TRANSCRIPT
There are two basic ways that I’ve interacted with the prison system. One is through talking to quite a lot of people who have been in jails and in prisons, mostly in America, but in quite a few other countries also. And this for me was both as a therapist and just people I was friends with or acquaintances with, listening to their experiences, listening to the horror that they went through in prison. Some of them said they changed as a result of it. It woke them up. Most, I think, didn’t actually wake up as a result. Most became more traumatized as a result of what they went through, such that when they came out, they were in a less functional position. Some said they even became more criminal types after having been in prison, after the horrors that they went through.
Well, the other way in which I have interfaced with the prison system, with jails, is by actually having visited quite a few in several different countries. So I thought that’s the way I’m going to focus on this video, to talk about some of my personal experiences visiting jails and prisons.
The first one that I would like to share was in my first year of being a therapist. I was a psychotherapy intern at a center for Vietnam combat veterans in New York City, and we did outreach to prisons a few times. One time we went to this notorious prison upstate in upstate New York called Sing Sing, a really dreadful place. The kind of place you don’t want to ever end up. A lot of convicted murderers, rapists, that kind of thing. Kind of a dungeon, basically.
I went there with my psychotherapy supervisor, and he was nervous going there. He said he never had a good time. He only went there because it was part of the obligation of his job, but he didn’t like it. He said it was scary. He said it was dangerous. He said you couldn’t walk anywhere inside of the prison without guards next to you all the time. There was so much risk of the prisoners attacking you, harming you, maybe even killing you. And so I got a little bit nervous going in there.
And then we arrived inside, and I started interacting with the prisoners, and I realized, you know, actually they were not making me feel unsafe. In fact, they seemed to be really welcoming that I was there. They actually seemed to like me, and a lot of them were kind people, very hurt people. Yeah, pretty much guaranteed probably all or most of them had done pretty horrible things to end up there, but at the same time, it was like they wanted to interact. They wanted to interface. They knew that I was there for a good reason.
And so I was there for the better part of the day. The incident that comes to my mind that I wanted to share about is that at some point in the middle of the day, while counseling these guys, I realized I had to go to the bathroom. And the bathroom was quite a ways away, maybe a 10-15 minute walk from where the little office we had was. And we had to walk through basically the dungeon to get to the bathroom.
I remember my supervisor telling me, “You need to have a guard go with you.” And I realized, you know, I don’t want to walk with a guard. There’s something about walking with a guard that just didn’t make me feel right. So when my supervisor wasn’t paying attention, I just left and I started walking to the bathroom.
I remember there were prisoners walking around, and I asked them which way do I go to the bathroom, and they told me. And they were actually very nice. I could see they were concerned about me. A couple of them said, “Do you want me to walk with you?” And I said, “Well, if you want to talk with me, sure.” And they did. So a couple of them walked with me as far as they were allowed to go, I guess. I talked to several of them, and what I realized is I didn’t feel unsafe at all. In fact, I felt it was probably the best experience I had all day. I was away from this formal setting. I was away from this ugly little office. I was away from my supervisor, my supervisor who didn’t like me very much, who realized that I was an independent thinker, and he was threatened by that.
He was a guy who needed to be massively in control all the time. His clothes were always perfect. He would actually check my belt when I came in in the morning to make sure it was lined up perfectly with the buttons on my shirt and the button on my pants. “Your belt’s off,” he’d tell me. I was like, I never even noticed such things before.
Well, what happened when I got back from the bathroom, maybe a half an hour later, is my supervisor, this guy, was in a frenzy. “Where were you? Where did you go? Why did you not take a guard with you?” He was really mad at me. He was scared. And I told him it was fine. It was fine. I met nice people. “Because you could have gotten yourself killed! I would never go without a guard! That was bad of you!” And I remember feeling spanked by him, but also thinking, oh God, I did not want to do what he said.
Well, then he went to the bathroom later, and he went with a guard. And while he was gone, I was alone with some of these guys, these prisoners, guys who had committed murder, some other really rough stuff that they’d done. And I asked them about it. I said, “Was it a stupid idea that I went to the bathroom?” And they looked at me and they said, “Daniel, we’re getting to know you.” They said, “No, it was not a stupid idea of you to walk alone to the bathroom without a guard, but it would have been a stupid idea for your supervisor to go because people, they can tell what kind of guy he is, and they can tell what kind of guy you are. People can read people pretty well. They know who a person is, and they don’t want to hurt you. He’s the kind of guy that they want to [ __ ] up.”
