i need help, you intellectual old people

[FarmerYoda]

now. my "prision paper". we have a lot of freedom.  I already introduced my topic but I think this is what I'm going to go with, as I come closer to the "due date"...
Now, I'm going to prep my question.  I'm in a semester long course called "Individuals and Institutions" where we study indiviuals and um. institutions.  Clever name, I know.  But specifically, we study racism under indiviuals and SCHOOLS and PRISONS under the institution quarter.  Before now, we were studying prisons, reading exerpts by Jack Abbott, Jacobo Timmerman, some Ginzberg lady, Malcolm X etc. I'll go more into this later.
Anyway, last Tuesday we went to the Norfolk County House of Correction to talk with the inmates, look at the literal architecture of the building (noticing interesting parrallels between it and school), looked at their coping mechanisms ETC.
So, we talked to five guys, all told us the cliche' oration, "don't do drugs blah blah blah, stay safe, it's not worth it, blah blah blah".  But I was more interested in what this one guy had to say - he was called "Chance".  He was fourty one. He had been in and out of jail for 28 years, since he was thirteen. He had told us the wolf story. He called himself a rebel.

I want to cover a huge, broad topic.  While I'm interested in submissive, passive prisioners vs. agressive, rebellious inmates.  Chance was a agressive, rebellious inmate.  So was Jack Abbott.  Timmerman was not. I want to discuss the differences in each behavior, however I don't know if I have enough evidence for this.  I also am interested in identity, and what makes you who you are... but this could go on FOREVER.  And I don't have very good evidnce for this, either, only reading Abbott and Timmerman, and only reading WHILE they were in jail, not having the whole spectrum (before and afterwards...) and talking to Chance while he was in jail, not knowing what could come of him.

Thanks to Tracy's findings, I want to start with the wolf story.

Then I want to go into Chance, a little bit, showing how his backgorund could've ultimately influenced the way he is now. Comign from a broken home, living on his own, having firends who were 18 when he was 13, etc.  Pointing out he as agressive
THen go on to compare Abbott
Then go on to compare Timmerman to Abbott
Bring it back to Chance
End with the morals of the wolf story.
But it's SO long.
And SO complex.
And just a heck of a lot of work.

...but it could be spectacular!

This is what I have so far:

Two Wolves
An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life.  "A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy.  "It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves.  One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorry, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego.  The other one is good –- he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.
The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too."
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will in?" The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed."

At 13, "Chance" had moved out of his broken home to make it wherever he could.  Literally living on the streets, a group of bikers took him under their wings and ultimately influenced every action he took after that.  Now 41, Chance has been in and out of jail for over twenty-eight years due to drugs, violence, and bank robbery.  Why does he do it? Simply answered, he's out of control.  He's a self-proclaimed "rebel" and seems confident in every action he takes, no matter how horrific it may seem, and despite it's consequences.  Chance tried to be the "bad guy" growing up, and he changed his whole identity in order to achieve this.  But the real question is not whether or not he plays the "bad guy".  The question is, is he a "bad guy"?  It's said that you discover who you really are between the ages of thirteen and twenty... but if you missed out on all those years; not only trying to fill the shoes of something your not, but also being in and out of prison, who are you?  At what point do you become the role you've been playing?  While this is a complex and complicated topic to cover, it seems totally relevant to the prison environment and all the consequences and actions you take after years of non-freedom. [/i]

i hate the topic sentence, and i'm working on flow. this is the roughest you get, folks.

if any of you funny intellects have any suggestions for me, please, lemme hear it. i will not be offended. I promise. I just need your honesty and WISDOM!

I'm not sure exactly what I'm looking for, just maybe a way to sum this all up??

