Dear Future Friend:
Starting at lunchtime on Friday, the 8th of October, I will be meeting with you for several hours. Director Frank Hall will introduce me-but then he will leave. He will leave because it is our mutual agreement that all of you and I face one another alone-so that there is no chance that his presence will influence your decision. For he and I have also agreed that you must have an unconditional veto over what I am proposing.
What I am asking you to consider is this: Some time next spring or summer we could bring together judges, legislators, police and parole authorities, correctional officials, private citizens, prosecutors, defense counsel, and media people for an 8 to 10 day workshop, to consider what is wrong and right about what we are doing in criminal justice. Also present during that workshop will be up to 24 convicts and ex-convicts from Oregon's correctional institutions.
Except for one day and night, the site of the workshop will be a "cultural island"-away from the prison. But for one crucial 24-hour period the free participants will be distributed as voluntary prisoners at each of your institutions. They will not be coming for the usual "tour." They will enter in handcuffs, have mug shots, go through your reception process, experience assignment in a living unit, and spend a very bleak, crowded day as prisoners. The real convicts will, of course, know who they are. And so will your staff. But the pretend "cons" will not do "easy time." Neither will they be mistreated.
After 24 hours they will have experienced something that you and I-for all our cumulative work-time in corrections-have never known: a day and night behind bars.
Why should we want to do this? . . . The basic idea can be summed up in one sentence by the proverbial "wise old Indian" who said, "If you want to understand another individual, walk a mile in that person's moccasins."
But why should any institutional head want to have any part of this? Especially when-as in Oregon-things are pretty good (compared with other states)? I cannot hope, in a letter, to justify it to you. (I may have a better chance when I spend some hours with you face to face next month.) What I can do, however, is to suggest certain reasons why you might want to turn the whole thing down. Let's start with these.
The Oregon Workshop will either succeed (as it has done in eight states) or it will fail. Though it has not happened, failure is easy to imagine. The most obvious worry is that some one will get hurt, even seriously hurt. Despite all the vigilance of staff and the even more pervasive vigilance of convicts, some crazed lost soul might break through the informal cordon and harm one of our visitors. Or try to take a hostage. Even an attempt would be a disaster, requiring instant termination of the prison sojourn. These are only some of the more dramatic hazards. Suppose after eight days of spirited communication, the participants wind up just as alienated and ill-informed about one another as when they started. Or suppose that things are said that bureaucratic protocol can never forgive. . . .
Suppose, on the other hand, that the workshop "succeeds"-what then? You can take it from me that your institution will not be the same for some time. It will be different, and it will remain different unless and until organizational inertia-that dead hand that slows and finally paralyzes all penological change-reasserts its bureaucratic grip. Only this time that may not happen, because many of you will do your best to defeat it and keep the growth process alive. Toward what end? To transform the correctional process beyond all danger of relapse into What It Was.
Not by "improving" it or "reforming" it. Reform does not cut it any more in this field. One does not invent the electric light by improving the gas lamp. How, then? By being "kinder to inmates?" By "giving them more?" By "tearing down the walls?"
None of the above. Prison life will be tougher than it ever was-but in an entirely new way. Instead of more being "given" to convicts, more, much more will be asked of them. As things stand now, prison life-especially in a decent system-is not very demanding. I'm not talking about the largely legendary "country club." In most joints an experienced convict can do pretty easy time-after all, s/he may have spent half a life learning how. Truly gifted and intelligent convicts can do better than that. They can run your joint for you-for their ends, not yours.
I have never seen a prison that was not run by cons, in one of two ways. If the joint is relatively decent and humane, it is because the savvier class of cons finds it easier to do their business by "working with us." Unchecked, they will run off with the whole store. If it's a hell-hole, like Marion or the super-max sinkhole we built recently in Pelican Bay, they will have forced us to create a monstrosity that dehumanizes us while it destroys them. Either way, we LOSE, either by being "conned" blind or by turning ourselves into proprietors of concentration-camps. (I know, because I helped create one. And the Warden I worked for was the best, the wisest, the toughest and yet the most compassionate I have ever known.) We lose, either way. Because what they get away with, or what they compel us to do to them accomplishes the one thing that society can not afford. It wholly prevents them from developing that sense of remorse and awakened conscience without which no predator can safely be allowed to return in a free society.
