Criminal Justice Society
A buddy of mine who had served a 2-year Peace Corps commitment in Moldova with his wife blew my cell up three times because he wanted to put me in contact with his co-worker named Indiigo, who worked with him at the Vista Program in Seattle. Indiigo was contemplating a move to the bay area with her 7 year old son.
I expected her to call early, but she didn’t get a hold of me until 8pm.
We began talking about 15 things at once, slowly unpacking and labeling our critique of all the societal blockages to a humane existence in the bay area and world. Then the topic turned to mental illness….
view from San Quentin by night (e. ekman)
Damon: Yeah, society is sick and as an organism and in deep denial and rationalizing and blaming, therefore there’s no choice but for it to point the finger and continually diagnose individuals as mentally ill rather than to see what it’s doing to cause the problem.
Indiigo: Anyone could or should be crazy in today’s environment. We’re all walking a tightrope.
Damon: Tell me about it. I just took my slippers off and put my pole down.
We then began to dissect the even closing gap between the client and the worker.
Indiigo: When you see how many mental health jobs there are, the qualifications they want individuals to have, all the things they want you to do, and the low pay they are offering, you have to wonder who it is that think they can get to do these burnout job?
Damon: Hey, I know the answer to that. I remember being at a Walden House function in ’96 and talking to a guy that was a senior executive director. He was telling me about how he used to be an addict, but worked the Walden program up to Director. At the time, I was working at a methadone maintenance program that had only graduated one client off methadone in 13 years, so I asked him how difficult it was to maintain sobriety. He said he had relapsed over three times since becoming direcor, and each time he’d lost his job, he enrolled in the program he had been running and worked his way back up to be Director again. It kind of blew me away.
This “real spit” went back and forth for 19 minutes between Indiigo and I. Finally the topic turned to what my experience of mental illness was at my job as mental health director at Alameda County Jail, the 6th largest penal facility in the United States. I told her, “y’know, I was talking to my friend Eve the other night, and we were able to figure out that jails and prisons are going to continue to grow and grow, because unlike every other program on the face of the world, penal facilities are unique. Most programs have eligibility criteria, you need some kind of insurance, you have to follow the rules or get kicked out… but jail, you don’t need any money, or benefits, or to meet eligibility and no matter how many rules you break, they’ll never kick you out. It was the ultimate in acceptance. Eve called it, ‘unconditional love’.”
In a way, it makes sense of why so many people continually come back time and time again. They need that place where they can kick back and be “themselves”, safe from the temptation of law abiding citizens and their vices. I guess you could say that prisons have morphed into a strange type of bargain basement, industrial heaven on earth for people whose minds are out of synch and/or can’t keep their hands to themselves.
Damon Eaves
