Roots Between Stones, Part. 2: Cracking the Convict Code

I began my first prison sentence 24 years ago, a short stint for drug-related nitwittery.  I learned a fair amount during that year, but not how to stay out. Since then I have spent less than four years in the free world, a tally I own with no small amount of regret.  I returned for a fourth time in January of 2003. As a historical reference, two months later the U.S.  Invaded Iraq, looking for WMDs and Saddam.  I’ve never held a smart phone. To me, Facebook mght as well be outer spacebook and a “cellfie” stick is a paintbrush. What I know of your world is mediated through either a TV screen or whomever I’m asking whether the thing in question is still the way I remember it to be.  Too often it isn’t. Most of my interesting memories are attached to what no longer exists. But I know a thing or two about what it means to be a convict. 

A dying breed, the old school yard dog invokes in his pursuits the only gods he cares to acknowledge: hustle and muscle.  Inured to his adopted habitat, he remains outwardly unaffected by all but the passage of time. Indominable no matter the correctional tactics employed against him, he admires in others the potential for violence, and truly respects only the rare capacity for violence that exceeds his own. To him, inscrutability is a virtue, a mechanism crucial to his safekeeping of personal information, including his own mindstate. His expectations are drafted by decades of confiscation, occasional betrayal, and punishment.  He endures out of sheer spite for the very same ones who would piss on his gravestone.  Particularly ferocious when provoked in the modern convict you see the Will to Power locked in a death roll with a destructive principle, rendering him incorrigible even in the face of brutal consequence. A magnate of cellcraft, he is ingenious and resourceful, making him a genuine threat to the power structure. He is, in a word, unbendable.

The convicts I met all those years ago as a wide-eyed duck inspired me to minimize liabilities such as fear, attachment and compassion. I’ve adhered to much of the code since I was a street kid, intuitively for the most part. But even after having spent half my life in here, an inner quirk keeps me from defining myself as wholly convict.

A dozen years ago I set for myself the unattainable goal of living authentically, such as I can while being held captive in the kingdom of artificial imposition.  I say unattainable because authenticity is best defined by what we do when we are free to externalize our passions, to realize our possibilities. Aside from practical matters of what I’m willing to accept or how I might express myself, my outer life contains few choices.  I am left with only the free play of ideas, my commitment to the spirit of freedom entertained internally. I don’t want the truths I accept to be situational ones. In here, dogmatic norms masquerade as ethics to be held aloft like a guiding light. I refuse to believe that truth is a matter of consensus. 

Big Chuck became a free man this morning, after being told for 24 years that he would die in prison. (To understand why he was released from a life-without-parole sentence, please read “Roots Between Stones, Part  1.”) He had to spend the past six months at this camp, as a “transitional step.”  Although not as visibly shunned as he was in the Reformatory, he still felt for the most part socially repelled, not quite accepted.

Because everyone here has less than 4 years left to serve (the average is 18 months), most feel less invested in prison politics than they would in a real joint. Here, those of us who’ve done real time are in the minority, to be sure. And ironically, the short timers seemed to be the ones whispering things like “Captain Save-a-Pig” behind his back. In this facility I have the most seniority of any “solid” white prisoner, an unenviable distinction that affords me, if nothing else, a little deference. Prior to his transfer I’d gotten wind that Chuck was heading out here. I was able to present his side of the story to the fellas ahead of time, which I’d like to think helped to soften some hearts and minds towards him. 

Our former boss from the maintenance department in the Reformatory volunteered to pick Big Chuck up at 2 AM this morning and drive him to SeaTac Airport.  His flight departed at 6:02.  Destination: Florida, and the remainder of his newly restored life. 

Big Chuck’s actions—principled on a fundamentally human duty, the “categorical imperative” to save the life of a person in peril—have run afoul of the rule of law in this land.  Risking one’s own safety to stop a violent act is the sort of thing that earns one labels such as “hero” and “Samaritan” out there.  In here, his actions made him a pariah.  After giving much thought to the rift between the social norms of this forlorn backwater and those of the freeworld, I am faced with the conclusion that some members of my tribe may be incompatible with yours. 

