Sketching out the Scarlet Letter

Sometimes in prison, and ofter after you are out, the criminal justice system pretends to care about “reforming” you. They might offer some rather feeble pass at offering you literacy, or a job skill, or psychological counseling. I haven’t experienced any of these as particularly helpful, nor can I say that many of my fellow (ex)felons have every told me of their enthusiasm for these government-mandated orders to change.

When I look back at the Bureau of Prison mandated drug education class, it’s certainly easy to see why there isn’t much gratitude for the class or its curricular materials. The very cover of the booklet used in the class I took — with the “workbooks” presumably produced under government contract by The Change Companies — is enough to put anybody off, at least anybody with a shred of cultural sensitivity. The cover of the book features four photographic portraits: one of an African American man, one of an African American woman, one of a Latina woman, and one of a white guy covered in tattoos. Welcome to a helpful and balanced vision of America’s drug abuse problem. I supposed they should start changing the portraits down at the Betty Ford Clinic.

Aside from the obvious racism and classism in such a representation, or more accurately because of it, what one feels even before getting into their attempt to “deprogram” one’s criminal mindset and addictions, is a sense that one’s drug problem is something inherent in who you are, not really a behavior that is independent of what kind of person you might be. It really does look as if problems are skin deep. If we can identify drug users that easily, then we have a modern analogue to the Puritan’s scarlet letter. And I say this as somebody descended from Puritans. It would be more convincing if I could actually reproduce the photographs here, but since every page of The Change Companies’ products sternly admonish me that “It is illegal to duplicate this page in any manner,” I better resist my in-born criminal urges and resist the temptation of offer you such ocular proof.

My bigger concern about The Change Companies’ allegedly reform-minded publications, however, has to do with the kind of ever-implicit core belief that lies beneath them: that all criminals are inherently bad people. It’s a program of “personal change” that involves shaming felon and the felon’s internalizing of their particular notions of moral turpitude. They play the good people of Boston; we play Hester Prynne.

In my post-prison education courtesy of The Learning Companies, they posed me the following question: “Choose one of the following: __ I plan to make positive changes __ I plan to stay pretty much the same”. Really? How about both? One seems not only limiting, but inane. I was a pretty good and successful person BEFORE I went to prison. I made a lot of positive changes in regard to the one thing that got me in trouble even BEFORE I went to prison. Moreover, prison didn’t empower me to make any positive changes at all. Prison is being cooped up with a bunch of people who didn’t make The Learning Companies’ moral grade and aren’t especially motivated to make sweeping changes while warehoused with a bunch of people suffering the same fate. But perhaps the authors of the question don’t realize that. Maybe they are just naive about what prison really is: a dangerous and useless excuse to preserve the very social norms and status quo that frequently cause criminality in the first place.

I’ve done my time. I’m always changing, and I’m always the same. Whatever good I do from here out, insinuations of my fundamental damage as a human being won’t add to it. Hester never reformed because of the scarlet letter. She survived in spite of it.