Hard Time – Soft Time
Recidivism or Redemption
As a body ages, the arteries often tend to harden. This is especially true for physical bodies that have become sedentary over time. Is the same true for a body politic that has begun to age and ossify? Our culture seems to be hardening by the day. And just as it is so in the physical body, perhaps the hardening of our culture is life threatening as well.
Such thoughts came to mind the other evening during a screening of the Discovery Channel’s documentary, Lock Up, Lock Down, at the offices of the American Friends’ Services Committee (AFSC) in Philadelphia. The film contrasted two prisons – the San Francisco County Jail, and the Ohio State "Supemax" Prison in Youngstown.
In one section of the San Francisco jail there is a dormitory housing sixty inmates. These inmates participate in RSVP (Resolve to Stop Violence Project) anywhere from ten to fourteen hours a day in various types of therapeutic experiences. There are group sessions where inmates have the opportunity to deconstruct their own violent behaviors. Victims of violent crime also come to meet with them to talk about how violence has affected their lives. In a way it is constant, unrelenting “soft time” where these men are immersed in an alien sea of emotions until they can swim for themselves.
The prison experience in Ohio could not be more different. The Youngstown prison, like many supermax prisons that dot the country, is the epitome of “hard time”. From the first one, the Federal Prison in Marion, IL to the famous (or notorious) SHU – Special Housing Unit – at Pelican Bay in Northern California, these prisons ensure that inmates continually bathe in one emotion - rage. And of course the more rage that the inmates express the tighter the controls have to be on these men. To call this circle vicious completely disrespects the word vicious.
As I watched the Ohio inmates and listened to them talk about their experiences, I could not help but notice that every surface they encounter is a hard one. The monotony of the smooth concrete walls, the clang of the metal doors, the rock hard glass. How do you harden a hardened criminal, I wondered. Harden everything around him was the obvious answer. I also noticed what was not around them. There was no beauty, no art, no music, no flowers or plants. Nothing around them to remind them of their essential humanity. No way for them to recall that, their surroundings notwithstanding, they are still of us.
Yet, here is perhaps the most disturbing realization – the supermax route does not work. Isolating these men from human contact makes them less able to cope with other human beings. The idea of solitary confinement even for a few days seems overwhelming to me. But years? Twenty-three hours a day in a cell with one hour for exercise and a shower? And that one hour comes on a good day. The notiona that the only human contact is when guards chain your hands and feet, and then unshackle them through the bars? Unimaginable.
And here is another realization – the San Francisco RSVP model works. In the three years that this unit had been in place there was one assault during the first month. That was it. Since then there has not been a single violent incident, even though many of these men had done many years of “hard time” in other prisons, and some had been in supermax prisons in the past. For the first time these men came in contact with the “soft power” that comes with emotional clarity, and the possibility of redemption.
Finally, the realization sets in that virtually all the supermax inmates are eventually released, not just from solitary confinement into general population, but to the outside as well. These men hardened by steel and concrete, by isolation and alienation are all around us. They are sitting next to us on the trains we take in the morning. They are parking our cars when we go out in the evening. They are working in the restaurants where we take our families out to eat. They are everywhere.
What if we were to elect politicians who really were “soft on crime”? What if we were able to engage in conversations that get past the taglines, and have deep dialogues about how to truly “soften up” not just these hardened criminals, but our hardening body politic as well?
Where there is no beauty, there will always be a beast.
Check out the work that AFSC is doing to address these supermax prisons here
Also, to see how far the SF Sheriff is willing ot go to use "soft power", check out the jail's Garden Project here.