Big Chuck’s story, moving though it may be, carries with it larger, darker implications. How vast must be the divergence between a natural social environment and one capable of recalibrating the moral compass to magnetic west. In the same way that Omerta (the Mafia’s infamous code of silence) evolved to preserve a power structure against an opposing force, the convict code emerged as a behavioral pattern conferring an adaptive advantage to a population under extreme selection pressure. A population trapped in an environment whose features include a bureaucratized rationale for psychological and physical violence, the negation of individuality, carefully codified oppression, and weaponized isolation, to name but a few. Here, punishment is the often the ends, not the means. 

At some point the corporate gaze affixed itself to prison as an untapped market, and human storage became commodified, monetized. The sheer profitability of the prison industry incentivized legislation calling for harsher sentences which would, of course, require expansion of the prison complex.  Claims used to justify the funding of ever more severe prisons and their extensive staffing had to be legitimized, giving rise to the modern correctional facility in all its soul-remaking glory.  In this parallel universe, betrayal is a form of currency and pathological bullies are rewarded, often with promotions. The convict is a byproduct of the collision between the pleasure principle and a reality stripped of pleasurable experiences.  We learn to minimize our pain at any cost. 

Evolutionary theory makes some interesting predictions about competitors and compromise—namely that arms races are expensive. Cheetahs gave up the ability to fight and climb trees in exchange for bursts of speed sufficient to run down gazelles at an acceptable rate of probability. Gazelles gave up the sturdiness of their slower cousins to be able to elude cheetahs often enough to survive as a species. And so, it goes. Granted, human nature isn’t exactly a logical construct with tidy lines of causation. It isn’t my job to prove these things away.  I can only attest to what I’ve observed as a rational person who pays attention. Convicts surrender certain hallmarks of humanity in favor of antibodies against a dehumanizing pathogen. 

Acknowledging that a systemic pattern of behavior provides an adaptive edge in a specific environment is not to say that that attribute is universally beneficial, in the sense of conferrting overall well-being. We watch drop-forged convicts release after serving sentences lengthy enough to “serve as a lesson,” or so we would imagine. And yet here they are, returning at a rate you may find alarming, and I find dismaying.  Legislators look to ever-increasing penalties for the answer, believing that a convict can be prosecuted into a citizen. Law enforcement sees in the sorrowful rate of recidivism their needed evidence for increased funding and further militarization. Both have succeeded only in filling new prisons as fast as they can be built. Correctional staff refer openly to recidivism as “job security,” a euphemism aptly summing up in two words the reason the American prison complex seems geared against reform. Modern prison is a wasteland of opportunity – – few restorative programs except those that are religion-based, no transferable jobskill training or opportunities for betterment—simply because prison is exactly as it is meant to be. Ignored in the recidivism conversation is the link between released convicts and a remodeled worldview at odds with that of society: a warped perspective owing its genesis to the very place where we are sent to be “reformed.” And reformed we are, indeed. 

This subculture goes to work on us immediately upon our arrival, fashioning a tolerably shaped being so that our social structure can preserve itself.  Where the dominant is suffering, we are socialized to think anti-socially, acculturated to be apathetic.  Resculpting one’s social conscience is critical to maintaining mental health: either you are affected by what you see, or you protect your inner life, your sanity.  You can’t do both. The atmosphere is always toxic, sometimes turbulent, and always pressurized. Were we to feel and react like you do, we wouldn’t outlast our bid. 

We are subjected to two extreme, and at times competing, forms of panopticism – that awareness of being constantly watched that leads one hostage to one’s own visibility.  For most of my sentence, cameras were a constant presence, day and night.  There was even one watching me through the bars of my cell, recording for posterity some the most boring footage ever purchased by your tax dollar. The likelihood of getting away with violence nowadays is almost nil. We are surveilled constantly and often sanctioned remotely for rule violations observed by a guard in a booth behind a wall of video screens. And we watch one another. Constantly scrutinizing the actions of one another for deviations of the code, we keep score like no other social machine: in here, transgressions never wash. For any given situation, there are two sets of rules – – the administration’s “thesis”, and our “anti-thesis” – – and oftentimes the outcome depends on which set of laws you hold most dear.  Out of such an ungainly dialect emerges a misshapen entity, benumbed and dysfunctional “synthesis”. The modern convict.

