Saturday, May 4, 2013

Two Tribes

Yesterday I had to visit the prison to pick up money left for me by an inmate. He doesn't have much obviously but whatever he does have, he's been putting aside for my son. I couldn't just bang on the front doors of the prison, so I went into the little outbuilding that is the visitor's first stop. She seems to know me by name and she is a kindly sort, working on the coalface of humanity as she does. The room was plastered with friendly, cartoon-style warnings about drugs and sex. She was playing a CD by the Sex Pistols. She rang me through and then I stashed my bag in the lockers and walked down the pathway of dying agapanthus towards the gates and razor wire.

Beep. A goon (sorry, but his unfortunate genetics and choice of occupation made me decide that he would otherwise be a 'doorman') opened the door and said, "Sit there please." Brown, filthy couch.
I sat on the couch. Everyone worked on, ignoring me so I studied the lockers and the retina scanner.
"Excuse me." A warder was waving a manila envelope at me. "Hello."
It's a small town. The warder was an ex work colleague's husband and had played quizmaster with natural authority on a night when my table won. We won a plastic frangipani-shaped candle holder, if I remember rightly.

He waved the envelope at me again. "Do you want your money?" His tone had a grudge beneath it, like it was his money and I was diddling him a bad deal.
All of the other warders in the waiting room pretended not to be interested. I walked to his counter. He pulled some bank notes from the envelope. "Make sure you count it out."
So I counted the notes. A radio played somewhere. I went to put the money back into the envelope but he whipped the envelope away and held it up by his shoulder. "You need to sign it to say you've received your money. I have to keep it for records. Sign here, please."
After I signed the envelope, he put it on a desk behind him and handed me 'my' money. What was I supposed to do with it? My bag was across the compound in another locker. Stuff it down my fucking bra and give them all a wink? Fuckers. Failed fucking parking inspectors. I crushed the notes into my palm and he nodded at the goon who pressed the lock and let me leave. Beep.

After prison visits, getting out the front door and heading for the car park always makes me inhale deeply, look at the sky and think, thank God I'm outta there. Imagine years ... two hours in there and I'm gasping. I'm headed straight for the nearest bottle shop.
But this was the first time I've had to pick up money and, hear me, I've never been made to feel more like a two-bit hooker dysfunctionally attached to some piece of banged up gutter trash than I did yesterday.

This dirty feeling and the undertone of the guards' behaviour really bothered me as I drove away. C'mon Sarah, I tried reasoning with myself. You know how this all works. It's Sociology 101. Bentham's panopticon. Hobbes. Foucault's Of Other Spaces. The Milgram and Stanford experiments. Come on Sarah. You know this shit.
But, while driving, my education was stormed over with a personal indignation and gathering rage. The magistrate in her tight designer dress wriggling into her SUV outside the local supermarket. The lack of even a token rehabilitation or counselling. Being put in this position by an idiot family member. Tears outside the courtroom. Dragging my son out of school to give him the news. That glance between the quizmaster and the goon. (You can let her out now.) The covert demonstration of power and class that I saw, condensed into a single room, yesterday.

And so this, from Anna Akhmatova's Requiem:

No, it is not I, it is someone else who is suffering,
I could not have borne it. And this thing which has
     happened,
Let them cover it with black cloths,
And take away the lanterns ....
                                                  Night.

25 comments:

  1. Well it sounded like a valuable experience, even if it was a shit one.

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  2. It's a scene alright....absolutely fucked.

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  3. I think your comment says it all MF. I thought of you a lot while writing this but it is a different perspective.

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  4. Yes, different perspective. It's another trip being an 'educator' in there. Half of the guards reckon the inmates should be on bread & water rations with no privileges at all. It's easy to upset them, they are very snippy. I thought one guy was going to march me to the door for having a joke with him. Won't do that again. In another universe I would have told him to go fuck himself.

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    1. That is what I wanted to say yesterday. It is the most curious power relationship ... he rang today, to make sure the money thing went through. He said, 'what you saw was the friendly bit.'
      Two tribes, yes?

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    2. Yes, very tribal. Very primitive. One of the fundamental flaws of humanity - I am good, you are bad - you are 'other'......the root cause of all humankind's conflict. Once again, the inability to accept that none of us is all good or all bad. You can see it in its most extreme in someone like Sarah Palin, who really believes she is one of the good guys. The Devil wears Prada alright - and high-heels.

