The forgotten 5 percent

“What we have here is a failure to communicate...” I have never appreciated more the irony of that statement until now, in the midst of my own prison term.

Throughout my incarceration, I have frequently said, “If only the administration knew what kind of allies they could have if they stopped focusing on controlling the 5 percent of inmates that are beyond hope, and would reach out to the 5 percent that have most of their own interests in common.”

It is probably not widely understood that in most prisons, the administration allows a relatively small percentage of the inmate population (usually the most violence prone) to dictate the entire structuring of prison life and activities. Indeed, evidence suggests that, when it comes to violence, a relatively small proportion of inmates are responsible for the majority of violent incidents in any given institution. Furthermore, it is probably even less widely known that there is a relatively small proportion of inmates that have absolutely removed themselves from violence completely, and are in virtually full sympathy with prison authorities with respect to the safety and security of the prison, and the promotion of a therapeutic environment (however idealistic these might seem given current prison conditions).

Prison populations are not homogeneous. In between the majority of prison inmates, which are more or less an admixture of the extremes, there exists a small group of inmates that absolutely embody and fuel the resistance culture that currently blights the prison system; but there is also an equally small group that completely rejects the prison culture and struggles to maintain the kind of pro-social norms and values that everybody wishes that the prisons could facilitate.

These diametrically opposite extremes represent, to my mind, the two potential focus points for prison administrators, and represent two possible approaches, equally opposite, to administrating the prison environment.

No one, in the current discussion, is giving appropriate attention to the other 5 percent.

True, at least in the juvenile system, there is a renewed focus on rehabilitative/incentive programming. But, although rehabilitative and incentive based programming does target inmates that maintain a positive lifestyle, the rest of the institution frequently remains for the most part entrenched in a disciplinary mode divorced from the incentive programs and developed to focus on the other violent minority. When this happens, incentive programming once again becomes marginal and is never fully integrated into the general program structure of the prison. This happens most frequently in institutions with high levels of violence (like the institution where I live). Prison authorities cannot ignore or make of marginal concern institutional violence, while incentive programming can easily be sacrificed or made marginal if institutional violence is so frequent that it consumes a large amount of institutional time and energy.

The challenge is to adequately address the 'safety and security' of institutions without defining the social structure of institutional life around the exigency of violence control. This is not the easiest path to be sure. The disciplinary and control model is much easier and probably more efficient. But we must remember that criminal justice is not a business, and prisons are not warehouses that operate on the maximal efficiency model for controlling warehoused goods. Prisons house human beings, and their existence, especially in the juvenile system, is premised upon providing a social structuring conducive to the development of pro-social behavior.

It is way too easy to fall into the dead end of making marginalized, extra-structural incentive programming the entire focus of the rehabilitative aspect of the prison environment. It takes creative commitment to envision a prison environment that structurally embodies and promotes pro-social behavior, and provides incentives for the demonstration of such behavior.

It also takes intimate, first hand knowledge of the current dynamics of prison life and culture. This is where the forgotten 5 percent come in. This group has the potential to be an invaluable resource to prison authorities.

Contrary to popular knowledge, not all inmates are uneducated, and not all the educated inmates are devious and manipulative. Many of them, in fact, are quietly living positive, pro-social lives in prison, but are forced to fly below the radar because of the overall disciplinary structure of the institution, which does not acknowledge their lifestyle as structurally and culturally valuable, and actually serves to entrench and institutionalize prison resistance culture.

And they know what is going on. The administrative-bureaucratic nomenclature may escape some of them—but in reality they have a quite sophisticated, objective understanding of their environment. If given the opportunity, they could bring an invaluable perspective and insight into the discussion.

A failure to utilize these inmates would be a serious mistake—a communication failure that could very well hamstring any genuine reform efforts.

Walls

When people build walls, at some point other people are going to throw things at them.

If you think about it, walls are one of the most defining characteristics of human civilization. Not only are they universal, but they also universally define human social relationships. As such, they have also indirectly influenced human identity.

The basic function of a wall is to separate. The decision to separate one thing from another, or to divide up this or that space, has much more social significance than one might immediately suspect. Throughout history, these decisions have defined family relations, have divided public from private space, have symbolically defined sacred space, have represented racial and ethnic distinctions, have defined nation-states, have designated battle lines, have represented ideological divides, and have differentiated the criminal from the citizen.

