A Sentence Or Two About Jail

by DJ E23

For the last eight days in the month of April, 1994, I served a jail sentence in the Boulder County State Detention facility. While a few experiences in my life have been invariably worse, my time in jail was certainly no pleasure. However, it did completely reshape my thinking about the nature of prison operations and how American society has either become entirely complacent about the issue or would prefer to shy away from thoughts on imprisonment. After all, the average American has never been to jail and probably will never go. Still, in a remote era when politicians plan a contract with the citizens of their country which insures that more Americans will be living in prisons than ever before, it somehow makes sense to me to re-examine what otherwise has been accepted as a social normalcy.

As a result of this short time in jail, my perceptions profoundly shifted as I detailed the workings of my psyche in such an alien environment. During one of the many restless nights I spent with toilet tissue jammed in my ears and a pillow over my head, I had a dream concerning a neuroscientist friend of mine whose name I have changed in the following recount:

A series of murders in our neighborhood had led to a witch hunt of sorts, and the outraged mob ended up on the doorstep of my house, pointing the finger of guilt at my friend, Wilson. I stood aghast looking out the living room window at all these malicious, screaming faces.

“Wilson?” I implored. “You actually believe that Wilson is the killer? You people need your heads screwed on.”

Finally police arrived and began battering down the door. Wilson slinked down the hallway toward me, his face grim and pale. I stepped forward and opened the door, just as the cops were about to ram it again.

“I can’t let you people do this,” I bellowed. “I attest to this man’s innocence. He’s a neuroscientist, for chrissake.”

I felt Wilson’s beefy hand on my shoulder. “No, Brian,” he says. “I’ll hafta handle these muthas MY WAY.”

His face transformed into a hideous smirk, eyes swirling with dark power, and suddenly I felt ashamed for defending him. He was indeed the killer.

My impression of this dream indicates that an internal transformation had begun, a dialogue between my subconscious and conscious minds that was somehow trying to rationalize my situation. Certainly there was no doubt that the state courts felt I had acted criminally and must be punished accordingly. However, it suddenly occurred to me that although I had consciously accepted my fated short stint in jail, my subconscious mind remained very troubled by the seeming incongruity of my “criminal self” (as reflected by the other inmates) and the individual “me” with whom I remain psychologically and emotionally comfortable. And so it seemed, via the dream scenario, that my subconscious mind had enacted a sort of criminal episode to help my interior emotional being come to terms with what my rational mind had already accepted—that I had in fact done something considered criminal and must be incarcerated as a criminal.

In this fascinating display of projection, my subconscious mind had taken the figure of one of the most criminally innocent and respected intellectual individuals in my current life and imposed on him a scenario of ultimate heinousness. It further occurred to me that because of the surrounding environment and the common attitude of the jailkeepers (inmates are created equal, regardless of the severity of their crime), that a psychological transformation was beginning to take place in my own mind—an attempted redefinition of my self-attested character into a personage suitable for socializing with convicts and interacting in a freedomless world.

Moreover, I recognized from conversations with and observations of other inmates that this process is the common pattern and that every inmate eventually comes to terms with it individually. And some come to terms with this shift by not coming to terms with it: In other words, a “martyr complex” develops in which the inmate forever protests his innocence of wrongdoing and manifests resentment toward the establishment for mistreating him in this manner.

From these observations, I cultivated an understanding that if I did not keep this discovered awareness at the forefront of my being during my sentence, that, like the other prisoners, I would begin to deteriorate from the individual I am into the definition of the being that had been superimposed on me by the prison establishment. This idea, this interpersonal psyc hic assault, frightened me more than any threat another inmate could have made on my physical being.

Further, I witnessed this fear being manifested among my fellow inmates. If the common subconscious expression of fear is in fact anger, then what better environment for the cultivation of anger? The unfolding reality of the martyr complex was unmistakable: Initially inmates attested to their innocence and to the injustice which had brought them into the present situation; Eventually, as the prison system became more ingrained as a daily routine of living, as the jailkeepers—cops— transformed increasingly into emblems of invasiveness and oppression, inmates reflected on their crimes as high virtues, no matter how petty. Being a subjective witness to this process, it all made some type of perverse sense to me.

