To those who don't think criminals are different than you and I

The BBQ Pit
81

I think that using the terms helpless and hopeless in terms of criminality does a great disservice to the rest of the law abiding population, most of us have had periods of time when such terms could apply, and to some folk, these terms apply for most of their lives, yet still they don’t go out committing crime.

I can personally say that my background is without doubt at least the equal and probably worse than that of most criminals, so don’t make such statements, its insulting.

Sympathy for criminals, especially the revolving door ones, comes very short from me, I’ll save mine for the innocents.

Lazy and greedy are also terms that, when combined in one person, accurately describe a huge percentage of criminals, in fact, these folk have a sense of entitlement to a lifestyle they feel they should have, and god help anyone who gets in the way, because they do not have the usual restraints in terms of empathy that the rest of us have.

I’m sure its a very familiar refrain that prison staff hear from the prisoners who state that if they could get work that paid over $500 a week, they would give up on crime, and this from prisoners who can barely read or write, and have absolutely nothing to offer a potential employer.

There is a reason for their hopelessness, its the hopelessness that comes from the latest failure of their short term self gratification, that has no depth, and no continuity, of utter selfishness and callousness.

One thing about working with prisoners is that their values and their personalities are corrosive and insidious, you work with them and they have a completely differant take on reality.

It is important to ensure you don’t become infected by their thought processes, which for a large part are anti-social, concrete and inflexible, badly reasoned and unfelt.

In many ways, prisoners attitudes are very similar to the 13 year old, poorly developed, selfish, moody, teenager who sets parents to such despair, differance being that instead of stamping their petulant feet about, they pick up guns and knives, and slash and kill, without any thought but for themselves.

So yeah, I’m not surprised that they can produce a certain contempt in staff, that is one possible defence mechanism, and some days you need it, other days you can breeze past.

82

It’s an expression. It has its original source in the Comedy of Errors as I recall. I could just use hapless I suppose, but it sort of breaks up the set. I feel certain the use of the expression is based on its alliterative qualities and its internal rhythm and not on any effort to insult you personally.

Honestly, I don’t see what sympathy has to do with it, though you are of course entitled to have any personal feelings (or lack of them) that you would like.

Sure. Lots of people are both lazy and greedy, and I feel certain there are a lot of people with a sense of entitlement to a lifestyle they feel they should have. Both in and out of prison. As for “god help anyone who gets in the way” and lack of empathy causing an absence of self restraint and so on, I submit to you that this description does not apply to a large percentage of the current prison population. We are once again back to this notion that everybody convicted of a crime is clinically a psychopath which just isn’t true.

Especially in the US where I seem to recall reading has something like 700 of every 100,000 in jail.

For the rest, really, other than your own willingness to make rather broad statements about anybody convicted (evidently) of any crime ever, I don’t see that there is anything here to respond to. Though I must say, the theory of the inectiousness nature of thought is an interesting one. So what you are saying is that people who work with this substandard class of humans will inevitably be infected?

Seems like a waste of some very expensive training to me.

It is often observed that the demographic qualities of people working to put people away are similar to those of the people put away. I have not myself found this to be true. But this is a new take on it. So you think it’s sort of like how people start to resemble their pets or their spouses after a while?

Contempt isn’t really what we are talking about. Well, other than yours I suppose but that’s just a personal feeling and it is devoutly to be hoped that the closest anybody with that kind of personal feeling gets to an actual correctional facility is, say, watching a newscast about it.

We are talking about the willingness to think about this thing – the class of “all prisoners” – as fundamentally different from you and me. And we are talking about it on the part of a person part of whose job it is to manage safe and constitutional jails.

Nowadays (these modern times, what can you do) they have ethics codes and professional codes of conduct and all kinds of things. And I hear they even make corrections officers learn about stuff like the Stanford prison experiment and the psychology of imprisonment and how to identify when your need for defense mechanisms could become a problem.

83

According to this post, casdave works in a prison in the UK.

Kinda scary, no?

84

For which I blame the welfare state.

85

I’m with Alice on this. It’s pretty fucking simple logic, really. Never leave witnesses and never work with anyone you’re not willing to kill. (See previous statement)

86

Nice way to avoid the issue, that most people who suffer deprivation and hard lives do not go out and commit crime.

