A Letter from Prison
To Whom It May Concern,
Enclosed please find an order form for the entire back-issue sets of The Caring Parent and Side by Side and an institutional check for thirty-nine dollars, ten of which is designated for shipping (or other expenses). If I’ve sent an excess, please consider the remnant a donation. If I’ve sent an insufficient amount, send me an invoice that I may remit the balance.
Having read a dozen or more issues of Present Time, I’ve noticed a very low count of articles pertaining to incarceration and incarcerated RC Communities.
J—, our RC Community leader, has asked each of us to consider writing a short article on the challenges and benefits of Co-Counseling within our fences. What follows is my contribution. A brief list of common terms and their meanings and use precedes it.
If you publish any article on the topic, my hope is that you do so in both English and Spanish, for we have many Latino/Chicano brothers to “minister” to herein. Perhaps two hundred people out of twelve hundred here speak and read Spanish as well as or better than English. At other U.S. facilities—especially in the Southwest—the ratio is considerably higher. It feels almost rude to exclude by omission such a substantial fraction when the information could be extremely beneficial to them.
Some terms:
The streets: home, outside the gates, freedom (also “free world”)
Touch down: to be released from incarceration
Free folk, free people, the people: anyone working in a prison who goes home every night
Jos (pronounced with a long “o”): sentence time, doing time, or kidding around (“josed out” means totally relaxed)
My people: any outside supporters, especially family and close friends
Offenders: the word used by the State to identify the group of people who have been convicted of felonies (formerly called “inmates” or “convicts”)
I don’t personally use the above terms.
I am thirty-five years old, white, male, Gay, and raised middle class and Catholic with raised-poor and pagan influences. I’ve been incarcerated for over sixteen years, almost eleven of which have been at my current facility.
My prison is in a rural location. It is unusual in that it has a fully open yard—meaning that (under non-pandemic rules) it is simultaneously accessible by ten dormitories, each with almost eighty men—and it has an astonishingly low rate of violence, physical or sexual.
Our prison RC Community is small—usually fewer than ten men. There are no women in it, and it is all white, though not by design.
I’ve been with RC since 2015, when J— taught me the fundamentals course. J— has taught several fundamentals classes since he’s been here and at least three since I’ve been involved. The benefits of Co-Counseling within our somewhat regimented environment are obvious to us.
Our days revolve around head count, work, and meals—all at designated times. Thus we can easily plan Co-Counseling sessions, groups, and classes around everyone’s (mostly) identical schedule and ensure ample time for any event.
Considering that prisons are filled with people who, let us say, “don’t fit the mold of conventional society,” and that all of us nonetheless do “fit” most of the mold, prison gives us the opportunity to look my favorite Harvey Jackins quote in the face and live it, minute by minute: “Every single human being, when the entire situation is taken into account, has always, at every moment of the past, done the very best that he or she could do, and so deserves neither blame nor reproach from anyone, including self. This, in particular, is true of you.” To remember to love the human regardless of the pattern, and to love ourselves and remember that we, too, are loved and loveable, is often difficult but totally worth it.
Prison RC is challenging. Between our rules (official and unwritten) and our “mental health” system, many forms of discharge are discouraged or forbidden as is some of the standard RC closeness. Here are a few examples:
Tears: In a private RC session “out there,” crying is encouraged. “In here,” it’s liable to result in a paper gown, a concrete bed, an eight-by-ten-foot cell, and a seventy-two-hour “suicide watch,” compliments of our “mental health” professionals.
Yelling: “Out there,” yelling and vulgarity can denote anger discharge. “In here,” they mean being put in an eight-by-ten-foot cell for “fighting.”
Laughter: A lot of embarrassment and light fear is discharged with laughter. But in here, “excessive laughter without apparent cause” can result in an investigation for “intoxication.”
Touch (in any form): Counselors and clients “out there” often hold hands. That’s sure to earn a rule violation in here—or possibly trigger homophobic patterns from passersby.
Privacy: As they say in New York City (USA), “Fugiddaboudit. Not “happenin’.” [“Forget about it. It’s not happening.”] We can generally find a spot to have sessions and classes—subject to interruption and eavesdropping.
The RC “no-socializing” guideline doesn’t apply to us. We (our current RCers) all knew each other before RC. We work together, eat together, even live in the same dorm (five of the seven current members anyway). Four of us are in one of the prison bands; two are in the church choir.
Despite the challenges, I’ve personally gained more than a modicum of control over my anger, my depression, my sex issues, my “ADHD” and “OCD” [“attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder” and “obsessive-compulsive disorder”], and my racist tendencies. I’ve incorporated RC concepts into my meditation with excellent results.
It’s often said “in here” that “you can’t find friends in prison.” If that’s true, then I suppose I haven’t made new friends—instead I’ve found a new family.
USA
(Present Time 206, January 2022)