Gradually, these “virtues” provided justification for anger—that the state had overruled the qualitative aspects of the subject in question. Inevitably anger must be directed somewhere, whether externally, or inward, towards the self. Now I am not asserting that this type of justification is commendable or even rational, but rather predictable, especially in an environment which is intrinsically irrational to normal, healthy human beings. In surroundings where individuals have been stripped of all possessions, and consequently, any definitions of being individual, it is socially predictable that inmates will find ways to up their personal ante. As a result, a new personal, social definition must be created, and will be created—whether consciously or unconsciously. In accordance with the proposed martyr complex paralleled with the nature of anger, these distinctive “virtues” could then be used as a sort of social leverage, a strengthening of personal value, esteem, and stature among social peers.

Those who chose not to participate in the structure according to this process (via awareness like my own), or were emotionally incapable of it (via prior lack of esteem), generally turned their anger inward and manifested it through solitary quiet sadnesses, belittling commentaries, a good deal of pacing about, or even outright denial— which seemed to be the most explosive type of character. The individuals I observed who fit into this category I felt most compassionate for, as they were obviously needy individuals deeply blanketed in personal confusion. It was hardest attempting to talk with types like these, because either they avoided interaction or ridiculed it.

As in any oppressed society or faction, the animosity towards oppressors becomes a unifying factor, in both personal and social objectives and perceptions. As I have demonstrated, in their own minds the “criminals” are then apotheosized into saints or martyrs, while their incarcerators become perceptually demonized. (I’m not speaking only of immediate incarcerators, but in effect, the entire far-reaching establishment—”all cops”, “all judges”, etc.) How can criminal behavior, therefore, be transubstantiated into “socially acceptable” behavior when no healing process, no psychoanalysis, is taking place? My consideration is that the objectives of the state cannot be achieved by these means; that the current system of incarceration (even at BCSD, “a resort” in one inmate’s words) breeds results exactly opposite of what the state allegedly has intended. Einstein’s theory of insanity matched well with this system: Insanity equals repeating the same process again and again expecting different results. Especially in the cases of “criminals” incarcerated for victimless crimes (such as driving without insurance), the end result achieved equates a powerful and analytical mistrust of “law enforcement”. The question then becomes “Is it worthwhile enforcing laws whose consequences carry such a high level of personal infringement?” In my mind, there is little justification for the enforcement of such laws that produce as many (if not moreso) maligned results as they “correct”.

Because so many laws have arisen to “protect” the people, virtually no one is any longer capable of minding one’s own business. And those who are subject to incarceration are not, in my opinion, being provided enough attention to truly make their convictions reformable.

Like a comparison of Newtonian physics to chaos mathematics: The one system is outmoded and produces inherently flawed models of natural conduct; the other supersedes ordinary paradigms while achieving a more complete perception of natural behavior. Yet only a few insightful thinkers are capable of applying the newer system to the current paradigm. The effect is Copernican and uncomfortable for most people. And that’s one of the problems of trying to do things according to what’s “socially acceptable”—in the end, what is socially acceptable may actually be unrealistic in the terms of how the universe and how human beings truly operate. In this sense, Einstein was correct in asserting that the establishment of “mediocre minds” continually bombards the progressive-thinking minority who humbly try to reshape human perception according to its most recent paradigms for understanding the universe.

If the state truly has the best interests of individual securities in mind, then it must begin to make the shift toward a system based on healing— emotional nurturing and psychological understanding—rather than a system centered on authoritarian domination, control, and depersonalization. One system shuts the individual off from the world; the other opens the individual up to oneself and the nature of the universe. One system assures that it’s okay to feel upset and that the problems can be corrected; the other unrealistically commands, like an angry, abusive father, that the rules will be obeyed, or else. If such changes are not invoked within the current system then, at least in my mind, the fixative structure serves only as a proof statement of the state’s true objectives.