Astounded by the Lack of Compassion for Men in Prison: Inside the Conversation at The Good Men Project

The Good Men Project Evangelist Conference Call covers the cultural narrative about prison, and why the discussion is so important.

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Lisa Hickey: I’ve been thinking a lot about prison lately. It’s not something that, as a women, I am used to thinking about a lot, and the number of conversations I’ve had about the topic in my lifetime are far and few between. Perhaps men don’t think or talk about it much either, but we’ve been discussing it a lot on the The Good Men Project lately and I’d like to share with you the complexity of the issues and the insights I’ve seen unfolding.

One thing we’ve discussed recently in an article is the difference in sentencing between men and women for similar crimes. I think the sentencing disparity is part of a cultural narrative that goes like this: Men are assumed to be guilty more often, and they are also assumed to cause more harm when they do commit crimes. Sometimes, in fact, men DO cause more harm, as in domestic violence cases—and in that case, punishment is harsher and that harsher punishment is seen as justified. When you look at domestic violence, the actual number of incidents is fairly close to equal between the genders (men are victims more than 40% of the time, according to The Guardian). But men are more likely to cause more harm when they are violent. So not only do men go to jail more often, but until recently, women were never even seen as the perpetrators. And that is in part because it was assumed men couldn’t be harmed in domestic violence cases. It was treated as kind of a joke in the cultural narrative. The same thing is true of sexual assault. Until very recently, there was a narrative out there a man who has sex with an underage girl is a perpetrator, but when a women has sex with an underage boy, that boy “got lucky”. So it’s important to note that men are seen as guilty more often AND they are seen as causing more harm. If a boy “got lucky”, it implies that he was not harmed. But it can’t be true for one gender and not the other.

Another other piece of the narrative that often gets overlooked is that men are constantly pushed to their limit to become a financial success—if they are not successful providers to their families, they are not even ‘real men’. Financial success becomes a part of their identity. The same society that pushes men to succeed at all costs is the same society that wonders why they cheat or steal or lie to get there. And finally, when talking about narratives that inform our views on men and prison—-there is something we discussed on another call—if you watch Orange Is the New Black: Season 1—it reinforces the cultural narrative that women always have a backstory for their crimes, men do not. Women, the story always goes, have some reason they were pushed to the brink to commit some crime, men just commit crimes because they are ‘bad’. This is obviously harmful to men and something we seek to change.

So what happens when men get found guilty of a crime and go to jail? By all accounts, it’s not good. We need to talk about men and how badly they are treated while they are in prison. If the narrative is true—the one that is heard so often as to be seen as a joke, as in “don’t pick up the soap” – then there is a high likelihood that once men are sentenced and do go to prison that they will be abused while in there. Recently on a Good Men Project post that was a video created by the state of NY prison system that is a “training video” for new prisoners. And it basically tells prisoners things about how to avoid sexual assault and other forms of violence while there. In other words, the prison system is admitting the abuse is going to happen and saying “deal with it”. Then there was a recent article in The New York Times magazine which nonchalantly described men kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, or men with mental illnesses who are simply unable to cope with the environment and not being given medication or care. How is that anything less than abuse?

And finally — what happens AFTER the someone is incarcerated — and tries to go back into society? We recently had a Twitter chat about just this problem. No surprise, it’s difficult. No surprise, it’s an economic hardship because no one wants to hire you. In fact, given what we just talked about—that we have a cultural system which pushes men, particularly men who are disadvantaged to begin with into prison, and once there they are abused, and once they leave they are given few resources for re-entry into society—it seems likely that men who have been in jail have suffered great trauma and have the same sort of PTSD symptoms veterans have. Yet I’ve never heard of PTSD in ex-prisoners. It’s simply something people don’t want to deal with.

Let’s open this up for group discussion:

Jed Diamond: Great topic. I have worked in prisons—from maximum security prisons to local jails. I can attest to the nature of abuse and the horrific conditions inside. In the US, there is a higher percentage of people in prison than anyone else in the world. And if you go into these prisons as I have done, you find that the people inside are really not so different than the rest of us. And besides the problems of abuse of these people, we should understand that we are also losing resources that could be used to make the world a better place, but instead we are battering, abusing and causing more trauma in these men.

I’ll also bring up a book called The New Jim Crow, which talks about how a lot of minority men are put in prison because it is a way of dealing with our fear of the other. And so we create rules that make it easier for us to jail them instead of getting along with them. It’s an important topic that not only most people can relate to, but should relate to.

Mike Patrick: I’d also like to bring up the point about how more and more of these prisons are being operated for money. The prisons make more money the more people are brought in, and they make more money when people are kept in there for longer. It’s an economic cycle as well as a social cycle which makes it even harder to break.

Patty Beach: I’d like to point you to a documentary film called “The House I Live In” directed by Eugene Jarecki that gets into those economics. It talks about the entire system which creates an “us vs. them” but really we are all complicit in it. It’s well researched and has huge implications for everyone….it also has huge implications for future generations. It is said that if you have a father in prison, you have a 30% higher chance of ending up in prison yourself. This means that the cycle will just continue at a higher level for future generations.

Tom Mallouck: It really struck me what you said about sexual abuse Lisa, and the sexual abuse of boys and how it is not seem as harmful, as expressions like ‘he got lucky’ indicate. As long as we’re talking about resources I’d like to suggest two books by Richard Hoffman Half the House
and Love and Fury. He talks about sexual abuse by a football coach, and how after he came forward over 100 other boys came forward. And he speaks about how each individual develops a narrative which helps them overcome trauma in a way that empowers them.

