I’m a total fool. I really expect too much of myself, and that generally translates to me expecting too much from other people. Many people, including my criminal defense attorney, have told me to have low expectations and then be pleasantly surprised, but I seem constitutionally unable to follow that advice. Fool that I am, I don’t see how most people can do it. So, I shouldn’t have been surprised when a Bureau of Prisons contractor told me that her organization was empowered to conduct drug tests “at random at our discretion.” These are the holy rules passed down through the Washington bureaucracy, and by them I must abide. And abide by them I had. I wasn’t worried about trying to beat a drug test because I had nothing to cover up. My question, which was taken as an affronting challenge and attempt to evade my well-surveilled fate, was simply directed at the timing of the test I had been ask to take. If I were to make a 4-hour round trip to take the test, I wanted to know, wouldn’t it make more sense to administer the test when I was going to make that trip anyway in less that 48 hours. It was a question of practicality, birds and stones. I was told that that wouldn’t be random if I took the test 48 hours later. My point — “If you didn’t tell me that there was going to be a test when I went to the scheduled meeting, wouldn’t that be random?” — didn’t seem to register. First she wanted to haggled about the definition of “random” and that was an experience akin to listing to BIll Clinton parse the word “is.” Then, to undermine her whole argument, she concluded that they had the power to administer tests randomly at their discretion, which, it seems to me, is not actually random. It means that drug tests are administered on a whim, but whims are not random. The more fool I for even going down this Orwellian road.
Our entire exchange made exceptionally clear to me that a major part of the in- and post-prison disorientation I feel is a result of over five years of continuous gaslighting when dealing with the Bureau of Prisons and its henchorganizations. I’ve touched on this a little bit before in terms of BOP propaganda distributed to the public. However, being in clutches of the system has provided me with far more gaslighting experience than press releases. I’d almost say that I would have to be impressed with people who can pile untold tons of disingenuous manipulation on me, except for the fact that, as anybody who has experienced continuous gaslighting can attest, it really does start to chip away at your sanity, even when you know you are being propagandized. It’s just that I am fool enough to expect some shred of genuine care and truth from the system. For some reason, I expect “rehabilitation” to be about the building up of human decency, yet, as my posts on The Change Companies have suggested, there is literally a rehabilitation curriculum that is premised on tearing people down and asking them to accept the often-false premises that they are fundamentally flawed and, therefore, incarcerated. If you bow to that kind of assertion and repeat it back as an accepted gospel, you can be seen as rehabilitated. If not, then you are a problem, and likely subject to various sorts of retaliation that can range from being moved between prisons to microaggressions such as being awaked in the middle of the night for “random” (i.e. intentionally disruptive) drug screenings. Having been an adult when 9/11 happened, and an adult who looks vaguely “terroristic” (and believe me, the deployment to stereotype, and trying to get you to believe in the stereotypes that people have about you, is part of gaslighting), I have never been convinced by the randomness of government screenings. I was on an airplane flying to a conference in Texas within weeks of the post 9/11 air travel ban being lifted. For years afterward, I was selected for special “random” screening on about 75% of all the flights I took. Profiling is not random. It’s discretionary. And yet how many times do you ever hear anyone admit to profiling? If you call somebody on it, the response is invariably justified by some sort of distortion or half-truth or equivocation. Gaslighting. Make you think it’s your fault that you have to be pulled out of line. I’m not saying that my drug test was targeted, but I am saying that I have seen it happen over and over again.
“Rehabilitation” and “treatment” are what the Bureau and its contractors purport of offer, but attempts at brainwashing and manipulation are hardly therapeutic. If I made a complaint, I was always told that the Institution had covered that at some point in that past and that it was my fault for challenging something it had already justified to its own satisfaction. It doesn’t matter, for example, that the orientation booklet that they handed out in prison was both years out of date and had both duplicated and missing pages. The “policy” had been published someplace, whether easily accessible or not, and so it was my meager reading comprehension skills that must be at fault. Most inmates get beat down by this assertion, considering that, by my own estimation, about 75% of my fellow incarcerates were functionally illiterate. My problem is that I am too literate, so. the written word isn’t sacrosanct, but subject to interpretation and questioning. The Institution, however, can not survive on interpretation and questioning, so there must be something wrong, I am told, with Big Fool Me. Authoritarian structures brook no deviance from policy, save for when that deviation is bestowed as a gift from the powerful on the powerless. To question the logic, efficiency, practicality or goals of any policy is to commit a grievous sin, but the Institution will tell you that your aim was to get some kind of personal gain by this questioning, not that you have a bigger picture problem with how things are being run. I was always told that I was seeking something selfish when I was always seeking something structural. There was no way to convince them otherwise because they “knew” my “type.” Thus a bascc false assertion about motive is thrown back in your face at every moment of potential resistance, and you are expected to believe it about yourself.
