Current Issue
"HOW DO I LOVE THESE GUYS WHO JUST RAPED ME?"
by Bo Lozoff
Within the first year of corresponding with prisoners we found
it was the hard-core prison population
who wanted to know how to become monks. Many of their concerns and problems
were identical: "How are you supposed to meditate with all this hostility?"
"How are you supposed to learn how to be quiet in this place where
it's noise 24 hours a day?" "I can't see the stars anymore, I
haven't seen a tree in three years." So we thought we should write
a little newsletter and let them feel the support of other prisoners trying
to do the same thing . The newsletter quickly turned into a little book,
which turned into another book. We maintain a mailing list of around 20,000
people, most of whom are prisoners. We get up to a hundred letters a day
from all over the world. I've been in hundreds of prisons and been a consultant
to many departments of correction and to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
It's not very hard for us to get into a prison now-except California.
California is the Alabama of prisons that has legitimized mean-spiritedness
and intentional cruelty to human beings. San Quentin at present is the only
prison in the world that won't allow our books in. We send books free to
prisoners to help them transform their lives-not just for them, but for
everybody. There's no hook at all. They don't have to belong to anything.
But San Quentin will not allow prisoners to receive the books, though they
allow Penthouse and Hustler. It's not that our books are seen as threatening.
Prison administrators sincerely believe they have a mandate from the public
to be crueler, less kind, much more punitive to prisoners, and they are
heeding the will of the people who pay their salaries.
Everybody feels that he is a decent person. The warden of San Quentin feels
that way about himself. He can sleep at night with a clear consciene. It
is our will-the voters, the media-telling him to "coddle" criminals
less. We're the hardest on criminals of any nation in the world. We keep
people in prison to a point where they're incapacitated rather than rehabilitated.
Then we let them out and see they can't function, and say, "See, we
shouldn't have let them out!" We put unbelievable pressure on them.
They've got 24 hours to report to their parole officer, have a job, know
all the sophisticated ways of paying for groceries, etc. that changed while
they were in prison. They screw up, they're violated[parole revoked] and
they go right back for the rest of their sentence, which is 40 years.
Now that I'm just about 50, I look back and see two forces in us. One is
a force that wants to feel better than another group of human beings-out
of our fear, our insecurity, our unhappiness. So we objectify a certain
group and legitimize socially-sanctioned, socially-approved hatred or condescension
toward them based around some common trait. We did it with Blacks for hundreds
of years. We did it with Native Americans-basically destroyed their civilization.
We did it with women, civil rights, and gay rights. It's all one movement.
The other force is against that tendency. We call ourselves whatever "rights"
movement is current at the time-civil rights, women's rights, gay rights-but
it's pretty much the same people decade after decade, saying, "We shouldn't
do that. Everybody is a child of God."
That little demon in us that wants to objectify and hate somebody has been
very frustrated in our lifetimes because the Berlin Wall has fallen; the
Soviet Union has collapsed; we have to make friends with the Japanese now.
So all over America in the 1994 elections, we elected people solely on the
basis of their expression of anger and hatred toward human beings whom they
call "animals" and "scum." That little demon in us thinks,
"I can hate and objectify my hatred and it can be socially approved
toward people who violate us because who's ever going to stick up for them?"
The American public believes that our prisons are teeming with violent and
dangerous people. The truth is over 70 percent of the people in American
prisons are there for nonviolent offenses. The prisons are mostly teeming
with addicts and junkies and hapless, confused, disoriented, pathetic people
and we-by the nature of our institutions, the nature of that hatred, that
racism, and lumping nonviolent people with violent people for 5 or 6 or
10 years-are creating violent criminals. Out of that mix, very few come
out of our prison system nonviolent. And when someone drives her car into
a lake with two kids or somebody blows up the federal building or a lost
student in my own home town of Chapel Hill picks up an Uzi and mows people
down in the middle of Franklin Street, we say, "We are going to get
tougher on crime!" Every two or three weeks in America somebody with
no criminal record, an American citizen, picks up a weapon of mass destruction
and starts mowing people down. That's not crime. That's insanity. Right
now we're in a period as hysterical as the Salem witch trials. Unfortunately,
we're spending a hundred million dollars a year in every one of the states
of the union to build more prisons, and that's going to last longer than
the results of the Salem witch trials.
I believe that the problem is a deep unhappiness over the failure of the
American Dream. It seemed like a great idea, but people are more fearful
than they've ever been. We are perfecting alienation in the American culture,
based on getting and having rather than on loving and cherishing. Our children
are losing all hope that adult life is enjoyable, so they're tattooing themselves,
branding themselves, disfiguring themselves. The peak age of violent crime
now is 18 years old, and it's going down every year. In a few years it'll
be 13 - or 14-year olds who are killing the most people.
We're a young culture. On a world timeline we're a little tiny blip. The
problem is that we have always been living a rhetoric, and we have not yet
become mature enough to sit down and say, "Look, we do have the potential
to be a great nation. Let's stop lying to ourselves that we already are.
