to ask.  For sure, this goes quite beyond a grown man sitting in the joint and asking his mom to send him a couple hundred bucks to buy a TV.

In my case, twenty-five thousand happens to be a rough estimate of how much I’ll need to complete a four-year degree through correspondence.  My relatives (who are by no means wealthy) need time to deal with something like that, of course, so it will be a couple weeks before I find out.

I wouldn’t have taken this route if there was any other way: Student loans or grants are not possible for inmates, and the amount I could contribute from my own institution checks is fairly inconsequential.  I also have to be honest and admit that there’s no way I can guarantee the ability to pay back such an amount with reasonable alacrity – I won’t even be able to really begin paying for eight years, when I’m released.

Twelve years after graduating from high school, I finally want to go to college, and I’m asking my parents for the money.  I can’t help but feel a bit infantilized because of it.

How an Atheist Convict Defines Morality I

If I live with the idea that there is no divine moral absolute, how do I know what is right and wrong?  I’ve tried to answer that question for years.  I see morality as making choices about the value of human life in relation to your own.  There are basically three positions that you can take in this matter:

1. My life is equal in value to the lives of others.
2. My life has more value than the lives of others.
3. My life has less value than the lives of others.

Number One is the position of a moral person.  Number Two is the position of a victimizer.  Number Three is the position of a reformed victimizer.  I fall squarely into the third category.  In fact I lean toward the idea that I can never climb to the summit of Number One, because the effects of my crime are impossible to erase and repay.  The best compliment I can award myself is that I’m incapable of ever returning to Number Two.

As a de facto atheist, I’m operating under the notion that I don’t have a soul, that I live in a universe with no afterlife, that I am the sum of my parts, a collection of atoms.  Identity, consciousness, and self-awareness are simply the products of social experiences and the firing of synapses.

If this is so, then it’s perfectly compatible with Number One.  Each of us is a human being, the same as billions of others.  We’re all equal in value.  We start off with the same opportunities, the same capacity for kindness or cruelty, the same inalienable human rights.  None of us are special – at least no more special than anyone else can be.  Your happiness and pain are no more important than the happiness and pain of a random shoemaker in Tibet or a farmer in Kenya.  It is simply irrational to think that your desires have more importance than theirs do.  If you don’t think so, then try making an objective argument for why your happiness is more pleasurable than theirs, or why your pain hurts more.

If you have a rational mind, if you use the faculty of reason, I don’t see how you can escape Number One.  This is why I’m so fond of saying that reason banishes prejudices, pointless tradition, and other faulty methods of thinking.  This is also why I think that reason is the true path to morality, not obedience to a divine moral standard.  And you can’t have it both ways, either; reason cannot abide obedience to dogma.

So not only do I think that there is insufficient evidence to believe in the notion of divine morality (or divine anything), my position is that even if there were a divine moral standard, I would not follow it.  I think humanism is simply superior.

Prison Story V

A guy I know received a job after being on an appropriate waiting list.  This “job” made him responsible for a small cart of second-hand books that is made available in the living units each evening for inmates to borrow.  The actual work involves pushing the cart roughly twenty feet, sitting there for fifteen minutes while inmates peruse and possibly choose a few titles, then pushing the cart back.  That’s all.  This procedure is done five nights a week, and the pay is typical for an institutional job.

This guy, however, was a lazy fellow who wanted to shirk even this small bit of responsibility.  The very first opportunity he had to skip out on an evening of work, he did so.  Then he did it again, and once again.  He hoped no one would notice, but that was not the case; he was fired.  Needless to say, it was his own fault.

But he didn’t see it that way.  He asserted that someone must have snitched on him, and that was why he was fired.  Not because he skipped out on his job, but because he was caught.  Now, it is likely that there was no snitch at all.  What assuredly happened is that a random inmate wanted a book one evening, and, when the book cart never showed up, innocently asked the officers whether it had been cancelled for some reason.  This isn’t the point, in any case; the point is that he couldn’t see his own personal responsibility.

Fast-forward a couple of days. He’s given another job, this time by mistake.  (If you’re terminated from a position, you have to go to the bottom of the list to wait for another job.)  The officer who gave this guy his new job missed this fact, but corrected it the next day.  He was informed of the clerical error, terminated once again, and told that he would be moved to the bottom of the list like everyone else.

His response was typical.  He got angry and bitched at the officer.  He couldn’t understand what he’d done wrong.  He deserved that job, in his mind.  The officer and the prison, perhaps even the superintendent of the prison, were somehow screwing him over.  He sulked and whined.  He recounted the tale of woe to his buddies, all of whom consoled him by agreeing that he’d been shafted.

It’s like he’s standing in the middle of a circle, placing blame on everyone outside it.  It’s the snitch’s fault.  It’s the officer’s fault.  The prison’s rules aren’t fair.  It’s because my lawyer screwed me and my judge was an asshole.  It’s because the laws are too harsh.  It’s because society was hard on me while I was growing up.  At no time was personal responsibility ever taken.  He could never simply shrug his shoulders and say, “Oh well, I got caught.”

And make no mistake:  Though I’m pointing out one specific example here, it’s a common mindset among prisoners.  It’s one that I myself fell victim to some years back.  We’re especially susceptible to it because in prison it’s socially acceptable behavior to blame the officers and the prison rules and the judges and cops and sentencing laws.  Indeed, if you don’t blame those things, if you bring up the wildly insane idea that perhaps you’re here because of your own personal opinion, you can easily be seen as someone who sympathizes with cops.  Everything becomes “their” fault.

This si the problem, this is the root of it.  If you can’t even admit such obvious fault, you have a serious sense of self-entitlement.  It’s no wonder such people are locked up: They think the world owes them a living, and so it’s easy for them to justify the victimization of others to provide for themselves.