Love,
Jenny

[FarmerYoda]

added more:
Chance was told the two wolves story when he was a younger man, from an older, Native American friend.  He admitted to feeding his "bad wolf" more than his "good wolf", perhaps making himself a "rebel" and ultimately the aggressive inmate.  Because he spent years attempting to impress a group of older boys, making bad decisions, doing drugs and causing mayhem, he definitely encompassed every aspect of "bad" that he wanted to achieve.  Clearly, the bad wolf has won.  But who's to say that makes Chance a bad person?
It's obvious that some of the decisions Chance has made have been poor ones, and that he's done a convincing job of playing the "bad guy" part. This is reflected in the way he acts in the institution.  He admitted that he does try to manipulate the Correctional Officers and that he knows that some of the things he does are interfering with the way others around him work.  With that said, it also seems that although he knows, he can't take this disobedient image away from himself.  He has created this persona and it seems as though he can no longer make the simple decision to stop the act.  I don't believe that it's in his control any longer.  This is his new identity.  He is the rebellious, aggressive, hostile, clear cut, manipulative prisoner.  Furthermore, Chance is all of this as a man.  What influenced this is clear, his past is not preferable, and while he was in his early teens, he didn't know how to make the right decision to stop.  He didn't even have one person to look up to, as a beneficial figure in his life.  Now, he's living a lie, too far into the plot to reverse it.  This is Chance, now.  This act was forced upon him by himself, at a very young age, but his identity in undefined.  He's a thirteen-year-old boy, stuck inside a forty one year old body.
 


does this even MAKE SENSE?
am i asking too much of you old farts?
Is it too much on Chance? Too repetative?

sorry.
thank you.
bye.

[ycartrob]

a couple of random thoughts would be how mental illness may play into the equation. Many people with untreated mental illness seem to gravitate towards drug use as a coping mechanism and as a form of release (or feeling "normal").

then there's the whole nature vs. nurture debate. I am sure there are people who were in Chance's exact same socio-economic position who did not go to prison or resort to drugs and came out the other end af somewhat independent and functioning members of society. Why would that be?

People tend to gravitate to places where they feel power. Sure, most people would not want to be in prison, but if you feel powerless on the outside, any slight chance at feeling powerful (harming someone, robbing, rape, etc...) supercedes the consequences. That is, if the person developmentally can regard consequences (but mental illness and/or developmental issues makes that cloudy).

It's been my experience (both personally and professionally) that people need to have a very deep, emotional experience before they can begin any sort of transformational process. peter Gabriel calls it :Digging in the Dirt" and he got his through psychotherapy. This can happen through relationships, near death experiences, being "sick and tired of being sick and tired", a brush with the law....so much is wrapped up into personality. Whereas one person may be terrified to get a speeding ticket, another person is a serial killer. is the killer in you really the killer in me? Remember, we are all different (however, we are much more alike than different).

there's no 1 answer and no 1 answer works for all.

If you had time, you could find people who were in similiar predicaments as Chance and see if you can correlate a change component that helped them make "better" decisions.

Good luck.

[SiOuxTribe]

ah yes, thankyou for writing about the natives.

Mitakuye Oyasin

[Jaimoe]

I'm Canadian and our penal institutions are run far differently than they are in the U.S.. I wish I could help you out Face. I grew up in a city with six federal correctional institutions including the only federal penitentiary for women.

[colleen]

Not sure if this is interesting to you, but I was thinking about what Tracy said of personal transformation and remembered that I saw an interesting documentary about this amazing Australian Buddhist nun (she now lives in the US) who runs a program called Liberation Prison Project. The documentary is called Chasing Buddha and I'm sure you could get ahold of it if you wanted. Here's a little description of the project:

As director of Liberation Prison Project Venerable Robina Courtin has taught Buddhism in prisons to over 400 inmates in 150 institutions, several with life sentences or on death row, many involved with both street and prison gangs. Robina can see that, like herself, prisoners may have a soft inner core beneath the hard exterior she has to confront one-on-one. Robina's compassion, effort, energy, and commitment to the Dharma (Buddhist teachings) are what she brings to those in the bleakest of situations. It is a powerful experience to see condemned men reviewing their life and, perhaps for the first time, quenching their thirst for intellectual and spiritual knowledge and wisdom. These are the opportunities and gifts that Robina is willing to drive two hours in each direction to bring to the prisoners.

Her teachings to the prisoners include starting the day in gratitude for being alive, vowing to use that day for your own benefit and for the good of others (which often means, staying in isolation of others for their own protection). As she says "he (the prisoner) has the choice of going crazy or going inside and finding his own mind", the mind that he is now cultivating in a deep spiritual way.  