Many times the separation created by wall building produces or represents mutual resistance, causing (or indicating) changes to the cultures on either side of the walls. Some of these changes are imperceptible. But most are recognized within the cultures themselves. Frequently, the changes are known and embraced.

Which makes it all the more frustrating to recall the history of wall building—which is a history of conflict. More frustrating still is the fact that most of these conflicts have been irrational and in a profound sense anti-human. In retrospect, we wonder how in the world the German people could have participated in the Holocaust (preceded by the removal and confinement of European Jews); how the United States could have interned Japanese Americans during the Second World War; or how the Berlin wall could have ever been deemed a necessity by the Soviet Union.

Prisons, obviously, are all about walls. It is certainly true that we have come a long way from the days when the criminal would be pilloried or executed in the public square. As grateful as we are for the improvement, there are many of us who feel, nevertheless, that the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater. In the humanizing process that rendered the pillory and the hangman's noose obscene and obsolete, replaced by the confinement of the prison, the public context of criminal justice has been abandoned by the justice process. Public influence upon the mind and heart of the criminal has been removed. The face-to-face phenomenon that places the criminal in the midst of society, confronting him or her with the legitimate social condemnation and the necessary restorative conditions laid out by the public body, has ceased to exist.

The absolute separation of the criminal from the public space seems to be at the root of the anti-social nature of prison culture. Prison culture is a classic resistance culture, created within the walls of facilities breeding social ecologies that have developed in response to being alienated from the wider society and its regulative norms.

One must remember, laws, especially criminal laws, require widespread acceptance and adherence by a general culture that contains such laws as norms of social behavior. Without people who share a common culture, laws are not followed, much less respected.

A common refrain in prison is, “It may be like that on the streets, but this is prison.” That “but” contains the key insight to which I want to draw attention. The absolute removal of criminal justice from the public space has enabled an anti-social resistance culture to develop in the nation's prisons—a culture, the norms of which have developed in the course of resisting and opposing the laws of wider society.

Inmates instinctively understand this as they move back and forth between cultures, experiencing life on both sides of the walls. But I think we all would do well to understand this in connection with the history of the failure of all prison rehabilitation models—the object of which has always been the reconciliation of the criminal with society through reform of attitude and behavior—originally introduced in the prisons as a way of reconciling the criminal with society.

These models have literally been in a constant state of “reform” since the origins of the prison system approximately 200 years ago. (Many of us have been hearing about prison reform for as long as we can remember!)

Reforms repeatedly fail not because they are intrinsically bad (some are, but some aren't). Rather, they fail because they have been hamstrung by the very nature of the walls of the supporting system. The state of constant reform clearly testifies to this fact.

The penal model of absolute separation—physical, social, and interpersonal—seems to be responsible for the failure of prison reform programs, and the development of the resultant, and far more serious, anti-social nature of prison culture.

Obviously the problem is more complex than this. Criminals come to prison because they have already exhibited anti-social behaviors. But although a different set of circumstances and issues are needed to explain this original anti-sociality, the force of the fact that the absolute removal of the criminal from society is a primary factor in the development of anti-social prison culture, should not be minimized.

Absolute separation and removal is appealing because it is easy and convenient. Citizens enlist paid professionals to shoulder the hard work of criminal justice. But no professional force can ever replace the force of the public space. Its force is the force of the whole. And the whole must maintain a regulative role over the part, especially the errant part, so as to ensure that that part does not become of itself a whole in and of itself, with a resistant relationship to the whole. So that it does not begin throwing things at the walls.

Because the fact remains—most criminals come back. They re-enter society every day by the hundreds; but now as foreigners rather than errant parts. Prison, in many cases, has taught them social norms and values in direct opposition to those established in the wider society. They have experienced a kind of alienation and separation from society that they could never have experienced previously, even while engaged in their criminal behaviors. And this experience has in many cases further removed from the criminal the social norms and values needed for successful social reintegration. And like the foreigner who reverts to his or her native language and custom when confronted with adversity or resistance, at the first sight of trouble the criminal reverts to what he or she has come to know best, which is the attitude and behaviors native to the prison.