LETTING GO OF AN UGLY BIAS

Sometimes when I day dream I think bout what if? What if I had made different choices than I did?  What if I had argued with my mother more to look both ways before crossing the street? Would she still be alive today? What if, on and on. Today is the "anniversary" of the day she died and so I am reflecting on her.

I have been thinking about how  the events that happen in our lives affect us. I have been reading Wally Lamb's book Couldn't Keep it to Myself, essays of students in his writing workshop at York Correctional Institution, a women's prison in Connecticut. It made me think about my bias towards prisoners. I used to feel that if you made it to prison you must belong there. My bias was also that prisoners usually did not do 'time equal to their crime'. Then it seemed apparent to me that the American justice system is different than the Canadian justice system. In Wally lamb's book he spoke of a child who entered prison at the age of 15 and was not scheduled to be released until 2046, the year she turns 64. She has since her incarceration attempted suicide 3 times. It just seems so much more unforgiving and harsh than the Canadian system (at least to my current knowledge).

Wally Lamb's book Couldn't Keep It To Myself, contained the women prisoner's life stories. It was interesting for me to see their life stories and learn about their experiences and events that formed and shaped them into the people they became. I don't believe a single woman prisoner in the book was not sexually abused as a child, every woman's story leading up to her incarceration contained sexual abuse.  Most had also experienced domestic violence from their significant other. Most suffered from Post traumatic Stress Disorder while they were in prison which shows how traumatic there life experiences were before entering prison.

I felt changed after reading the book, like it could have been me in that prison. One woman from the prison had been sexually abused and had experienced domestic violence and then her grandchild experienced sexual abuse from the same male who she experienced domestic violence from. She shot him dead when she found out about her grandchild's abuse. As I read this I wondered, if I had experienced the same life would I have done any differently? I  could see myself having a nervous break down and wanting to shoot the abuser. Wally Lamb's book really taught me to recognize that prisoners are just people just like me. I need to love them and try to understand them.

In my work as a foster parent I have always had sympathy for the addicted parents that I work with, and I always work with them with the end in mind of helping them to get their kids back. I knew the stories of their past were severe. I understood there was reasons as to why they were addicted. Many told horrendous stories of what they had to overcome in their childhoods and the impact this has had on their adult lives. None of us could live the challenges many of these parents faced and emerge unscathed. I must admit though for one of the parents of the children in my care, a mom who was in jail for a very serious crime, I felt justified in being a little holier than thou. I told myself that obviously she was a bad egg and so the usual sympathy I felt for the parents I work with went out the window. After reading Wally Lamb's book  it opened my eyes to my own bias against prisoners. I saw the correlation between incest, sexual abuse, violence perpetrated against females and those females going on to commit acts of crime. I also could see from the women prisoner's first hand accounts, the extent to which American prisons fail to rehabilitate them (men, women, and sometimes even children) as well as the racist and classist nature of the American justice system.

My mother experienced sexual abuse from a family member when she was a child. She had a life similar to a few of the women I read about in Wally Lamb's book. She was quite damaged emotionally and it opened my eyes to who she could have become. I had always pitied my mother and said she was damaged but look at the horribly hard life she experienced. Which is true still, but she was able to keep her emotions and actions together enough to stay out of jail. My mother had her faults, she was a parent similar to some of those that I work with. Not many tools in her tool box for parenting skills. I do give her credit for staying out of jail. Maybe she should earn my pride a little more. This accomplishment, her staying out of jail, is not something I would have recognized if I hadn't read Wally Lamb's book.

This book had a serious impact on my thoughts and feelings and showed me a bias I had towards prisoners. I didn't even recognize the bias as something negative. Maybe I can learn to show more love towards prisoners. At the end of the day the prisoners are people just like me and you. I identified with these women and wondered if I had lived their lives might I also be in prison? If so wouldn't I want to be treated like a human being while I was in prison and not inhumanly like the prisons do today?

To quote Wally Lamb speaking of the inhumane treatment of prisoners "At York C.I. a woman is told when to rise, what to wear, when to shower, when to eat, when to use the phone, and when to go to bed," Lamb shrewdly observes. "Her mail can be read, censored, or confiscated. An institutional lockdown can abort her classes, her workday, or a planned visit with her children." She also can be put into segregation (23 hours a day of isolation), have degrading strip searches performed and or be denied meals just on the whim of a guard and without any real provocation or justification. She is powerless and all too often the victim of a continued cycle of abuse from without the prison walls (her life prior to her 'crime') to within the prison walls.

James Baldwin once put it "People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes back to them, poisoned." This quote makes me think there must be a better way towards rehabilitation for prisoners. I dream of a prison system where prisoners are treated humanely. I would love to see the prisons with work for the prisoners to do, where their talents and strengths are used. I think their self-esteem would be built and strengthened from the pursuit of a trade or profession. I am grateful to have read Wally's Lamb's book for what it taught me about myself and my relationship to the foster parents I work with and most especially to how I view my mother.