Feel "sorry" for what they have done? Show me one survivor of an adjustment center who retains even a shadow of remorse for what he has done to his victims. Show me one convict-who was not a "square John" in the first place-who comes out with a shred of gratitude for what we have done for him (in a decent joint) or who is ready to forgive what we have done to him in one of our high-tech hell holes. This is our guilty secret.
We fail, either way. Neither the sweet treatment nor the most terrible punishment can accomplish that birth of conscience which, alone, can protect any one of us from one another when the stress or the temptation becomes more than we can otherwise resist.
Ask a related question: how can merely being given good things-education, housing, recreation, training (necessary as they are)-improve one's character, especially when they were not earned? You and I have to work for our keep. We are expected to give in order to receive. We might well ask convicts, "How does taking something that didn't belong to you entitle you to expensive services from the same citizens you robbed?" Yet if we go to the other extreme and treat them as cruelly as some of them treated their victims, how are we-except for knowing better-any different? And how can we expect anything but their hatred? This is the two-sided dilemma we have locked ourselves into. Are there better alternatives? Our workshop experiences since 1967 suggest that there are.
We all agreed-convicts included-that ways should be founded for offenders to make some kind of amends for what they have taken from us. How else could they begin to earn their way back to our regard as fellow citizens? But what do they have to give? Most of them-having failed in crime as well as in life-are poor. Most are unskilled. Many are so hostile that they can hardly stand being together without endangering or terrifying one another. What can they possibly offer us?
What they have to give us, first, is a tremendous opportunity to learn.
The most important thing we can learn is how to deal more effectively with human beings who are forfeiting their own humanity while taking or endangering our lives, stealing our property, and turning our neighborhoods into places of horror. Learning how to do that would also help us in more personal ways.
Learning how to grapple with evil directed at us might teach us something we need to know about how to cope with our own proclivities for wrong-doing. This is a very delicate point, about which one can safely speculate only in one's own case. I do not know and dare not pontificate about the evils you might be capable of, but I feel free to confess that there are impulses in me that I would rather not admit to the District Attorney. I have never done, and at my age and station, will probably never do one involuntary day in jail. I have been sorely tempted, and, sometimes, the only thing that restrained me was so powerful a sense of fellow-feeling with my chosen victim that I could not help putting myself in her or his place.
Call this anticipatory guilt. The social psychologists have longer words for it. It was not fear; it was not even shame. It had nothing to do with being good. What held me back was something like uncontrollable empathy. The person I wanted to hurt, exploit, take revenge on, was typically so like me that it even made me angry to acknowledge it. I had become socialized. My family, my peers, my neighbors, even strangers, had mostly treated me as they wished to be treated by me. Having been so dealt with by others, I identified with them. The Generalized Other became another Me. Harming any other person (except in self-defense) would, by some strange social contagion, give me personal pain, immediately after I had recovered from the savage satisfaction of venting my fury. And afterwards I would suffer the guilt that comes from convicting myself before my internalized court of conscience. It is, of course, more complicated than that, and I cannot claim I wholly understand it. But I know this: I was not born decent.
Very well, then: how does one "train" offenders to be law-abiding, person-respecting citizens? As I have already said, we learned a lot about this in our Workshops. The odd thing is, we had not expected to learn it at all. The only reason we included convicts in our Crime and Corrections Workshops was that it seemed stupid to continue studying prisons without talking to prisoners. We could, of course, have talked to them through the bars-but that seemed boorish. Someone had the idea: why not talk to them as if they were, for the moment at least, rational and responsible human beings? This thought led to another: while talking to them and asking them questions, why not let them question us? Not only in a conference room but at breakfast and lunch? In other words, rather than treat them as some kind of exotic experimental animals, why not, in the workshop, sit around a table with them as people?