Well, that was the first story, a little indicator of what life is like in jail and prison.
The next story I have is in a South American country, and I don’t want to mention which country it is. I don’t really need to out the country, but I got a chance to visit a prison, a big prison, a prison for long-term prisoners. Pretty harsh place. People told me a lot of warnings: be really careful. But by that point, I already had been a therapist for 10 years, and something I realized, that I realized also from that first prison experience in Sing Sing, is that if I go in with an open heart, if I go in honestly, if I go in unafraid, trusting, being honest, really wanting to connect, there is karma, and people pick that up very quickly, and they feed the same thing back to me.
Well, I went into this prison, and it was a scary place. It wasn’t actually like Sing Sing; it was a lot scarier. I saw a lot of guys who had like broken arms that were unhealed in strange directions and missing eyes, missing a lot of teeth. I saw a lot of people with mouth sores, like really bad sores. And it was like, this is a rough place. I think a lot of them didn’t get great or any medical care at all. It seemed like it was a rough environment. It was not the kind of place you want to end up at all.
And I’d actually had some therapy clients when I was a therapist talk about being in South American prisons, being in Central American prisons, some Caribbean prisons, and they said absolute horror. The kind of place you really don’t want to end up. And if you go in there screwed up, chances are you’re gonna come out a lot more screwed up.
Well, while I was in there, I just spent the day there talking with the guys, talking with these prisoners, trying to make connections, make friends. It was all in Spanish for me, and they were really curious about me. They really wanted to know a lot about me. They wanted to know a lot about America. They had a million…
Questions for me, and I hung out with them. Well, in this country, they drink a lot of mate. It’s a kind of tea. They drink it in a little mate bowl or a little mate cup, and there’s a little sort of metal straw that comes out of it. You keep the leaves in there, you keep putting hot water, and you drink it.
And part of the culture of mate is that you sit in a circle, or however it is that you do it, you share it with other people. So you take a sip, you pass to the next person, they drink. Sometimes you go around the whole circle and everyone drinks. And part of it is sharing saliva, sharing something really from your body. You take theirs into yours, they take yours into them. It’s very intimate, it’s very personal.
And I was hanging out with some of these guys in the South American prison, and they all sat down in a circle to drink mate, and they invited me. And I noticed that several of the guys in this circle had mouth sores. They had mouth herpes, cold sores. And I thought, okay, this, if you—especially if you’re passing this thing quickly, this mate cup around, this is transmissible. I could get it.
And they all watched me to see if I was going to join them, because I think they knew that I knew that they knew this. And there’s something about it. It’s like, are you really in with us or not? And there is part of me that didn’t want to be in with them. I didn’t want to be part of this circle, even though for several hours beforehand, I’ve been hanging out with them and really communing with them, being open, being honest, having them be the same with me. They were telling me why they were there, how long they were there for, what it was really like, how scary it was, how crowded the conditions were, mosquitoes, and all sorts of different illnesses in there.
Well, suddenly I’m invited into the circle, and I realized, Daniel, you gotta do it. And it’s in those moments, I’m not a religious guy, but instead in that moment, I’m like, Daniel, have faith. You’re guided by something bigger than you. And so I joined in the circle, and several times around that mate cup passed. And there wasn’t a lot of talking, but instead it was a sort of deeper communing, drinking that mate cup.
And I was sitting next to a guy who had a cold sore, a big open cold sore, the kind that if I was staying with a friend—and I’ve done this before—the friend has said, listen, don’t share any silverware with me, don’t share any cups. We gotta be really, really careful. You know, I’m going to wash my hands before I even touch the sink spigot, that kind of thing. I don’t want to pass this to you. And here I was sitting next to a prisoner, and he drinks the mate cup, and it’s right against his mouth and against his cold sore, and he hands it to me, and it’s still wet with his saliva. And it’s like, Daniel, drink it. So I just drank it, and I participated.