It might be tempting to pigeonhole the hardliners who blacklisted Big Chuck as simply amoral and institutionalized, emblematic of the antisocial stereotype. But that isn’t the case. The relatively few who were most vocal in censuring Big Chuck are, for the most part, men who pride themselves in behaving nobly. Striving for betterment through self-education, these are family-oriented men. A few of them I would trust to look in on my Mother were they to get out before me. And yet they would banish a man for actions considered by society as heroic. 

Ethical paradoxes suggest more about a person’s social environment than the person himself.  Nazi soldiers tasked with manning the gas showers were often devoted family men. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owned hundreds of human beings. These were men otherwise considered paragons of virtue. Simply put, their moral community had been shrunken to longer include the other. After all, in times of war, we never hear the news anchor announce how many Iraqis or Afghanis were killed during the prior month. 

How we approach questions of right and wrong has much to do with precisely whose happiness and suffering matters to us, the set of those with whom we identify.  A distinction once made at the entrance to our cave, where “us” ended and “them” began. The notion of bright-line ethical borders has been elemental to phenomena such as colonialism, slavery, Trump’s rise and the penal system. A defining ideal of modernity is the outward push of our moral community to include (nearly) all humankind, toward sentient creatures in general. How we’ve progressed since the 16th century, when Parisians turned out in droves to watch cat burnings: dozens of cats gathered in a net, hoisted into the air and lowered slowly onto a bonfire for the crowd’s amusement. More recently scientists performed vivisections (live dissection) on dogs, believing Christian claims that since animals were soulless automata, they could feel no pain. In a post-Blackfish world, we can no longer revel in the antics of captive orcas because our knowledge of their emotional suffering imbues us with moral outrage. We are unwilling to contribute to the infliction of a woeful existence driven by our demand for entertainment. We’ve come so far – in some ways.

With each glance over our shoulder at former ethical blind spots comes a wave of revolt, and maybe shame. How could we? We wonder, recoiling. How could we have been so cruel?  I want to avoid bogging down here, so I’ll skirt the common resort of relativism: that right and wrong are normative aspects of culture, subject to social or religious whimsy. It makes more sense to me that we tend to build our identities on certain premises (American; Christian; Democrat; or white convict, etc.). It follows that we also tend to withdraw our moral concern for anyone (or anything) that we perceive as not sharing those defining premises, who is therefore the Other.  

Even if I could, I would not exonerate the convict as simply a product of his environment. But I would indict the overfed and diseased institution that gave birth to him. The cognitive offspring of American prison is a species of moral chauvinism. Psychologists involved in “mortal salience” studies have isolated the causal relationship between threat and the winnowing of perception. They’ve found that when primed with images of potential danger (guns, knives, fatal car accidents) our minds go immediately into “us or them” mode. It makes sound evolutionary sense that in the presence of peril we would extend protection to our own clan – – those perceived to be “like” us – – and disregard outlanders. We are hardwired, it seems, to discriminate under extreme stress in a binary manner: you are either from my cave or you are Other. Threat stirs an instinct to side with those – – and only those – – with whom we share familial bonds (considering that there is more than one way to define family).  A drive that evolved in the interest of promoting genetic survival, goes the argument. 

When stresses are chronic, rather than acute, you may find your identity circumscribed to no longer include all sentient creatures as objects of moral concern. Not all humans earn empathy, nor even all prisoners.  “Few lives matter”, is your moto. Your boundary of concern might be limited by principle to include other convicts with whom you share a sense of communality.  In any serious dealing with another there is another subtle calculus that informs your behavior in real time, a labyrinth of logic shaped around alliances, elements of folk-biology, known prior missteps, whether you share beliefs, and how you’ll be perceived, against the need to reinforce solidarity. 

