as the culmination of the seminar i'm taking this semester, our prof packed us off to a correctional facility to have a look-see and speak with the inmates about their experiences and rehabilitation. i'm glad to report that this was more educational and less scary than it sounds -- if you imagine a straight line between fox river and oswald state penitentiary, we're talking way over on the left side in terms of shanking and sex slavery (i think). i must say that i was probably more scared going into the locked wards of imh, though i was somewhat more tender at the time. also in uniform, though, so perhaps it balances out.

ugly pink exterior, lots of electronically-operated doors sliding slowly open and shut, each door with its own big orange sign: HOLDING CELL 12, SALLYPORT 2. long, wide, strange-smelling corridors. also, according to the sergeant who accompanied us, lots of technology that doesn't work -- id tags that don't scan, a fancy drug detector on the fritz -- and a registrar's office that would be right at home in, oh, 1978; filing cabinets wall to wall and not a PC in sight. this was the stuff we actually got to see; i shudder to think of the disorganization that lies beneath. fortunately, my cynicism re: such affairs peaked circa 1999, and these things neither surprise nor disturb me any more. we released someone early and they went out and murdered you? oops!

we got to speak with a group of a dozen or so of the inmates who were part of a drug treatment program (it was never clear to me what precisely any of them were serving time for, and none of us found it appropriate to ask. is there prison etiquette? someone needs to write a book on this.) most of the answers they gave us were of the for-the-bible-(or-in-this-case-my-parole-officer)-tells-me-so variety, but then again, what can either side offer in a situation like that but platitudes? incarceration is just one small part of a system that shits on you if you're one of any number of things -- poor, uneducated, black -- but that's not a card anyone at the table was willing to play.

did i feel sorry for them? wholeheartedly yes. i've blogged at some length about neuroethics and the law; in summary, i'm in full agreement that punishment should be utilitarian but not retributive since broken mind = broken brain. what this means, sadly, is that no one really deserves to be in jail, they just need to be. and, to complete the argument, the real tragedy is not the steady, inexorable influx of people into the prisons, but the fact that as humans ourselves we can, and must, think of these people as individuals instead of statistics.

i know this is a rather strange way to think -- let me end on a less confusing (though just as depressing) note. the drug "treatment" program that these folks were in seemed to hang almost entirely on the premise that if one changes ones mind, and has sufficient willpower, life will get better. this is the perfect recipe for recidivism, and entirely out of whack with what we've learned from psychotherapy research over the past 50-or-so years. if you're an alcoholic or a crackhead, willpower just isn't enough; what you get instead is guilt and self-blame when the "changing-ones-mind" deal doesn't pan out. and as wonderful as the social workers and the platitudes are, one could not help leaving the place more than a bit despondent, with the sense that things are as they were in the beginning, and that they forever shall be, in saecula saeculorum.