If family members had the temerity to question a policy, I was always told that I wasn’t communicating well enough with my family. They must be ignorant of policy because I hadn’t educated them about policy. After all, isn’t policy perfectly obvious and self-explanatory? If my family questioned policy, they either had the sense to see that the policy itself was either iffy or, in many cases, literally contradictory, or they had questions about it because I had, indeed, communicated with them, very clearly and in great detail, they problems with policy and they happened to agree with me, rather than agreeing with the Institution. The gaslighting here is nearly sublime. Not only must I related and defend the position of my oppressor, but I also have to convince other people to buy into my oppression lest the wrath of the Institution be brought down upon me. This means, for example, that if I questioned what was taking so long for the prison to tell me my release date, and I wrote the proper queries to the proper bureaucrats and still didn’t get an answer, then I should just be content. If I communicated all this in full to my family, and they went above these bureaucrats heads to get a response, then I was told I wasn’t following or communicating policy. When this happened I was also told the the bureaucrat who should have been responding to me: a) never got the query which is almost certainly a lie, given the process I followed (the much more likely scenario being that he shredded it without responding to it) and that b) he had been out of work for some time due to COVID and they were all overworked and I needed to give them slack. As for Part B, I know that was a lie because I had seen — with my very own foolish eyes — the bureaucrat walking around the prison interacting with other staff for at least a week before I was scolded. He just wasn’t going in to his normal office, but rather hiding out somewhere else. After all, I wasn’t, I well knew, the only person trying to get answers from him. And as for when I would be released? Well, they told me just to look at the length of my sentence and I could calculate it from that. In prison terms, that’s a threat: if you question us about the work we are allegedly supposed to be doing but aren’t, we will just find a way to hold you in prison as long as we possibly can, revoking all your good behavior credit to do so. So, when people mischaracterize what you have done and said, lie to your face, and then back that lie with a threat, that’s a pretty severe case of gaslighting, but just a normal day in the injustice system. Here’s another example, my husband calls to register his displeasure about a policy about which I was already being gaslighted. I was told that multiple attempts had been made to call me to get me to comply to the Institutions request, but that was flat out untrue because, well, cell phones register missed calls and I had no missed calls on my phone. When he asked to speak to a higher up in the bureaucracy, he was called a homophobic slur. When I was called in to be scolded for the whole incident, I was told that he was called a slur becuse he made racist comments, another untruth, though the scolder claimed to “have it on tape.” Well, if that isn’t classic gaslighting, nothing is; telling lies about one person to turn him against another and gain the upper hand is literally in the psychological textbooks.
Many policies themselves are just fuel for gaslighting. Take the zero-tolerance approach to anything in which zero never means zero, but people hawking will policy insists that it does. Sexual assault and harassment policy is supposed to one of those. They put signs up all over the place touting the “Prison Rape Elimination Act” and how it’s there for inmate benefit, but really it just seems to be there to remind you that of course you could be raped in prison and, given all these signs, you would be wise to expect it. I can’t claim that I was ever assaulted, but I do know a case in which an inmate did complain for harassment and assault. He went to solitary. The person he accused also went to solitary, though in a different cell. Because they make such a public display of this policy, people had to investigate, but the investigation went like this: The accuser was pretty much browbeaten into recanting his accusation because that would look really bad for the prison and its staff. His recantation was “incentivized” by threats of transfer and ostracism from other inmates; I heard this from the accuser himself. I have no reason to doubt him, particularly because I also knew an eyewitness to the harassment and had no reason to doubt him, either. But in the gaslight, we can see that nothing ever happened. Everything was tolerated except the complaint.
I could go on and on about how the Institution insists on using “exact words” against you — that is, “you said X but you really meant X1, so I got you” while in the same breath distorting and misstating facts of their own — “You said X on Tuesday” but, in fact, it was Wednesday — but that’s so common I would bore myself in the recounting. Let’s just say that the Institution, like every gaslighter, relies on double standards. But what, really, can I expect? After all, I never existed as far as the Institution is concerned, before I was arrested. Nothing I ever did before that is or ever will be relevant to It, save as evidence of and justification for my identity as criminal and felon. Not to get philosophical here, but Louis Athhusser was correct, and if you want to get philosophical, you can check out his seminal “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Injustice System bureaucrats repeatedly tell those who are caught in the system’s web that “they don’t care about the past, only the future.” That it’s all just about “moving forward.” But that is logical and structural nonsense. Prison and all its state-sanctioned aftermath has only to do with my past, and only a small portion of that past. If people weren’t worried about the past, then we could simply focus on not committing future crimes rather than punishing for past misdeed. Indeed, in the system some small part of the past is always seen to be predictive of the future. It’s an obvious misjudgement of fact, but it dominates out lives in this country is ways that we seldom contemplate. We don’t contemplate them because we have been gaslighted into believing the lies about law and order. THe US leads the world in prison population by a wide margin, so we ought to have a future paradise with all those criminals off the street. But we punish backwards rather than protecting forwards, and we listen to politicians tell us that they are making us utterly safe, even as they tell us we are always in mortal danger. Rather than challenging the cognitive dissonance that produces, it much easier to just buy into the gaslighting and move on to the next day.
And so we end up in a system in which a “treatment center” is really just a place of indoctrination and manipulation. We end up with people who have done time and haven’t been taught to value themselves and see a positive future because they have been too busy struggling to grovel before the authoritarian and debase themselves for some small reward. But why do the difficult work of creating real and positive change when you can coast by on humiliation, shame and the creation of the creation of the Other against whom to define the Innocents? Like all gaslighters, the Innocents don’t mind the irony or the hypocrisy of browbeating others to raise their own self-esteem. And so we create a large population of people who are not experiencing growth or becoming something more or better, but a group of people who are consistently debased and infantilized, not the best outcome, I would argue, for the system to produce. If you don’t end up buying the Innocent line, you turn out exceptionally resentful. Wouldn’t you be if, in your 50’s and after a fairly successful life outside prison, somebody said to you, “Take this experience as a Learning tool, Grow from it and never return!!!” Or if someone else said to you, at the end of a meeting, “You may be excused.” I may be, but I don’t excuse them.