And there was something special about it. There was something like, I’m not saying by any means that I was a prisoner and I know how it felt like, because I really don’t. But in that moment, I did join the circle. And I wondered, am I gonna get lip herpes from this? I’ve been tested before, I didn’t have it, even though they say two-thirds of American citizens actually do have the virus that causes lip cold sores, lip herpes. Well, it’s been four years, never did get it. And there’s some part of me that thinks, okay, maybe it’s my immune system, or maybe it’s just like at some deeper level I was protected.
And then I come to my third story, my third anecdote. And this goes back well over 26 years now. This goes back to the summer of 1994, and it was my first time in Russia. It was, what, three years after the fall of the Soviet Union? And I arrived by train from Poland, actually from Belarus, after Poland, from Belarus to Moscow. And I arrived with my backpack, with a guitar, and with a telephone number of someone who supposedly somebody I knew knew, and he might take me in or might help me in some way.
And so I thought the first thing I do when I arrive in Moscow, after changing money—and I got some money, changed some people helped me with that—is I have to find a telephone to call this fellow. And so I was wandering around this outdoor Yaroslavsky train station with this telephone number, with my backpack on my back, holding my guitar, and realizing there are no pay phones here. And I don’t even have any small change anyway to use a pay phone. I don’t even know how to use, what do you call it, a code beforehand? I have no idea.
So what I did is I finally found a policeman who was wandering around this outdoor train station, and I said, “Tell his phone, telephone,” and I showed him the number. And he looked at it, and he says he couldn’t help me. I said, “You gotta help me, please, please, please.” And he was like, oh god, I’ve got a foreigner, I have to help. And there weren’t too many foreigners in Moscow. I didn’t see any in the train station at that point anyway.
But finally he said, okay, he was defeated. So he walked me about 10 minutes all the way across the train station, and he brought me inside a building and down some corridors and up the stairs and then over. And then he brought me into a big open room that was the jail of the train station. And there was, you know, it was like a prison. They had gates and fences and all that, the kind of stuff that was holding in people. They had a big metal cage, and inside this metal cage was probably about 25 men. And I was like, oh my god, I’ve been in Russia for an hour and I’m already in a jail. I’m like, this is weird.
Well, the guy had a telephone there, but someone was using it, so I had to wait. So while I waited, I went over and I was like talking to the—I knew basically almost no Russian—but I was talking about American. I’d learned that I’m an American. They were curious, Americans? Is this here in the jail? They couldn’t believe it. Now, some of these guys looked Russian, some of them looked Roma, a couple of them looked pretty drunk, a lot of them were missing teeth. But the guys were most especially curious with my guitar. They kept pointing at it and pointing at it.
Well, I was thinking, I wonder if I could play it, because I love to pull out my guitar and play. I ended up playing a lot in the street when I was there in my next few days in Moscow. But they were pointing at it, and the prison guards kind of watching this whole interaction, and I kind of didn’t feel like I wanted to ask him.
Well, what ended up happening is the phone became free. The guard helped me make the telephone call. I called this guy, he was like, oh my god, and he told me blah blah blah blah where I had to go to meet him. He was going to meet me. And then I got off the phone, and I wanted to interact a little bit more with the prisoners. They kept pointing to my guitar, so I asked the guitar, but I asked the prison guard. I said, “Guitar, guitar?” He was curious too. So I brought out my guitar, and I realized I knew one song in Russian, and it seemed like about absolutely the most inappropriate song to play in a jail. But it’s the only one I knew. It was actually written by a five-year-old Russian boy, and I knew it in English and in Russian.
So I happen to have my little guitar—this isn’t the same guitar—but I have my little guitar right here, and I thought I’d like to play it to end this video. I’ll sing it in Russian first. No, I’m sorry, I’ll sing it in English first, and you can see why it’s kind of inappropriate to play in a jail.
[Music]
Or maybe not, and I think it tells a lot about…
What goes on in jails and why people end up in jails? A lack of love, often a lack of nurturance, a horrible childhood. That was the story I heard again and again as a therapist.
May there always be sunshine. May there always be blue skies. May there always be mama. May there always be me.
And I sang in English first, and these guys looked at me like, “What are you singing?” But they loved it. And then I said, “Now ruski,” and they’re like, “Ah.” I said, “Yeah.” [Music]
And as soon as I did that to a person, they all started singing along with me. I couldn’t believe it. Never expected it, but they all knew it, and they loved it. [Music]
Yet, and then they clapped.