Life Lessons From The Unlikeliest Of Joints

2. Perseverance

We create non-profits and task forces. But when these same children grow up and act out of their pain, confusion, and lack of modeling and parenting, we lock them up and forget about them. We shame them and judge them and punish them. We take them away from their kids, their families, and anything that would help them keep their dignity or humanity.

And we hardly talk about it.


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There is a stigma on the subject itself. We think of them as not like us. But they are just people, like us.

BBC - Future - How prison changes people

We are learning more about how the brain works, how childhood trauma affects development, and creating effective treatments. Read about ACEs and the affects of early childhood trauma. Visit a prison or volunteer or donate to organizations helping with rehabilitation. Sign in Get started. Volunteers are practically untouchable. And the inmates are grateful and respectful that you are even there to begin with. What they overwhelmingly experience is that society has forgotten they exist. Many believe that is what they deserve.

But they are grateful we are there.

Why has serial offender Terry Ellis swapped a life of crime to go straight? | Matilda Munro

I am as white as they come, and I spend my days working on the computer, reading self-help books, blogging, going to Pilates, and quilting. I have experienced nothing like the lives most of these men have led. But I am there to help, and I have something to teach, and they want to learn. Nobody claimed they were innocent. Overwhelmingly the men I worked with felt regret at how they had hurt their victims, the community, and that they had let their families down by making poor choices, doing drugs, and getting into the situations that led to their crime.

There is an elaborate system of rewards and punishments to control inmate behavior. Inmates get sent to solitary as a punishment for breaking the rules or being caught with contraband—not necessarily having anything to do with violence. Most of the men work full-time. Many work at the laundry, which does laundry for the prison and all the nearby hospitals and institutions. At the second test, they showed increased impulsivity and poorer attentional control.

How prison changes people

These kinds of cognitive changes could indicate that their conscientiousness — a trait associated with self-discipline, orderliness and ambition — has deteriorated. View image of Prison time can result in increased impulsiveness and poorer attentional control. The researchers think the changes they observed are likely due to the impoverished environment of the prison, including the lack of cognitive challenges and lost autonomy.


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However, other findings offer some glimmers of hope. Instead, the researchers think their findings may reflect a form of positive personality adjustment to the prison situation: View image of One group of Dutch prisoners showed improvements in their spatial planning abilities.

These showed that prisoners engaged in normal or even heightened levels of cooperation. The findings have implications for debates about the reintegration of criminals into society, says. This clearly could affect their return to society. View image of Credit: There is currently a dearth of existing research with this explicit aim. To one extent that may be inevitable, given the loss of privacy and freedom.

But that said, the research findings regarding prisoner conscientiousness and cooperation show all hope is not lost, and they highlight potential targets for rehabilitation programmes.

What I learned volunteering in prison for 6 months

These are not merely abstract issues of concern to scholars: Ultimately, society may be confronted with a choice. We can punish offenders more severely and risk changing them for the worse, or we can design sentencing rules and prisons in a way that helps offenders rehabilitate and change for the better. After dinner, we pulled thick curtains over the windows to block the midnight sun and I fell asleep watching my heartbeat rise and fall under my nightgown. When school started, I took friends out to a stump on the playground and we lined up and took turns running, jumping, and attempting to launch ourselves into flight, but something had changed.

I could no longer get airborne. Eventually, we got distracted and moved to other things that seemed unrelated. And I would argue that all distractions—swing sets, birthday parties, high school, Monty Python, sex, college, drug dealing—are efforts to recapture our lost freedoms. In , I was incarcerated for selling ecstasy three years prior, a brief stint into drug dealing that ended in boredom and was followed later by pregnancy. In the most literal way possible I had my freedom taken away.

My rights as I think of them — mothering my young son, moving about as I please, phone, internet, privacy, and good food— were unavailable. In their place were uniformity and arbitrary interpretations of bureaucracy by government employees. My name was replaced with a number. I took on the burden of a stigma that will follow me for life. Yet sometimes the best way to fully appreciate something is to live without it. Or better yet, to have to redefine it.

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All the ways that people distract and destruct on the outside are easily replicated on the inside. People on the outside, who are supposedly free, are busy creating prisons for themselves, numbing and limiting and avoiding and spiraling. Freedom is one of those things that are deeply attractive as well as terrifying.


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