Why Prisoners Need Richard Dawkins

I remember a particular point Dawkins made in his book The God Delusion that struck a chord with me, for obvious reasons.  He was discussing the correlation between religion, skepticism, and crime, in part to answer the ridiculous creationist claim that people are more prone to commit crimes if they’re atheists.  Dawkins suggested the opposite: that he would be surprised if there were very many atheists in prison at all.

(I think he was also making a point about education.  That is, since prisoners are in general woefully uneducated, it would be difficult for many of them to be informed atheists anyway.  Prostrating oneself before a higher power and having faith doesn’t require any education; learning about actual evidence in the natural world does.)

I think Dawkins is right.  As an insider, I can state two things with some amount of certitude.  The first is that there are plenty of religious felons in prison.  The second is that there are very few atheists.  Further, there are very few atheists who have devoted any efforts to actually pondering and studying the idea.  This is a shame, because I’ve found that those who make such an effort tend to be more adept at using their brains than is usual for prisoners.  I’m not saying that religious prisoners are unintelligent.  There are guys with an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible, but then there are also guys with an encyclopedic knowledge of football.  Neither one is going to teach us how to think critically and use the tool of reason.  For prisoners, this should be priority number one for improving ourselves.

One thing standing in the way is the fatuous notion that religion is the answer.  Some prisoners do become better people through embracing religion, and I have no quarrel with that.  For this purpose, I think the destination is more important than the path.  But my main problem is the idea that religion seems to be required.

Despite the title of this article, I’m not saying that prisoners need to share Richard Dawkins’s views to be productive individuals who can function in society.  This isn’t about “converting” prisoners to an ideology; it’s about teaching them to think rationally.  It is not even imperative that they agree with Dawkins.  For the purpose of this argument, the content of his books is not as important as the method he uses and the language and skill with which he presents his arguments.  If convicted felons can learn to sue the powerful tool they have inside their heads, if they can learn to approach their problems, trials, and decisions with rationality rather than tradition or uninformed reaction, they’ll have the foundation they require.  Reading Dawkins is a good place to start.

One sign of hope:  The library here purchase The God Delusion last year, and ever since that time, it hasn’t been able to stay on the shelves.  It’s being borrowed and read as quickly as it’s returned.  Perhaps this will lead to prisoners putting down the Bible and reading something by Carl Sagan or Ayn Rand.  Perhaps they’ll listen to visionaries of the civil rights movement rather than prison chaplains.  Perhaps they can learn to see that the path to morality is reason, not obedience to mythology.

What Prison Has Taught Me

I wrote the title of this article to make myself think and see what I come up with.  I grew up and became a man here; I was arrested when I was eighteen and still extremely immature.  I suppose I could mention some of the positive influences I’ve had, such as the friend who taught me that guilt can be a part of responsibility, or the person who showed me how easy it is to deceive yourself with dogmatism, or the writers who prompted me to be a free thinker.  But those can be universal experiences; I’m after something indigenous to being a prisoner.

I should probably talk about learning to be responsible.  I’d say that in a general sense, prison can teach you responsibility like no other experience can.  This is not to say that many – or even most – prisoners learn to be responsible here.  But learning to be a responsible adult is one effective way to deal with being locked up.

You learn quickly, if nothing else.  When I was a duck through the door, I started gambling on card games and quickly got into debt for eighty dollars (which is the equivalent of about two month’s wages out there on the streets).  You can avoid nearly all the violence in prison if you keep away from entanglements with two main issues: Money and gangs.  And here I was already fucking up with one of them.  I was also busted for pruno once back then, which cost me some time off for good behavior (good time).  One lesson at the beginning was enough for me – I never gambled or felt the need to drink again, regardless of how many times I was accused of being “scared” for bowing out of situations.  (I’ve found that in prison, being “scared” is often synonymous with being “rational.”)

You also learn to be respectful of others, if for no other reason than being disrespectful is the quickest way to get in a physical altercation.  As a result, prisoners hold doors for each other, they say “excuse me,” they clean up after themselves, they don’t cut in line, etc.  I’m not saying that fear of reprisal is a good reason for people to be nice to one another, but in the case of prisoners, at least it gets us in the habit.

Most of all, though, you learn to rely on yourself.  Unless you choose to become a part of some racial or social group, you’re on your own.  And good luck finding someone who cares about your problems if things turn bad for you.  You quickly learn that most “friends” only care so far as it concerns their own welfare, and run for the hills the minute a hint of trouble comes.  You’re stuck with only your thoughts and any values you try to eke out.  The old dichotomy about choosing to be a leader or a follower doesn’t really mean much there on the outside, but in prison, it means everything.  Of course, you don’t have to be a leader in prison – it’s sufficient just to be an individual.

If you ask for nothing, you owe nothing.  If you expect nothing out of people, they can’t betray you.  If you place all your problems on yourself only, you embrace personal responsibility.  That’s how you solve those problems and learn to respect yourself.  And the more you respect yourself, the harder it becomes to ignore the fact that everyone deserves that same respect.

I don’t know if I ever could have learned to be responsible the way I have here in prison.  It’s too easy out there on the streets; the consequences aren’t as great.  Out there, you have friends and family to bail you out, and you can avoid dangerous situations simply by walking away.  In here, it just doesn’t work out that way.  Call it “learning the hard way,” or “growing up fast,” or some other such cliche, but you can’t avoid it in this place.  And I don’t think it takes a special kind of person or an “inner strength” to take something positive out of prison – I just think you have to be honest with yourself and learn to take responsibility for the decisions you make, both good and bad.