I have a rule.
Actually I have lots of rules – and One Rule To Rule Them All when it comes to working in prison:
I Never Ask.
I wont ask what they’ve done, how they come to be here and how they feel about that.
Sometimes – rarely – I’ll allow myself to wonder.
And I’ll never ask.
(This came up in conversation recently with a friend who is in a similar line of work and we were playing compare-contrast with this whole topic. Once I’d stripped all the psycho-babble I realised I was left with a simple truth: I actually just didn’t care that much compared to all the other stuff here I did really care about).
What this means apart from this being a straight-up coping strategy is that I focus on the person infront of me and the life they still have ahead of them.
This is my fuel of choice: It is an inherently hopeful position to hold and one which is consistent with the key messages of my work and what I believe about second chances.
It’s also, for me at least an essential lifeline when doing hard work in hard places:
Y’all gotta have a light to pull you out of the dark.
‘I Never Ask’ does not, of course mean that I won’t be told.
I just have to earn that right.
Now this has never been a deliberate strategy just something I realised was happening in the early days of the work and typically it did so on the final day of a program when clearly I’d passed some sort of Muppet Test: Some men would choose to disclose.
Over time I’ve learned to separate out the emotion and just hear the words. I mean, picture this: You’re finally moved to speak from the heart and your audience of choice is doing wide-eyed, hands-up, back-pedal all to a chorus of ‘No! Really? You did what? OMG! Get the f*** away from me!’
Active empathic listening consistent with building a lasting relationship it ain’t.
And to be frank some things are just too hard to hear with the emotion attached, and some experiences are simply too far out of my comfortable middle-class comprehension.
And that’s after over a decade of this work.
You will know from previous posts that this work can and does move me deeply and I think it’s essential that it does and I am. This typically happens for me when I’m away from the chalkface in replay-review mode with freedom to feel the weight of the words and no risk of scaring anyone if the tears come.
The nuance for me at least during the act of listening is not to telegraph YES YOU REALLY ARE A F**KING MONSTER by indulging in an unfettered emotion-laden reaction.
I’ve learned to listen for the trauma in the telling – the bad sh** that happened usually in the early years that we now classify under 10 dispassionately-titled headings Adverse Childhood Experiences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_childhood_experiences
There is ALWAYS trauma in the telling and it’s usually compounded and cumulative.
It never excuses the deed when the deed comes but it does provide at least a clue to cause-effect which allows me to label the behaviour as monstrous – condemn it – and hold the person with compassion.
Of course there are men who will and do spin a yarn in order to gain leverage, but given I tend to spend multiple days with the men on my programs I can usually spot the inconsistency in the patterns-trends. The disclosure also gives me a reason to check what I’m hearing with the specialist staff whose job it is to know these details.
So the manipulators tend to be conspicuous.
Bottom line: To witness Disclosure is not an easy thing – it is a privilege and you don’t control when it happens.
Then one day last week it all happened at once.
We were doing a share-listen piece at the end of a program and the topic of choice was ‘Being A Good Dad’ (While Serving Time Inside). It’s a topic that’s more inclusive than you might think – what I’ve found when we do this piece is that most of the men in most of my groups are fathers.
This time the topic opened up more space for more of the group to share more of their personal stories – and it didn’t stop there: In the afternoon I was in a different part of the prison with a group of men with whom I’ve been building a lasting relationship and developing as my program mentors since first meeting them in the Spring.
And the floodgates just opened and stayed open.
My job was just to stay there, listen and be OK with full comprehension coming later – understanding for the moment that I’d passed some kind of test.
And that was a good thing.
As I write this I can tell you that the other shoe has yet to drop fully because for Category A men in a High Security Prison the ‘what’ will typically include the death – deliberate or not – of a human being at the hands of another human being.
Sure, I can make the words make sense but I’ve no idea what it feels like to be those people who lived it and no doubt are still living it.I hope with all my heart that I never do either.
