Thinking about the time I was working in Corrections. We were in training at one of the men’s prisons in Louisiana (Hunt Correctional Facility). Offenders were walking around, doing their usual activities. I saw one man wearing his state issued uniform. However, he had “remixed” or personalized his. His shirt was tied in the belly, jeans were tight fitting, and he had on boots. State issued boots, but, somehow, they made the outfit. His demeanor was feminine. It’s clear he had taken on a feminine persona during his incarceration. I did wonder, though, was that something he explored BEFORE he got to prison, or had prison broken him so much that he became this person he wasn’t, originally.
It really made me think of the culture of incarceration or prison culture-as most people say. Rules in the free world are completely different from how you carry yourself inside. Being a decent person in prison is damn near non-existent. Rapes DO happen. It’s not funny, nor should it be acceptable. It is, unfortunately, a common occurrence and a part of many incarcerated people’s lives.
I wondered if that man went into prison as a man and suffered brutality and assaults. Did that make him who he was? He very well could have been gay before he was incarcerated. That’s possible. But prison has some of the same attributes as kidnapping a child or trafficking someone. You may fight in the beginning, try to maintain some sense of normalcy-of yourself. Sometimes that isn’t enough. There are many children who were kidnapped, held out hope of being found, and eventually gave up or forgot about their previous life. It’s not their fault. The kidnapper completed their task to break the child. Same with sex trafficking. Pimps break women-allow them to be brutally and repeatedly raped. It’s designed to gain compliance, dependency, and break the spirit of the person enduring the abuse.
That’s how prison is. You break a person until they no longer know who they are. It’s a sad cycle that does too much damage. Not all offenders are serving life sentences. Many will return to society. Most return broken, unsure of who they are, ashamed of their experiences, and without support or mental health care to help them cope. This is why we, as a society, must do better. We cannot have a justice system that just incarcerates and penalizes. We must have a system of rehabilitation and corrections. We must care about the welfare of those deemed “less than”. If society says a person has served their time, we must not repeatedly punish them. Second chances do exist. It’s not society’s job to play judge and jury. Basically, if we’re gonna have a system that releases those who have committed crimes back into society. We gotta make a way for them to survive and thrive.
-NRS
