Inmates Are Social, Not Antisocial

Inmates Are Social, Not Antisocial
Part 1

I was reading Dr. Stuart Grassian M.D.’s report on the psychiatric effects of solitary confinement dated September 1993 in the Madrid V. Gomez, 889 F. Supp .1146 case.  During my research on the penal system, psychological effects of long-term solitary confinement.  I wanted to learn more about the human brain in isolation.  I discovered that Dr. Grassian has based his opinion on animal studies.  Those animals were placed in isolation for a few days, months, years.  Neuroscientists try to compare animals with human psychology.  In reality, none of these animals express themselves to the neuroscientist.  Thus, Dr. T. C. Barnes’ 1959 report is based on his assumption within anthropomorphic terms of rats and mice.

Dr. Grassian’s opinion is incorrect, incomplete, and dehumanized political prisoners in solitary all over the country.  He based his unlimited knowledge on prisoners’ experiences, background history, and culture.  However, he tries to associate attention deficit hyperactivity disorder with antisocial personality disorder.  When classified both disorders are problematic with people who are restricted from environmental stimulation.

According to what Dr. Bruce Perry, M.D., Ph.D., the impact of trauma and the frequent misinterpretation of its symptoms revealed itself in the fact that nearly every one of them had some kind of diagnosis related to attention and conduct problems.  He went to say that in a classroom setting, unfortunately, both dissociation and hyperarousal responses look remarkably like attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity, or oppositional defiant disorder.  Dr. Perry said, “We have come to understand that many post-traumatic psychiatric symptoms, in fact, are related to either dissociative or hyperarousal responses to memories of the trauma.”

Narcissistic personality disorder – sufferers of which have “a grandiose sense of self-importance and entitlement”, “are preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success”, “are exploitative”, “lack empathy”, and require “excessive admiration”, and antisocial personality disorder, which compels sufferers to be “frequently deceitful and manipulative in order to gain personal profit or pleasure, (e.g. to obtain money, sex, or power).  Most politicians within the democratic, republican regime suffered from the above disorder.  There is a high amount of law enforcement officers who suffered from these same disorders.  

The traits for antisocial personality disorder is;

1. Glibness/superficial charm
2. Grandiose sense of self worth
3. Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
4. Pathological lying
5. Conning/manipulative
6. Lack of remorse or guilt
7. Shallow affect
8. Callous/lack of empathy
9. Parasitic lifestyle
10. Poor behavioral controls
11. Promiscuous sexual behavior
12. Early behavior problems
13. Lack of realistic long-term goals
14. Impulsivity
15. Irresponsibility
16. Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
17. Many short-term marital relationships

In the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, the psychiatric diagnosis of an inmate as antisocial personality disorder is due to them showing signs of violating prison rules and regulations, difficult to brainwash, condition, or institutionalize, or are antipolice.  When an inmate refuses to socialize with his or her oppressors, they become antisocial.  In solitary confinement being antisocial is a survival tool because the moment you communicate with officers, inmate drama occurs.  Being antisocial allows an inmate to avoid unnecessary conflicts which provides them the opportunity to be paroled from prison one day.

When inmates file grievances, 1983 civil rights complaints, they are labeled as manipulators and deters them from getting any future help.  All inmates in the PA DOC are recognized as manipulators and deceivers; this is the real reason inmates don’t receive adequate medical and mental health treatment.

American physician Samuel Cartwright identified a metal disorder in 1851 named drapetomania, evident only in slaves.  The sole symptom was “the desire to run away from slavery”.  The cure was to “whip the devil out of them”, as a preventative measure.  Here was the neurologist Walter Freeman hammering an ice pick through a patient’s eye socket sometime during the 1950’s.

Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner apparently cruelly isolating his baby daughter Deborah in a Perspex box for a year.  See book: The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, pages 54-55.

The PA DOC, and Dr. Stuart Grassian treats an inmate’s mental illness as being behavior.  This is why many inmates are undiagnosed and not treated.  Inmates with mental illness are being abused, tortured, and isolated as a form of treatment.  Isolation, unnatural food, lack of sunlight, lack of sleep, trauma, harsh punishment, lack of socialization, and sensory deprivation can make an inmate’s mental illness worse.  It can cause a normal inmate to develop mental issues or brain deterioration.  Therefore, the government agencies are often the creator of an inmate’s mental illness, brain illness, and antisocial behavior because they refuse to identify and treat the ongoing problem.  An inmate’s personality is the result of their social environment, especially in solitary.  If an inmate is placed in an oppressed environment, his personality will change to a more radical, rebellious, antisocial mind state.  Some inmates would become suicidal, depressive, scared, and impulsive.  In fact, many studies have revealed that our behaviors and personality changes when we are assigned a role to fulfill.  Many prison guards will be highly respectful and kind to inmates in general population, but as soon as they come to work in the solitary confinement housing unit, guards become highly disrespectful, belligerent, ignorant, abusive and racist.  So, an inmate responds in an antisocial personality manner, or a hyperactive, impulsive manner.  The inmate would become dangerous to general population.  Any time you continue to back a person into a corner, this is the response you are going to get.  If you continue to feed inmates junk food for breakfast, lunch and dinner, the inmate is going to continue to be extremely hyperactive and impulsive.  This is not rehabilitation.  This is debilitation.  Inmates/prisoners are social people by nature.  When you deprive them from sensory perception associated with human relational interactions:  the caregiver’s face, smile, voice, touch, scent, even the scent of nature such as flowers, trees and grass.  The inmate will lose himself and be conditioned into being antisocial.  This interconnection, the association of pleasure with human interactions, is the important neurobiological “glue” that bonds and creates healthy relationships between inmates and correctional staff. 