The vast majority of criminals are either violent in pursuit of resources, or are involved in supporting a lifestyle they cannot afford, often this is drug related.

I have seen them take part in all the rehabilitation courses, and come out the end unchanged, but participation earns them a step closer to an earlier release.

The lack of internal restraint in prisoners actually describes the majority of them, and not the minority, it is something that is recognised.

If you don’t get in their way, or if they have nothing to gain from harming you, then you are ok. They don’t consider the moral ramifications, I guess this also decribes the sociopath, which they closely resemble in many ways, except for the intelligence bit often associated with this state of mind.

Drugs especially appear to destroy all our social norms in these individuals, you could argue for more rehab courses and support, I won’t disagree.

By the time these individuals have achieved regular prison visits it is well too late, for the most part their crime careers started in their very early teens, and often before that.

They have done all the community sentencing work, the police warnings, the secure supervised learning environments, they have been through all the fines and pretty much everything that the social engineers have dreamt up to try assist them to go straight, but they persist and end up in prison.

Prison is usually the absolute last resort.

By then its well too late.
You want to reduce crime and criminals ? Look around you, look at school funding and class sizes, look around the heroes on tv - notice that half of them are violent criminals ?

Look at the very top, lies to draw us into wars on false justification, it soaks all the way through our society, from relatively minor things such as gangsta rap, through to high divorce rates and the collapse of the extended family with its role models and support mechanisms.

Our society has created these individuals, a spell in prison will not change them but it does keep them out of your way so you can carry on going shopping down the mall in safety.

It’s quite easy to point at prison and correction services workers and state that they are not solving the problem, but the problem was caused by all of us, and our societal attitudes.

We in prisons make the best of what we have, but the material we have to work with isnt promising, you, the public are not actually interested in rehabilitation, because you don’t really want to know or understand the work that goes on in prison, most of the time its just a prurient interest in prison rape, or the history of the latest serial killer.

You don’t win votes by spending a lot of cash on prisons and prisoners you all prefer low taxes, its highly expensive to ensure that you can keep track of prisoners outside prison.

I am expected to try train a prisoner in literally a few weeks to gain a trade qualification, and yet for most trainnees in the outside world, this takes near to one on one training in a work environment for several years, and the prisoner usually isn’t motivated, and often cannot read or write.

I have to attempt this training with 15 of them at a time, not one or two, and you can easily see why effective training in prison would be enormously expensive.

The people who hold the purse strings, the governement, are only interested in the appearance of training, and you the public are not interested in higher taxation, its that simple.

You want rehab ? Maybe you should think about changing the system so that prisoners are released into work, and that their continuing freedom depends on being able to hold down that job.

Expensive, you bet, but don’t give me all that moral crap about unfortunate offenders, or unfeeling prison staff, we are underfunded, and understaffed, we are unappreciated. Most of society would quite honestly wish that prisoners stayed inside forever without any financial burden on themselves.

Its not just prisoners that are the problem, you are the problem, we all are, there is plenty of balme to go around, but there are precious few in society who are willing to accept responsibility for its failings.

87

Little Nemo, I must admit to my being confused as to what your intent was with this thread. To express your surprise, despite your having worked with this population, that some of them are sociopaths? That some people who have killed and engaged in crime as a way of life take a cold dispassionate “professional” POV when viewing a movie about it? Kind of surprising that such a trite observation would surprise you. Or to support your op that “criminals are different than you and I”? With its implied broad generalization and us vs them false comfort.

88

Is that the issue? When did that become the issue? I think that this is the first mention in this thread of crime being caused by deprivation and a hard life so I don’t think it can have been the issue.

Okay, if that’s the issue, may I just say: I think poverty is neither inherently ennobling nor corrupting. The gap between rich and poor, however, does seem to be involved in crime rates and particularly in homicide. Which points at social justice involvement of course.

And we prolly could go on at great length about the causes and antidotes to crime in general, though we might be talking at cross purposes as I am not all that familiar with much of what you are talking about in terms of training/rehab or in terms of everything the social engineers have dreamed up – rehabilitation funding was cut in the 90s to crippling levels and hasn’t recovered as far as I know. In the US it’s mostly warehouse prisons.