In 1967 America, the idea, while unprecedented in the history of Corrections, was not all that foreign to who and what we were. As a people we are not excessively formal or socially exclusive. Robert Burns had said, "A man's a man, for a' that." Well, we reasoned, convicts are fellow men and women: what would be the harm if-for only a week-we treated them as if they were interesting neighbors? Not one judge or district attorney or legislator found that too uncomfortable.
So it was that in the fall of 1967 in a rough-and-ready retreat Center on the shore of Lake Tahoe, 18 Nevada convicts, none of them choirboys, sat and talked with over fifty judges, legislators, prosecutors and police and correctional officers nonstop for over a week. (The convicts returned to the prison to sleep, but otherwise you could not distinguish them from the civilians.)
Some of these civilians, being on vacation, had brought along their wives and their children who, (with some exceptions) did not attend the workshop sessions. But they were all over the place, and fully available to the "con-sultants" during the breaks. I ask you to imagine the scene-if only because you might one day be in it. Imagine a convict who had not been outside for years, exchanging pleasantries with the judges' wives, and playing games with their children on the shores of one of the loveliest lakes in the world? Not far away were parked cars, some of them with keys in them. For the convicts it was like an impossible dream. For some of the C.O.'s it was, but at first, a kind of nightmare. After a day or two every one realized that nothing bad was going to happen: we could even joke about it.
Imagine, further, that the convicts invited some of the participants to be their guests in the Nevada State Prison. Imagine that some of these civilians went as prisoners. Imagine how they were treated by their hosts, the convicts who were honored and astonished that the same judges and prosecutors who sent them to prison would have the courage to risk it themselves. Something rather wonderful happened.
As the "con-sultants" put it, no one in authority had ever asked them, the prisoners, what they thought about criminal justice and prisons-and they felt very good about being asked. As for the judges and other officials, they had never anticipated how courteously, how respectfully and even sympathetically they would be treated by the convicts. Other good things happened-some of them are described by the participants in the papers accompanying this letter.
So much for the good news. The sad news is that it ended after 8 days, and everyone went back home to his and her own world. We did it seven more times, and each time the sadness of ending got heavier. If we do it in Oregon, it should not end this way. How not to have it end this way is what the rest of this overlong letter is about.
After eight workshops followed by years of post-conference pioneering for change, terminated finally by time, aging, organizational inertia, and eventual discouragement, we vowed this: if we ever did it anywhere again, it would not become just another bitter-sweet memory. If we did it again, we would have to find a way to make it part of the fabric of correctional life.
This is the challenge I put before you. Assume that we spend a successful eight days in some correctional Nirvana, with the convicts rising, as they always rise, in floods, earthquakes and other emergencies, to the chance to be at their authentic best-what should we do then? Shall we go back to business as usual? Or will we make it possible that every judge, every prosecutor, every penal administrator, every police administrator, eventually every legislator, and finally, any citizen concerned with crime and justice have the opportunity, as part of his work or civic duty, to attend an on-going "living college" experience in every one of your institutions?
Imagine that such programs became a vital part of your facility. Imagine that every convict would have the chance to meet and speak with present and future government and justice officials-not just in some idyllic retreat center but in the Big Yard, under the shadow of the gun towers, in the mess halls, on the job in the kitchen, the laundry, while mopping floors in the cell blocks.
What would happen to the atmosphere of those cell blocks if they were constantly occupied by a changing but representative handful of the men and women who will one day run our courts, serve in our legislatures, drive the squad cars, walk the blocks as correctional officers? What if many concerned private citizens-some of them crime victims-could rise above their justifiable resentment and walk the Yard, if only for a day or two, with the men and women they sent there? Would any of them be the same? Would the convicts be the same? Would we be the same? Dare we take the chance? Can we afford not to? With all good wishes,
Richard R. Korn, Pacific Institute for Criminal Justice
Richard Korn --
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