Before I went to prison, I probably would have rated myself a C- achiever in the realm of emotional intelligence. After 4+ years behind bars, I’m pretty positive I’ve slipped further down the grading curve. I suppose there are folks out there who would argue that, of course, felons are going to be emotional idiots. In fact, that’s kind of a premise of most attempts are so-called rehabilitation. If you check out the literature from The Change Companies, just to pick on my favorite example once again, their premise is that we felons fundamentally lack self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, motivation, and social skills. Their implicit (and sometimes explicit) contention is that their journaling program will help us convicts gain those things. Now, I don’t think that set of presumptions is especially empathetic or self-aware, but perhaps that’s just one C student speaking to another.
One thing incarcerated people tend to have in common is that they have a variety of compulsions or addictions. These can be chemical, sexual, or something like gambling. Mental health professionals would point out that they are often co-occurring. As a mental health amateur, but an experienced compulsive, I would also add that there is not an absence of self-awareness in these behaviors; rather, we gladly opt for the self-medication compulsions offer when we are faced with emotional challenges. It’s not so much a matter of not knowing what we are doing, but of admitting it. After all, I can’t admit what I cannot see. The problem of compulsion, then is more a matter of self-regulation, the feeling that I can’t stop self-medicating and that the “high” is worth the cost. But allow me to tweak that observation a bit: “regulation” a “normal” or “regular” baseline from which one deviates. Now if “regular” is not your context, it’s going to be a struggle to align yourself with an alien world. If you set your average, regular American down in the middle of in the middle of Ghana and had him live with your average, regular Ashanti, our American friend is bound to struggle with what is now normal. Mr. America is going to have to re-regulate himself in order to assimilate. The high stakes question is whether he is willing to pay what he perceives the costs, to his sense of self and his worldview, of doing so. Now, the claim might be made that one of the purposes of prison is to guide the felon toward self-regulation, which seems superficially reasonable, except when you understand that in prison everything is regulated for you and you are berated or punished for not following “policy.” The criminal justice system normalizes by coercion, not conversion. It’s a baptism of the infidels, and that never takes very well.
Besides all that, there’s the matter of being motivated to change. There are plenty of inmates who would rather not go back to prison, who — we can be fairly certain — will not consciously tempt the police to rearrest them. The motivation to not indulge your compulsions, however, must be seen as distinct from breaking from them. The former is part of the latter, but the latter is hardly the consequence of the former. One is always recovering, not recovered. There are also, of course, the not so rare cases of inmates who just find it easier to that the system regulate them. And for them prison seems not so bad. It beats the struggles of life on the street, the context that wore them down into a “deviant” in the first place. And for those who are motivated to make a change, it’s unhelpful when a very public criminal record marks them, in the minds of many “regular” folks, as being fundamentally flawed in the first instance. When your past besmirches your future, you need much more motivation to face tomorrow than Average Joe.
If I ever felt I was lacking on social skills before prison, I’m pretty sure that my time behind bars set me back in trying to improve them. Although the Leprechaun sweetly claimed that visits by my family really “classed up the joint,” any “classy” social skills I may have had certainly atrophied — maybe even died — while I was being resocialized by the Feds. My inclination to tell others to go fuck themselves has increased manifold between incarceration and now. Thank God I still have enough self-regulation to resist that urge in the majority of cases. The social skills of prison cannot be the social skills of “regular” life, at least the way prison is currently configured. The mismatch is so great that it’s like asking Donald Trump to design and lead a group therapy session for those with social anxiety.
As for empathy, I think that’s where Brené Brown would say that I’ve always had some problems. I don’t think that I’m purely callous, though I sure seem to come across that way, or so people have told me. However, when faced with others’ emotional turmoil, I freeze and flee. If, as Brown says, empathy is about vulnerable connection, then I have to admit that vulnerable connection feels to me like being swarmed by wasps. Maybe they haven’t stung me yet, but I just know it’s going to happen. Let me just state the obvious: prison is not the place to work on your vulnerable connection skills; it’s more like the place to crush them. at least if you want to swim relatively unmolested in the waters of the criminal justice system. If inmates like me tend to lack empathy when we go to jail, then having any when we get out is a bit like expecting a night-shift data entry clerk who has worked in a Norwegian cave for the past 7 years not to have a Vitamin D deficiency. I encounter moments in my Life After Prison in which I know I should be empathetic, and at the same moments a feel frighteningly bereft of that capacity. Whatever progress I was making toward a higher level of emotional intelligence before I slipped behind bars feels like an emotional deficit brought about by withdrawals necessary for survivial.
So, if you want to protect your emotional intelligence, don’t get involved with the criminal justice system. Don’t be a felon, but don’t be a judge, either. Don’t be a recidivist, but don’t be a corrections officer; daily existence behind the razor wire necessarily saps our spiritual strength. That’s a virtual prerequisite of survival in that version of normal. Faced with the paradigm of the prison regular, it’s sure as hell tempting to drink, spend, or fuck yourself back to some sense of self-coherence, but at least if you spend some self-aware effort on those feelings, maybe you can start to find another way of being a C student.
This is just a devastating post.