Book References:
The Psychopath Test – Jon Ronson
The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog – Bruce D. Perry M.D., Ph.D. and Maia Szalavitz
Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement – Stuart Grassian
Brainwashing – Dr. Edgar Schein

Inmates Are Social, Not Antisocial
Part 2

PA DOC is the creator of turning an inmate antisocial due to ongoing isolation, or long-term solitary confinement.  They isolate the rapist, informant from the murderers, thieves, drug users, and drug dealers, or separated murderers and rapists from the general population, and place them in the management control unit by classifying them as dangerous.  During the Jim Crow era, Black people were segregated from the pale-white folks.  Classism – is social rank such as making pale-white people first class United States citizens and making Black-Brown people second class United States citizens.  You can find this same structure in India, the Dominican Republic, South Africa, the United Kingdom, etc.  During chattel slavery in the South, the slave masters dehumanized the Black slaves to hate the Brown slaves and dehumanized the Brown slaves to hate the Black slaves.  The slave masters, mayors, and governors dehumanized the American public in believing, practicing, and promoting racism.

Therefore, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections is what you would call modern slavery.  This is only a small institution of slavery because the big institution of slavery is corporate America.  Corporate America is the creator and master behind the conditioning inmates as slaves into being antisocial.

Malcolm X once said, “You know when you have a lot of coals in the fire, each coal helps the other coal to stay hot.  But when you take a coal and remove it from the other coals, soon its fire will go out.”  So, by staying out in the world, and staying away from the brotherhood, sisterhood where there is socialization with people who have a brain, intelligence and emotion, you are staying away from strength, perfection, reflection, and positive energies.  You become your own weakness again.  I’ve spent the last 18 years living in a single cell with no television.  I’ve been conditioned to live alone where I don’t want to be around other inmates in the yard, dayroom, or cell.  Associate means:  To join as a partner, ally, or friend.  To link or connect in the mind or imagination.  To keep company, mix socially, express agreement, or allow oneself to relate to something that is below standard or expectation.  Isolation can cause people to commit suicide, cover the cell with human waste, or see things that are not really there.  Isolation can cause outbursts of anger, hyperactivity, impulsiveness and trauma. 

Dr. Stuart Grassian never spent a day in solitary confinement; thus, he does not have an accurate understanding.  Especially when dealing with anything beyond the simplest phenomena to get a true understanding of psychiatric effects of solitary confinement.  To do so it is necessary to penetrate beyond the threshold of experience and make a scientific analysis and synthesis:  identify the larger reality that this experience is part of…such as…unnatural food causing brain deterioration, lack of sunlight, and stimulation, and the patterns and underlying driving forces involved.  This scientific method can be, and needs to be, applied by people generally – not only in terms of what people experience directly, but about human experience more broadly.

Bob Avakian said, “A basic example – the relationship between a patient and a doctor – can serve to further illustrate his important question of method and approach to truth.  A patient has the ‘lived experience’ of the symptoms they are suffering, but that is not the same thing as understanding the causes of those symptoms and a possible cure.”  Dr. Grassian has not provided us with a cure for the psychiatric effects of solitary confinement.

The First Judicial District of Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas diagnoses murderers and rapists as psychopaths, antisocial personality disorder for life.  This, of course, means the murderer and rapist can’t change, and can’t be treated.  They’re a danger to society.  Robert Hare is the founder of antisocial personality disorder in the United Kingdom in the 1950’s long before the United States judicial system adopted his unscientific theory.

Murderers and rapists can be cured with the right medicine.  At the end of the day they are still human = nature!

Their thoughts travel at the rate of 24 billion miles per second.  That means their mind continually going through growth and development.  Thus, with the proper knowledge of medicine, the proper healthy food and drink, murderers and rapists can change their way of thinking and action.  To be diagnosed antisocial personality disorder you would have to become a zombie, where your brain is unable to develop or work.  But this isn’t the case.