I really appreciated how she wasn't there to convert the people she met as what she's offering isn't religion, but a chance for transformation. She's also really funny and maybe a little manic (not what you'd think of a Buddhist nun to be necessarily).

www.liberationprisonproject.org

[colleen]

oh and here's the info on the film:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0260796

[FarmerYoda]

you've all been very helpful, and i thankkk yooouuu...

i think after reading some of this that I'm gonig to head into a direction steering away from timmerman vs. abbott for this paper. instead, i will compare Chance and Abbott -- both finding htemselves thru the bars and how this effected them.

life is about experiences - if both these men don't get the "luxury" of doing this and seeing things, what is their life?

oof.

i wish i could write twooooooo. with my original topic it jsut seemed like way way way toom uch.

my friend dan said it was do-able, but would consume several hours of work, and it's due TOMORROW! what?!?!

with that said, i think i'm indecisive.
i think.

thanks again, all ---
jennod

[ali]

sounds like a pretty interesting subject & assignment jen.... way more interesting than anything we had to write about in school! (getting flashbacks on the growth of industrial revolution europe, and what lead to the white colonisation of australia... which i guess are pretty interesting, but we never related them back to individuals or to our situation today...)

our prison system here is also quite different (and a lot smaller too i think), so i can't really help with much....

I also am interested in identity, and what makes you who you are...

(i'm coming at this from an architecture perspective, so its probably not entirely relevant) but i like the idea of linking institutional architecture (prisons or schools or anything really even office buildings) to the experiences of individuals within the institutions - in all institutions you have a wide range of individuals coming from potentially very diverse environmental and social backgrounds into the one place for (generally) one purpose - to work, to learn, to serve out a term of incarceration, whatever.... architecture is all around us, and even though most people don't think about it much, it does affect our day to day lives, the way that we feel and work within and around the architecture.

the way that all these institutions have been designed over the years has changed a lot - prisons (while they're still not the most comfortable of places) are now less about absolute submission, degradation and dehumanisation of the prisoners, and schools are less inflexible, static spaces for rote-learning.

don't know exactly where this is going anymore... i guess i was thinking that in order to allow and encourage people to learn/change/develop and grow, the architecture has to provide a suitable environment for that change etc to happen.... no matter what your history prior to that point, if you're not in a "comfortable" or "supportive" environment, the process of self-examination and self-development is that much more difficult....

[FarmerYoda]

sounds like a pretty interesting subject & assignment jen.... way more interesting than anything we had to write about in school! (getting flashbacks on the growth of industrial revolution europe, and what lead to the white colonisation of australia... which i guess are pretty interesting, but we never related them back to individuals or to our situation today...)

our prison system here is also quite different (and a lot smaller too i think), so i can't really help with much....


(i'm coming at this from an architecture perspective, so its probably not entirely relevant) but i like the idea of linking institutional architecture (prisons or schools or anything really even office buildings) to the experiences of individuals within the institutions - in all institutions you have a wide range of individuals coming from potentially very diverse environmental and social backgrounds into the one place for (generally) one purpose - to work, to learn, to serve out a term of incarceration, whatever.... architecture is all around us, and even though most people don't think about it much, it does affect our day to day lives, the way that we feel and work within and around the architecture.

the way that all these institutions have been designed over the years has changed a lot - prisons (while they're still not the most comfortable of places) are now less about absolute submission, degradation and dehumanisation of the prisoners, and schools are less inflexible, static spaces for rote-learning.

don't know exactly where this is going anymore... i guess i was thinking that in order to allow and encourage people to learn/change/develop and grow, the architecture has to provide a suitable environment for that change etc to happen.... no matter what your history prior to that point, if you're not in a "comfortable" or "supportive" environment, the process of self-examination and self-development is that much more difficult....

interesting point. a friend of mine is trying to cover that topic... relating the physical architecture to school buildings, and also what goes no to that as well... relating johnathan kozol's Death at an Early Age to Jack Abbott and some of the prisioners we met with... sort of depressing

others are donig more abstract things, i suppose i'm a cilche.  another friend is doing SOUND.  Very cool... they take away all your freedom, and ultimately ally our happiness, but they can't take away your senses. and when theres nothing else, you have the sense of hearing... interesting, and i'm excited to hear how she approaches that... (we have paper readings...)

others are focusing on individuality and identity, too, which is why i sort of wanted to come away from that, but it's still NOT much easier...