We have the most toys, the most affluence, but our degree of civilized behavior
has actually been slipping steadily." When you see pro-choice/pro-life
people face off, and you see the amount of anger and hatred on both sides-
you know we are not thriving or even getting by as a civilized culture.
We are not a melting pot. We're a bunch of iron things in this boiling water,
and we're not coming together and making our own flavor as a culture, as
a group. We're creating more technological ways to stay at home so that
we don't have to be around possible threats, so that we don't have to socialize.
We have a great potential, we have a great life. We've just lost our way.
It didn't do any good to blame Blacks; it didn't do any good to blame communists;
and it's not going to do any good to blame prisoners. If we keep building
these prisons in this period of hysteria, then it becomes big business.
CCPOA, the correctional officers association here in California, is the
largest growing labor pool in the state, and it's doubling and tripling
from the number of prisons. It's going to be the most powerful union in
the state. The average wage package for an entry-level correctional officer
with less training and less education than a school teacher is about $11,000
higher in California already, and they're gaining power based on the public's
fear. President Clinton's response to the tragedy in Oklahoma City, within
three days, was "I'm going to put a thousand more FBI men into service."
If there were ten thousand more FBI men in the country, Timothy McVeigh
would have done what he did.
In fact, violent crime has been decreasing for a few years. The hysteria
is what's increasing. And in times of hysteria, decisions are made to build
new prisons and curtail our civil rights for greater security. If you walk
into another federal building next year, and somebody takes you off into
a room and says, "Strip down, this is our procedure," most people
are going to say, "That's okay, I don't blame you." And if they
stop a guy around a federal building because he looks Mexican and you say,
"Hey, that's just a student," they'll say, "Yeah, but we
can't be too careful." Our first response to terrorism and to unhappiness
is to hire more police officers and to use imprisonment as a first response
to even credit-card theft or taking a car for a joy ride or using drugs,
which is a medical problem. We are building enough prisons to make a police
state a reality. It's going to be our grandchildren who are going to be
occupying those prisons because those prisons are going to be built like
Pelican Bay, which is the rage. When we employ all these people and the
economy depends on it, we're going to define enough types of behavior punishable
by imprisonment to keep the prisons full.
Pelican Bay is a monstrous design. Part of the promise was that although
it costs an enormously higher figure to build, this type of prison will
save money in operation. It was a lie. Pelican Bay has been much more expensive
to operate because of the intensity of the interactions and the burnout
of the staff. It has been in court in litigation since the day it opened,
and judge after judge has said, "You have to stop being so unkind;
you have to stop being so cruel; you're driving inmates crazy." Unfortunately,
the architecture of Pelican Bay is being copied all over the country. I
haven't personally been inside Pelican Bay, but I've been inside the supermax,
as they call these places, in Indiana, which is modeled after Pelican Bay.
Walls, ceilings, floors are concrete-no windows, a totally indoor environment-and
prisoners can be in there for six years and never see the sky, never see
a tree, no direct contact between inmates, no conversations, no yard. There's
a little dog-run that an inmate gets let out into maybe an hour a day. They
get led to a shower in shackles and handcuffs by four swat-team uniformed
officers who are as scared as the inmate because it's such an inhuman situation.
These officers' families think they're decent guys; the officers think they're
decent guys. The inmate is just trying to do his time; he's scared of being
beaten up; he's heard what happens to people. So four officers show up at
a guy's cell, and they have their helmets on; you can't see their eyes,
and the guy's scared, the officers are scared; this guy knows they can do
anything they want to. So much fear hurts everybody; it hurts those officers'
children; it hurts those officers' families; it hurts us.
Yet we at Kindness House have found that working with prisoners is joyous
work. Being involved in their lives after they've possibly done horrible
things and had horrible things done to them, at a time at which they decide
to seek something deeper, higher, is the greatest honor, the greatest privilege,
as that transformation occurs. Somebody writes me, saying, "I was just
raped by twelve guys and forced to shave the hair on my chest and on my
legs and wear my shirt up like a girl, and it was the most humiliating and
degrading thing I've ever experienced. How can I love these guys?"
That just blows me away. Part of what we try to do is to help people be
humbled rather than be defeated. Defeat separates you more, and the despair
and the low self-esteem involutes and is neurotic and alienating. But being
humbled is having the crap knocked out of you, having all your arrogance
and cleverness knocked out of you, but it softens your heart and you look
at others and you realize they have it tough too, and that you've just been
self-centered all your life and hadn't noticed that everyone around you
is having it tough. We try to help people use the pain of their experience
to be humbled. It's the most challenging thing in the world to respond to
that guy who asks, "How do I love these guys who just raped me?"
We had better be sure that we mean what we say and that we're living it
in our lives-to be the people that prisoners and prison guards and prisoners'
families and victims are turning to, saying, "Can you help me have
the insight to deal with this? "
-This excerpt was edited by Doret Kollerer with permission from the nationally
distributed "New Dimensions" public radio series. If you would
like a complete copy of the interview on tape with Visa or MasterCard or
a free catalog, please call 1-800-935-8273.