Notes:
Answering Ignorant and Idiotic Ideas Part 1 – Bob Avakian
The Hare Psychopathy Checklist – Robert D. Hare
The Restrictive Law of Islam – Louis Farrakhan
Reckless Behavior in Adolescence – Jeffrey Arnett
Neural Plasticity: The Effects of Environment on the Development of the Cerebral Cortex – Peter R. Huttenlocher
The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind – Elkhonon Goldberg
Rising Above Emotion Into the thinking of God – Louis Farrakhan

Inmates Are Social, Not Antisocial
Part 3

Dr. Grassian is a Board-Certified Psychiatrist who was on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School for over twenty-five years.  He allegedly has had extensive experience in evaluating the psychiatric effects of solitary confinement.  His evaluations consisted of providing inmates with a questionnaire; the evaluation lasted for a couple hours in person or video.  Dr. Grassian is not around these inmates on a daily basis to really overstand the psychiatric effect of solitary confinement on an inmate.   Solitary confinement is commonly known as special housing unit, restricted housing unit, special management unit, communication control unit, etc. where inmates spend time alone in a single cell.  The duration lasts most of, or all, of a day with minimal environmental stimulation and minimal opportunity for social interaction which can constitute severe psychiatric harm.

Environmental restriction can cause the following:

1. Sleep deprivation
2. Difficulty maintaining normal patterns
3. Bad mood swings
4. Irritation
5. Paranoia
6. Characteristic abnormalities

Inadequate social interaction can cause the following:

1. Vulnerability
2. Anti-social behaviors
3. Disorientation
4. Paranoia
5. Suicidal thoughts
6. Hallucinatory confusion
7. Impulsiveness
8. Impulsive control disorder
9. Violence

Processed foods can cause the following:

1. Brain deterioration
2. Memory loses
3. Difficulties with thinking and concentration
4. Obsessional thinking
5. Depression
6. Sleep deprivation
7. Agitation
8. Irritability
9. Aging of the brain
10. Hyperactivity
11. Impulsive behavior
12. Borderline intellectual functional disorder
13. Attention deficit disorder

Dr. Grassian stated inmates reported that they experience difficulties thinking, concentrating, and memory in solitary confinement.  This can be linked to processed food, fear, or the feeling of being threatened.  A perceived threat and fear will change the way the brain works in any given situation.  In general, when people feel threatened, key networks in the cortex will shut down:  specifically, the regions involved in reasoning, planning, and other complex thinking processes.

Dr. Grassian’s findings suggest that antisocial behavior patterns, and psychopathic personality disorder may bear a close relationship to primitive hysterical personality disorder, a relationship which has been described by other authors as well.  Grassian goes on to argue that psychopathic individuals may chronically exist in a state of relative stimulus deprivation:  highly impulsive, psychopathic behavior (may be seen) in terms of stimulation seeking pathology.

Grassian quoted a later study directly comparing psychopathic inmates with on-psychopathic controls corroborated these findings.

Psychiatric effects of solitary confinement have inflicted me to write this article requiring new forms of knowledge and the time and space for each person in solitary confinement to recover because the concept of self-mastery is so essential to the mental, emotional, physical, spiritual, will, and soul.  Inmates’ diets must change, lifestyles must change, and their way of thinking has to change.   Personality transformation is through a healthy diet, social interaction, environmental stimulation, and right knowledge.  The efforts to change an inmate’s fundamental notions of self, and the world around them, are magnified exponentially when such efforts are made by those outside the prison – like the inmates, trusted peers, elders; grandparents, aunts, uncles, mother, father, and cultural group.

If the Department of Corrections were built on healthy relationships with inmates, they might be able to develop trust with the inmates.  This means the DOC will have to stop feeding inmates deception, stop weaponizing policies, stop trying to manipulate them, stop filing false misconduct reports, stop denying adequate health care, and vocational and educational opportunities.  The DOC needs inmates’ family members to help them with the inmates’ transformation.  Hence, forced change produces little more than temporary modifications in behavior made to increase rewards and decrease punishment until such time as the individual can resume activities more in tune with his or her former internalized norms.  However, not all characteristics are viable to all cultures and therefore, some may fail to take root when they don’t consider the idiosyncrasies of the individuals in question and the context wherein they reside.

The DOC needs to be comprehensible to Einstein’s statement, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

Inmates’ and correctional staff’s consciousness must be changed through transformation dealing with the human personality and way of thinking, because the DOC’s current method of rehabilitation does not work.

Journal Article:

1. The Prison Journal, Volume 84, Issue 4 (December 2004)

Personal Article:

1. Unnatural Foods Cause Brain Deterioration, Muwsa Green. minutesbeforesix.com

Book References:

1.  Solinger, R., Johnson, P. C., Raimon, M. L., Reynolds, T., & Tapia, R. (Eds.). (2010). Interrupted life: Experiences of incarcerated women in the United States. University of California Press.
2. Grassian, Stuart. “Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement.” Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, vol. 22, no. 1, 2006, pp. 325–383.
3. Amen, Daniel G. On the Psychiatrist’s Couch: Improve Your Mood, Focus and Memory. Mindworks Press, 2015.
4.  Amen, Daniel G. Change Your Brain Every Day. Tyndale Refresh, 2023.
5. Youngberg, Wes. Memory Makeover: How to Prevent Alzheimer’s and Reverse Cognitive Decline. Wes Youngberg, 2019.
6. Emmons, T. D., & Webb, W. W. (1974). Subjective correlates of emotional responsivity and stimulation seeking in psychopaths, normals, and acting-out neurotics. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 42(4), 620.