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freebird1

Just when you think there is some sort of understanding on how prison life works or impacts those we are writing to, something else happens to make me at least, take a step back and take some time out to consider how their lives are so far removed from ours. The reality often is almost like reading a fiction novel. When in actual fact it is stone cold, blunt truth.

One of my ppl's is in a Fed facility. The lockdown procedures have been pretty heavy in terms of the covid, riots and god knows what else they deem necessary to keep inmates locked up 23hrs a day for weeks on end.  But the most recent one, which meant no emails or phone calls for over a week, was because there was 3 executions within as many days!

Now I am fully aware that many of the guys locked up are hardened to such things, after all many have backgrounds of murder, death and violence, and I'm thinking there must be a certain line of thinking whereby they feel safe because they themselves aren't on death row. 

When I finally had a phone chat the response was, 'Well some of them deserve to die'. No compassion, no sympathy, just an unemotional throwaway comment.  

It just brought it home with a resounding thud that the man I find easy to talk to, share moments of hilarity and interesting stuff to talk about, is also the same person who was once affiliated to the most notorious gang in CA. And therefore, his take on such matters should not be at all surprising.  After the phone call had finished I just sat trying to fathom how I would have felt if only 1, much less 3 people who I knew, either in passing or more directly had been executed. It's a situation too difficult to comprehend really, because our backgrounds are actually worlds apart from those we choose to communicate with. Never more so than this particular conversation. The biggest surprise to myself was my own lack of reaction listening to those words. But I guess the distance just forges detachment and to some degree disbelief. Just like reading the fiction novel...caught in a moment, then moving on within our own realtime world.

So, do we ever really  understand prison life and all it's complexities and highly charged day to day enviroment? Do we really know our chosen penpals as much as we think we do? And just how stoic are they dealing with such things on a regular basis? I can only assume it becomes a numbing process, whereby shutting it out is the way to deal with such things.

Certainly made me view many things somewhat differently. 


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Northernyank

I think people psychologically distance themselves to hold onto what sanity and humanity they have left.

 
VioletGrey

Mjuran - We don't have the death penalty in NZ, and I am glad we do not. But this was briefly swirling around in my thoughts not too long ago. I'm sure it's a world famous case - the shooter that murdered 51 muslims in the Mosque shooting here in Christchurch - was recently on every news station, because the offender was being sentenced. You can look up all the details about convictions etc. but he was given a life sentence with no eligibility of parole. They made a big deal out of it because no one in NZ has ever been sentenced to LWOP before. 
Then came the opinions, of which were spouted about being the hot topic of the media that week. "Should just shoot him" "deserves the death penalty" "would be better off just doing away with him" was the general sentiments of anyone who spoke to me about it. I don't believe in the death penalty, nor do I think taking someone's life in any capacity is okay. In fact, my belief as it stands is that we as humans shouldn't get to decide who dies, unless that is suicide (obviously not saying that that's a good thing, but if someone is determined to end their life then they should be able to) and euthanasia (also when done in a proper fashion, with consideration and process attached). But the part where I come unstuck is that there is no reasonable alternative in my eyes to just locking people away in prison. There's no real rehabilitation, here in NZ and in the US, and there's no chance for an offender to truly change their mindset about their behaviours and patterns. Those that have done so within the current prison systems, I take me hat off to them and really admire their ability for taking accountability  and proactively changing it themselves. But not everyone can get to that realisation point without help. And it leaves a huge space where it becomes human warehousing, a waste of human life, and a money making exercise for those corporations involved. I came to a kind of conclusion that the current system doesn't serve any needs of society, other than removing them, and that there needs to be entirely new ways to approach punishment and rehabilition. But that there are so many factors leading up to those crimes that could be changed with a better education system and more equal opportunity across all of society. 
I have never ventured to write to a death row inmate, mainly because their crimes are often too violent for me to be comfortable talking with for someone that committed such acts, but that's my personal view and I don't discourage anyone else from doing so, and hearing of your anguish for your pen pal, it makes me sad for you both. That there should be a better way. 

 
mjuran

Regarding the "Well some of them deserve to die" comments and attitudes, about DR inmates in the same prison who have been convicted of "worse" crimes, I think it's at least partly the typical defense mechanism people have, where you subconsciously look for reasons to explain why someone else has something bad happen to them.  It's that we don't want to believe  really bad things can just happen randomly to anyone, that doesn't feel reassuring at all, so we come up with rationales to explain why the victim asked for it, and the convict deserved execution, and so on and so forth.  If you can identify how someone was stupid or bad enough to get into trouble, you can avoid making that same stupid or bad mistake yourself and avoid the same fate.  That's how our human minds work, as far as I've been able to tell so far.

 
mjuran

Freebird, I just came here (to the DR forum) for the first time this morning, with similar thoughts!  I recently started corresponding with a DR inmate and had been blithely talking to him about art and so on, nothing about prison life or executions, and even somehow thinking that he most likely wasn't in any danger of execution anytime soon because normally people sit on death row for decades before execution, and in many states there are no executions carried out at all anymore.  It was something I hadn't researched well, I guess.  Yesterday I got a letter from him mentioning how much he misses his best friend "who was murdered by the sunny state of Florida almost three years ago".  So someone he knew from his DR cellblock.  I looked it up and there are about 350 prisoners on DR in his prison, and there are about 2 - 3 executiions there per year on average.  My pen pal has been there almost 30 years, longer than average, and I'm now suddenly realizing there's a possibility he could be executed himself during the time I'm writing to him.  That has shaken me up a bit.