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  5. My husband once had a job delivering snacks and drinks and a prison was on his route. He absolutely dreaded going every single time. He said the despair was palpable. And as for the mentality of most of the guards, well, he said most of them would be IN prison if they didn't already WORK at a prison. :(

    Sorry for your bad experience.

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    1. Thanks Jennifer. Despair is real, all over the world. Don't know what else to say except I wish I'd written something funnier. :~) Sometimes I just have to Spray.

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    2. I wouldn't worry about being funny Sarah. Some things aren't funny - a lot actually. We live in desperate times.

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    3. What is kind of funny is reading over my post again to identify all the first impressions I came up with to describe the players! Value judgements all over the place. Still, the polarities between perceived good and bad are terribly boring in today's world. It feels like we are getting dumber to this stuff.

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  6. My experience of visiting prisons is that I became acutely aware that those who worked were only partially human. That these men and women were each a living extension of the Instruments of State.

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  7. Hugs, Sarah. I went there twice to do writing workshops, after a negative experience on the second visit I refused to go back. Prison by name, prison by nature.

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  8. Tough. And ugly. But so well written! The subtle (and not so subtle) nuances of the prison system abound... had me on the edge of expectation too.

    I am sorry you have to endure it though.

    I went to Pentridge (many years ago) to play netball with women in K division (D & A)...the catcalls from J Division (Psych) still ring out.

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  9. Thanks for your comments, Mr Heron, Barbara and Sontag.
    Did you mean 'Drug and alcohol' by D&A Sontag?
    Anyway, despite the rotten experience, I do feel like I've got it off my liver. Oh the healing properties of a good whingeing spray.

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    1. Yes. Drug and alcohol. 16 plus hours of lock up for the women in tiny cells with a bunk and basin.

      Rob Hull has an article in The Age that I read this morning before reading your post. It's about punishment...what works and what doesn't.

      Privatisation of prisons set us back, I think.

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    2. I would like to find that article Sontag. Mind you, there are so many other articles ... :~)
      Some old friends of mine are just about to be banged up into D&A, which is why I asked. They've already lost their farm due to the seizure of the assets of crime laws. Quiet hippy folk, no victims there ... they will soon be under the control of people like the goon and the quizmaster. Weird.

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  10. How damaging can the power play be. I wonder if that guy was a bully in school, or has he become like that to survive working there. I am far too weak to survive that sort of treatment. I'm not sure how mf does it. But she does appear tougher than me. It's shocking how such a short experience can totally unnerve our psyche. We think we know ourselves so well.

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  11. Tough? Marshmallow me really....but I don't take any crap, that's for sure. I actually like a lot of the guys in there, they are real at least.

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    1. Just straight down the line, MF, is its own variety of tough.

      Another thing I've come up with is that my education was the thing that really did my head in, on driving away. I wonder if I would have been so fucking insulted and full of rage if I was used to that kind of treatment, every day. Maybe. Maybe not. Dunno.

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    2. Good point. Maybe not. I guess many of the inmates don't have a lot of self-respect so get used to being treated like crap. It's probably why many of them are in there to start with. Maybe we ARE used to being treated better so we expect it. I can't help but think that people who treat others with disrespect have no respect for themselves anyway, which is where many of the guards are coming from - they have more in common with the inmates than they would like to admit! Which is why they try to kid them selves that they are the 'other' and therefore not worth considering. As I said - fucked!!

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  12. Finally (or maybe not, she says, with a threatening grin)
    Being made to feel like a two bit whore by a prison guard is a very different thing to my own estimations of sex workers. I just have to clarify that.

    And the dying apapanthus ... any landscaper worth their salt will know that I tried to crack at least one funny here.

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    1. That WAS a bit subtle Sarah.....or obscure maybe :) Sometimes your obscurity obscures....:)))))

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  13. Okay, may not a funny but an irony ... that and the woman who played the Sex Pistols in a room full of posters telling us that drugs are bad. :~)

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  14. This line —

    But this was the first time I've had to pick up money and, hear me, I've never been made to feel more like a two-bit hooker dysfunctionally attached to some piece of banged up gutter trash than I did yesterday.

    — hits it hard, a punch, an undeniable truth.

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