Prisons - How To Change Inmates and How Not To Do So.

 If you care to read what supervised release has been for me, please see the link to your right for "Supervised Release"; I have some of my prison journal and some of my halfway house journal also posted under the topics "Prison Life" and "Halfway house life", respectively. You may get my perspective of what it is to be imprisoned and what it is to be re-entering civil society.

The United States federal prison is not geared towards rehabilitation; reform is not a goal of the system. This serves the interests of you. Whatever efforts were made to change my life, to move past the craziness I was mired in before my arrest, came from myself. They were neither aided nor abetted nor inspired by the federal government. I was lucky having the education to devise the means to reform myself, and I was even luckier to find the lucidity to see the possibility of having a new life. The goal I gave myself to do good; all the government cares for is to keep me obeying it. I see the former makes the latter irrelevant. Atoning for my mistakes (which go beyond my crimes) presumes what the government fixates upon.

Knowing something about writing gave me the means. Creativity counters the destructive. Some prison systems are using that fact to wean inmates away from criminality. ‘It felt like being stripped naked’: the prisoners confronting their crimes with art provides you with an example.

B has been in institutions since he was 11. But Grendon is different, the inmates say: it lacks the hierarchies and violence of ordinary jails. “Here there’s no fights, people can express themselves,” an inmate who writes poetry notes. “In other prisons you’d be seen as weak for that and open yourself up to bullying.” Grendon was founded in 1962 as a radical carceral experiment and is divided into five wings (communities) of about 40 men plus an induction unit. Inmates must apply to join the prison and spend up to six months being assessed before they can begin the intensive four-year therapy. Some can’t hack the extreme scrutiny and request to return to what they know, but statistics from criminological studies show that inmates who complete at least 18 months of therapy at Grendon are 20 to 25% less likely to reoffend than in conventional prisons.

“Prison can retraumatise people and if you don’t address it, it will be ongoing,” a female therapist (or facilitator, as they’re called at Grendon) tells me. “You have to believe people change. I’ve seen it.” Shuker agrees: “The thing that is unique here is that everybody feels they’re part of a shared goal. They want to make it work. At Grendon we say: ‘This is your prison, you’re responsible for making it safe, sort out your differences.’”

Every decision is taken democratically, by vote – including the choice of resident artist. Kelland recounts his interview with the men before he was accepted on the scheme. “One of them asked me what my work was about and I told him ‘flawed masculinity, cycles of failure’. And he said: ‘Well, you’re in the best place then. You’re not gonna find any more flaws than are here.’”
 

Just as Censoring Imagination: Why Prisons Ban Fantasy and Science Fiction Moira Marquis on the Importance of Magical Thinking For the Incarcerated shows you how prison systems operate against reform.

When deprived of human intimacy and other avenues for creating meaning out of life, escapist thought provides perhaps a necessary release, without which a potentially crushing realism would extinguish all hope and make continued living near impossible. Many incarcerated people, potentially with decades of time to do ahead of them, escape through ideas.

Which is why it’s especially cruel that U.S. prisons ban magical literature. As PEN America’s new report Reading Between the Bars shows, books banned in prisons by some states dwarf all other book censorship in school and public libraries. Prison censorship robs those behind bars of everything from exercise and health to art and even yoga, often for reasons that strain credulity.

Looking through the lists of titles prison authorities have gone to the trouble of prohibiting people from reading you find Invisibility: Mastering the Art of Vanishing and Magic: An Occult Primer in Louisiana, Practical Mental Magic in Connecticut, all intriguingly for “safety and security reasons.” The Clavis or Key to the Magic of Solomon in Arizona, Maskim Hul Babylonian Magick in California. Nearly every state that has a list of banned titles contains books on magic.

Do carceral authorities believe that magic is real?

Courts affirm that magical thinking is dangerous. For example, the seventh circuit court upheld a ban on the Dungeons and Dragons role playing game for incarcerated people because prison authorities argued that such “fantasy role playing” creates “competitive hostility, violence, addictive escape behaviors, and possible gambling.”

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It’s much simpler and less disruptive, of course, to deny dreams as unrealistic and to assert their danger. Imagination’s potential for disrupting systems already in place is clear. Those that cite this danger as a reason to foreclose imagination may even admit current systems imperfections yet, necessity. This may be the perspective of prison censorship of magical literature—commonly banned under the justification that these ideas are a “threat to security.”

Incarcerated readers say the censorship they experience oppresses their thoughts and intellectual freedoms. Leo Cardez says, “They [books] are how we escape, we cope, we learn, we grow…for many (too many) it is our sole companion.” Jason Centrone, incarcerated in Oregon, expresses exasperation with the mentality that sees magical thinking as threatening: “Or, lo! The material is riddled with survival skills, martial art maneuvers, knot-tying, tips on how to disappear—like this.”

Folks, you get what you pay for. You are thinking prison will reform inmates, and you cannot understand why with all that is paid into American prison systems there is such a great failure at rehabilitation. Only you are not paying for reform. You are being told that you are doing so, when what you pay for is warehousing of human buildings.

Think about that, please.

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