 
VioletGrey

"Just when you think there is some sort of understanding on how prison life works or impacts those we are writing to, something else happens to make me at least, take a step back and take some time out to consider how their lives are so far removed from ours." 
 
Freebird - I wanted to come back to this because I remember reading it but not feeling up to laying my thoughts out at the time. 
It's definitely one of those things that you get a deeper understanding for the longer you write. I'm at that point with my PP that the things they say, I can no longer just jump to what I think from my perspective outside of prison. Maybe something less drastic than what you're talking about here, but something that I have strong feelings about in my life, and I have to step back and try to see how he sees it from where he's sitting. It's tough, some of the stuff doesn't sit well with me, but I know that's his life in there, and it's less about choosing an individual moralistic way of life like it is for us, and it's more about survival. 
The contrast between my PPs lives and my own is stark, and that's perhaps one of the reasons why I got into writing prisoners when I was younger. To talk to someone that wasn't given the same opportunities as myself and their life took a very different route, but at our core we're all humans that need the same things. I've always written to long term inmates (sentences of 10 years or more) and the longer they're in for, I feel like the survival goes deeper and deeper, more enmeshed in prison, and forgetting the outside world more or less. For those serving LWOP sentences I really think they have no choice but to get to that total survival mode in prison and leave the outside world in their memories. Decisions have more weight or bigger consequences, offending the wrong person could mean your life, and being sandwiched in with hundreds of other people who are all doing the same thing, there are going to be people who come out on top and those that struggle. 
I don't ever think I could imagine what being in prison is like until I experienced it for myself. So I don't think you can ever truly know what it's like, and words from our PPs still wouldn't explain it in its entirety. Because of mail being monitored by prison staff, and also having to be careful what you might leave lying around your cell for other inmates to see, there's also a lot unsaid. Lots of ins and outs and things that you wouldn't risk being found or seen by the wrong people, or by staff, so even in the most open relationships, there's still a lot they might not be able to fully tell you about or explain. 

 
Liw

Yeah.. I've a pen pal that can say really nasty and reckless things, like that but a lot worse! He sometimes tells me (in detail!!) what he would like to do to some people and I know he has killed 3 and hurt more, so that's not just him playing tough... He could as well do it, if he was out. But it doesn't impact me that much or makes me upset. I obviosly knew when I reached out to him in the first place that he was a very "black-and-white" thinker because I googled him and read his crime story. But when he says such things I confront him in a low arousal approach and sometimes we can have very good talk, like two friends, about it. He has a beautiful heart, but he doesn't show that side to him easily.

I once said to him: "X, you gotta show me that heart I know you have inside."
He: "L, that heart is buried under so many layers of hurt and mistrust, it's impossible to dig that deep."

I will never forget that respond. It was so telling... There's reasons to why many of the pen pals we get in contact with have the mind frame they have.........

 
Lady_TaTas

I personally think it's not possible to understand what prison life is like. We can certainly have empathy for them being locked up, but not truly understand. It's like being a black women raised by white parents. They had empathy for me facing racism.. but they never felt the full weight of that racism because they didn't experience it first hand. Remember the old saying.. until you walk a mile in someone's shoes.. just remember we can never put on our PP shoes, however we can walk beside them and give support and hopefully perspective 

 
Kirsten

*put masks, sorry

 
Kirsten

Well, in a country that places three strikes and then you're out for your whole life, even if it's shoplifting (smh at this nonsense) what elsse are you gonna expect, really? And when "revenge" is thought of equaling "justice", again, what are you going to expect if you grow up with a mindset like this? 

As for do we know our penpals... well, do we know ourselves? Do we know our families, spouses, friends, neighbors? I daresay I don't. I may have assumptions, clues and examples, but... even with myself... there are/were enough situations I wouldn't know how I deal /cope with them before being into them. Therefore... I think there's always a considerable amount of not knowing.

As for a numbing process, yes, for sure. But what's been frozen/put on ice can also thaw up again (though it might hurt first, did you ever put cold fingers under warm water? There you go...)

As for being strong and acting strong: Much is bravado, just like St4s said. But then again... don't we out here also play roles and out masks on our faces and built walls around our hearts at times? 

 
ST4s

Prison as a numbing process? Indeed, Freebird. But then, I’d say it works in the other direction too, how it shines a bright light on how precious life really is.

I don’t write to anyone on death row, but one of my buds has beaten cancer in the past. He recently had familiar symptoms that made him think his remission was no longer reliable. In the interval it took for the powers that be to get him in to see a doctor… the conversations we had when his prospects for living to see his release day seemed to be hanging in the balance… there’s the other side of the coin. He was also a notorious gang member, now disengaged and on a PC yard, but still, not the kind of man you’d expect to hear crying on the phone. I guess my point is all that numbness and badass bravado evaporates in a heartbeat when the stakes are that high, and that personal. (The tests came back. It was something else and he’s gonna be fine.)

But yeah, the prison headspace thing. It’s like a whole ‘nother planet sometimes. And capital punishment in the U.S. of A. Don’t even get me started on that one.