“The Tragedy Is That They’re All Lumped Together”

April 30, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

David Scott Milton, a writer who taught composition to inmates at maximum-security prisons for more than a dozen years, just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

So are all people redeemable, or are there truly some that have no conscience, and no empathy? 

Answer: 

One of the astonishing things that I discovered in working in the prison- I had no idea of this from the outside- on the maximum yard, 5 to 10% of the inmates are unredeemable. They should probably be locked away and never thought of again. 5 to 10% (in my opinion) are likely innocent and wholly redeemable. The other 80% run the gamut from mostly redeemable to barely redeemable.

The tragedy is that they’re all lumped together.

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Question:

What is it you think separates the irredeemable 10% from the rest? 

Answer: 

I think the irredeemable 10% were just broken beyond repair. Either they were born sociopaths or life ground them down so hard and so fast that there wasn’t enough human emotion remaining to work with. Though I’d say legitimate, diagnosable sociopaths were rare, there was definitely that 5 to 10% that was so without empathy that they might as well have been.

Most of the prisoners I met who were like that had had unspeakable things happen to them in childhood, so in a sense they were victims, but I couldn’t pity them. I should add that not many of these ended up in my class. Once they were in prison many of them either became very apathetic or focused more on manipulating the hierarchy inside the prison for their own ends, and I wasn’t useful in either case.

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Question:

What is your craziest/wildest experience teaching at the prison?

Answer:

There were half a dozen times over 13 years where I thought I was in serious danger. These were one-on-one confrontations where, if the prisoner had felt like killing me, I’d have been dead… And I thought he might feel like killing me.

The craziest was when a female guard was walked off the yard after she was caught en flagrante delicto with an inmate. They escorted her off the yard, and it turned out her husband worked there too. He was a tower guard with a loudspeaker, and he was screaming insults at her as they walked her off. Also, as a tower guard, he had a gun, but luckily he never fired at her. All the inmates were forced to lie flat on the ground, but they found the whole thing very entertaining, hooting and hollering. It was a madhouse.

Question:

I can’t believe she would be so stupid while her husband was working there!

Answer:

Especially considering he was armed!

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Question:

How has working in the prison affected you? Both you personally and your views on prisoners/prisons.

Answer:

When I first started, I was very interested in my students and their stories, interested in the whole world they inhabited. But as time went on it really wore on me, reading about their murders, hearing about their abuse (many of them had been abused horribly as children by monsters before becoming monsters themselves)… It’s a coldness that seeps into your soul, and eventually it becomes almost too much to handle. I think it’s similar (though not nearly as intense) as what social workers experience, just being exposed to the full spectrum of human cruelty.

As far as my views on prisoners and prisons, the main thing that was affected was my judgmental nature. Before I went in, I saw crime as black and white. I was a proponent of the death penalty. And I believed there was something fundamentally different between me and someone who could commit murder. Teaching in the prisons taught me that there is very little separating any of us from a criminal. I had very few students who I believe were sociopaths, completely irredeemable. Most of the students I worked with were just kids who never had a chance and grew up to be something horrible. And many of the students I worked with were normal people who made one horrible mistake while high, or in a fit of rage or jealousy.

I also no longer believe in the death penalty, because there were a few students I had who I genuinely believe were innocent.

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