The difference is, I think that I was an outsider and the really sobering fact is that the people who work in these settings day after day have seemed to, over time, lose their capacity to be shocked by the kinds of things that they see. There is a kind of brutalizing effect of the prison environment which, I think, makes everyone who is a part of it more sick, sicker. It makes prisoners sicker; and I think it also makes the corrections officers sicker. I have actually had the opportunity to consult and lecture groups of corrections officers in Massachusetts where I live and talking about the stress of working in that kind of environment. It is an enormously stressful kind of thing and it does tend to lead to a kind of brutalization, a kind of sadism and it really is a kind of thing that, "There, but for the grace of God, go I." I think that, if you live in that kind of environment day after day, it does things to you. I was up at Pelican Bay, that community around Crescent City, California which is a very rural relatively poor community in California. Pelican Bay State Prison became the biggest employer in the region. But, I was talking to some of the corrections officers and they were talking about what was happening to some of their friends - the rate of alcoholism had skyrocketed, spousal abuse, suicide. Working in that environment may put money in your pocket, but over time it destroys you psychologically and brings out rage and sadism and violence and brutality. The sobering thought is that, if you live in those kinds of environments too long, you start losing some of your own humanity. And you stop experiencing the shock of brutality and inhumanity that those of us outside the system never thought would still exist in this country. But it does. And if you look at the super-max facilities, that's where you are going to find it.

Leo Grieb
Stuart Grassian
Massachusetts

When The Prison Gates Slam

When the prison gates slam behind an inmate, he does not lose his human quality; his mind does not become closed to ideas; his intellect does not cease to feed on a free and open interchange of opinions; his yearning for self respect does not end; nor is his quest for self-realization concluded. If anything, the need for identity and self-respect are more compelling in the dehumanizing prison environment. Whether an 0. Henry writing his short stories in a jail cell or a frightened young inmate writing his family, a prisoner needs a medium for self-expression.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall,
Procunier v. Martinez, 1974