Mark Sherman: This fits right in with one of my big issues, which is that boys and men are not getting the attention they deserve. When children are born, when they are kids, they are not inherently bad, but something happens along the way that gets them into prison. There are issues of race, for sure, and also issues of gender. Perhaps not having a father at home, or education. And as we’ve said, once they get there, conditions are horrific. I don’t know what conditions are like in women’s prisons, but I would guess that conditions are not as horrific. Part of what it comes down to is that in our culture, males are somehow disposable. Each individual life is not seen as valuable as a female life.

Jed Diamond: When we look at the conditions in the world, and the horrible amount of pain and suffering—we see that drugs are what is used to deal with that pain and suffering. And there is an unwillingness to deal with that anti-connection that leads to the pain and suffering which leads to the drug use and then the prison cycle. It’s time to end the war on drugs, for 100 years it hasn’t worked. And it’s time to look at the rest of the story—it’s part of the reason what you are doing at Good Men Project is so important. To get below the surface to the root of what causes drug use and breakdowns.

Mike Patrick: We are building new prisons almost faster than we can fill them. Let’s not forget that the construction companies are making money building the prisons. The cost of building could instead be used to get at the root causes of the problems.

Kozo Hattori: I’m astounded by the lack of compassion for men in prison. The cultural narrative says “That’s what they deserved. Who cares if they get raped and abused in prison, that’s their punishment.” But a high percentage of men that are in prison are there because they were abused early in their life. It’s a tough thing for boys and men to go through, and we don’t have good ways of dealing with it. So it’s a Catch-22 – we don’t talk about the sexual abuse that happens to these boys, and then when they end up in prison we say they deserve the sexual abuse they now get in jail.

Patty Beach: Our society does not know what how to handle masculine energy. The main way to handle masculine energy in our society is with punishment. There is not enough movement. I’m not male, I didn’t grow up a boy, but I see this. We see masculine energy as a negative. Men are not feeling really useful—they can’t be resourceful with tier energy. And sometimes they end up in jail because they don’t have constructive outlets to deal with it.

Lisa Hickey: This is going to sound like a disconnect, but one of the interesting things I’ve found working with GMP’s environment editors is that they believe that we won’t be able to solve the problems of the environment until we get men to connect with nature, and one of the reasons they can’t connect with nature is because they are not given the opportunities for big movements that you talk about in the natural world.

Patty Beach: On the other hand, there are rough and tumble boys and some parents don’t know how to set the appropriate boundaries. They fight, and hurt each other until it gets to the point where punishment seems like the only option.

Remy: I work on conflict resolution, and we have seen that in boys as young as three years old we have seen that teaching children the skills of conflict resolution as helpful. Teaching boys the skills they need at a very young age, so they have them for life.

Kozo: I was speaking to a woman who does restorative justice, which tries to repair the actual harm that was caused by criminal behavior, and gets the perpetrator and victim to work together on that reparation. And I asked this women, “how many times does this go awry?” It seemed as if to me there could be cases where it went horribly wrong. And she said, “It works 100% of the time.”

Mark Sherman: I’m male. I grew up a boy. And I was talking to a friend of mine who had a stand up student, a boy, who had been doing great. Involved in all sorts of activities. But now, at age 16, he’s spending most of his time playing video games. And it’s important to channel energy. But in the past, there wasn’t a need for organized sports. There was just play. And recess is being cut in a lot of places. I do feel as if we are restraining boys’ basic nature.

Roger Toennis: Remember we used to have pick up games of baseball, and social games of hide and seek. Big movement games were a way of socialization. Now connected video games are becoming the social networks of boys. Games like Minecraft. They are not all bad because they do have that aspect of socialization, but it’s different. My son can’t walk out the front door and have that social network outside like I used to have. There used to be 10 or 12 boys my age within a few blocks when I walked out my door. Now there are 3 or 4 in a square mile. Socialization is more organized now. It’s organized in different ways. We used to stay out until the sun went down. But on the internet, the sun never goes down.

Mike Patrick: It used to be when the streetlights went on, you go home.

Mark Sherman: It reminds me of the conversations about free-range children. It used to be I could go across the street and play baseball and be gone for hours. Now that doesn’t even seem to be allowed.

John Stolpe: I think this is in part because there is no longer a parent at home. Either both parents are working or there is a single parent who needs to work.

Roger Toennis: It used to be that every parent in the neighborhood would feel free to parent any child.

Kozo Hattori: I just spoke at a conference called “unplug and play”. In our world today, even play is coached, contained and scheduled. A boy goes to school and he is not allowed to play, and his body is being structured for him. And then he does do sports, but its organized sports and his body is structured once again. And then he goes off and plays videos games and his body is structured once again. It’s a scary time for the male body.

Unkonwn voice: There’s a quote by Brian Sutton-Smith that says, “the opposite of play is not work, the opposite of play is depression.”

Roger Toennis: This also a part of a trend I see and that is an increase in obesity amount men and young men in particular. When we are not using our bodies as men in the way nature intended, when the hyper-structured way we use our bodies takes over, then even the exercise in organized sports is not enough. Physical problems lead to emotional problems that lead to legal problems.

Tom Fiffer: This also relates to two trends in parenting which I would like to see us explore more on GMP in the future – risk aversion and overemphasis on outcomes.