Our community is more fragile than it appears. Kinship metaphors permeate our social sphere, mechanisms to implant and foster communal thinking. Crips call one another “cuz” or “nephew,” Bloods are either “Blood” or “fam”, and whites have cliched “brother” or “bruder” (German for brother). A universal tool of sympathetic politeness is the term “bro”, a generic appeal to familial leeway. Eventually, we become callous to the plight of an ever-expanding subset of humanity until sentiments similar to those expressed by Chuck’s arbiters are held toward all living creatures, save the vanishingly few considered members of our ingroup. The narrowing of the mind is the narrowing of my world. 

I enjoy reading about brain science, maybe for the fuzzy illusion of self-awareness I get when I learn the clinical name of some lumpy whorl in my own brainthat must have misfired in the past, leading me here. Anyway, it turns out the nosey folks in neuroscience have ferreted out the brain structures where empathy is rooted. A cluster of brain stuff nestled behind the forehead and known as “resonance circuitry” (the superior temporal and middle prefrontal cortices, to sound smarter than I am) is responsible for creating mental maps of the internal states of others: the “intentional stance” explored by philosophers of mind. The intentional stance represented in my mind allows me to divine your motives from simply observing your actions, a critical skill in here. What I find particularly interesting is that these regions are all tied to “mirror neurons,” an area in the parietal lobe with a specific function. Mirror neurons allow us to mentally represent the intentional actions of others. A perfect receiver for modelling behavior, mirror neurons allow us to imitate or predict from experience an act performed by someone else. They also account for the contagiousness of yawns, laughter, and – – I believe – – the sense of shared mystical energy peculiar to religious practitioners when gathered and acting in unison. Perception of the inner states of those around us seems to happen cross-modally, that is, not limited to sight. We’ve all “felt” the sorrow of another through the phone, some of us more than others.

“Resonance” implies more than simply aping the acts of others. How shallow we’d be if that were the case.  Those of us with intact resonance circuitry absorb or become attuned to the emotional state underlying the behavior of others. Survivors of head trauma resulting in injuries to resonance circuits have described themselves as feeling “soulless.” A sort of sociopathic affect, mothers with damaged resonance circuitry have lost all but a passing interest in their own children. In a bleak sub-world where the zeitgeist fosters emotive states between apathy and antipathy, where behavior patterns are born of indifference and often embedded with contempt, the mental maps of others we create are distorted by a warped lens. We cannot help but internalize the intentional stance of those whose behavior has the greatest impact: our keepers. The dehumanizing pathogen becomes a contagion. 

Over time, the physical changes that take place in our brains relate to our focus of attention. Neuroplasticity (new connections among neurons) seems to occur in brain regions responsible for the actions into which we pour our energy.  Brain imaging of violinists, for instance, show increased synaptic growth and connections in the area controlling the left hand. There seems to be an emotional component to neuroplasticity as well. Brain reshaping is not simply incidental to repetitive behavior – – it occurs when what is practiced is also meaningful. How has my brain changed shape after decades of paying attention to stony disregard laced with malice?

Albert Einstein, when asked about human integration, has this to say:

Rehabilitation involves more than forcing prisoners into cognitive-behavioral therapy crash courses and remedial adult education.  Like any other type of growth, human transformation requires an environment that will sustain it. One in which a human being may retain his humanity, where betterment is incentivized and rewarded. An environment capable of nurturing basic human principles: compassion, empathy, and understanding, allowing the circle of moral concern to include those with whom we do not identify. Maybe one day our system will take a page from the European model, socially remodeling prison communities to represent the macrocosm beyond, rather than stand as its antithesis. In the meantime, some of us shake our heads in dismay as we watch our convict cohort return to prison one by one after serving decades. Time enough one would think, to learn that this life is no life.  It isn’t the lessons learned that brings them back. It’s the failure to unlearn the convict code.