I don’t think it’s the job of prison workers to solve the problem; what they are mostly asked to do in the US, it seems to me, is to oversee the separation of criminals from society.

However, this is in some ways self reinforcing. As you rightly point out we have to look at the entire sysytem and not just bits of it. And it hacks me right off for a person who goes out of his way to present himself as an expert by virtue of his employment in prison to take a purely gratuitous opportunity to depict criminals as being criminals purely as a result of their fundamental difference from the rest of us. It is a very short step from that to the notion that they (as a class) deserve to be punished simply because of their intrinsic evil.

And no matter how much they may indeed suck, how dreadful they may be, even assuming all of that to be uniformly true, making these little steps are harmful. Harmful to us. The non criminals. On so many levels. It has harmed us already and I do not see the trend reversing any time soon. We exceeded 7 million behind bars last year, did you hear?

We have more than enough imagery of prisoners as disposable and undeserving of any compassion, let alone rights, there is zero need to reinforce that and certainly not for no evident reason beyond ego feeding.

89

In the U.K released prisoners are often guided into construction work because it is believed that they will stick it out ,unlike if they were put into a factory enviroment.
So I have worked with a lot of ex cons.

Unlike your boys ,when men like that make a comment on what to them is a job related conversation ,they are not fantasising,they really,really arent fantasising,they totally mean what they say, just trust me on this one.

90

Methinks he was shaking his head at an, “I guess you had to be there” moment.

I would guess that your soliloquy (interesting as it was) probably applies better in the UK than the US. My understanding is that the US public isn’t interested in even the appearance of rehabilitation, roughly speaking.

(Substantively, I wonder when exactly things go wrong. Teens? The womb? Whenever some receive a combination of abuse and brain trauma? Of course this probably varies.)
Miller: I think little Nemo was using an analogy when he talked about bigotry. His point was some classes of individuals are different than other classes of individuals, according to certain criteria (such as bigotry). Or at least that’s how I understood it. With all due respect, I don’t think his analogy worked that well.

OTOH, I thought this was pretty funny.
Notwithstanding the confusion I’ve find this thread to be interesting, Nemo and casdave. Thanks for your remarks.

91

Well, you see, those dudes weren’t criminal so much as sociopaths. Really, they are no longer human IMHO. They have lost their “humanity” and that’s what makes us human. IMHO, again, of course.

But your prison also has some poor dude that was caught with a baggie of weed, and he’s just like you and I and everyone else. Maybe a little stupider.

92

Which is the problem. Trying to impute criminality to ‘class’ or in any way to turn this into an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ situation is trying to create a dichotomy where no valid one exists.

Did you read the statistics above on the numbers of prisoners with learning disorders and other disorders? Perhaps it might be wise to begin with literacy courses? Diagnoses of ailments that could be treated?

93

You can only teach those who are motivated to be taught.

These individuals largely do not place a great deal of value on literacy and numeracy.

It is almost a chicken and egg situation, which came first, the mental health issues or the drug use, in many cases its probably that one exacerbated the other, add in the revolving door syndrome and mixing constantly with other idiots, and it doesn’t matter any more, the fact is, they are largely suffering deficiencies in thinking skills, and logic skills.

Prisoners for the most part are differant, for a start, they are in prison, making them a small subset of society, but to get there means quite a prolonged effort on their part, because they go through all the lesser forms of corrections outside of prison first.

Offenders are often nothing, if not dedicated to persuing their disastrous criminal careers.

They do have far more mental and social problems, they do have much poorer intellectual skills than the rest of society.

Their value systems contribute to their problems becoming ingrained, because they do not see anything to be gained by changing themselves.

One classic example of the differance between prisoners and the rest of us is their inability to plan ahead, or to visualise outcomes, along with a serious lack of an ability to discover alternatives when faced with a situation of almost any sort.

Prisoners have cognitive deficiences, prison probably does make this worse, along with the type of peer pressure that is found in prison.

There will be plenty who argue that lots of folk outside of prison have some of these issues, and whilst it is true, these people form a lower percentage of the population, and most of all, these free individuals are not committing severe enough crime to be imprisoned.

Not all prisoners are like this, that is also true, but the large percentage of them are.