INSTITUTIONALIZATION | 2008-04-02
Our present society was built but the Greatest Generation when they came out of the armed forces in World War after years of intense Obedience Training. They looked for new institutions to boss them around.
I used to work in prisons. Yes, smart ass, WORKED there! I could leave when I wanted to!
Very soon one runs into institutionalization, people have been in institutions so long that, despite the fact that they bitch as loud as anybody else, they don't WANT to get out.
Like the Greatest Generation, they bitch and moan about Authority kicking them around, but they know no other way to live.
Prison is the ultimate Welfare State, It is the nearest to true Communism that a real human society can get. In an American prison, one is guaranteed "three hots and a cot," and those three hot meals are INFINITELY better than the ones the average Moscow resident in the whole history of the USSR.
The space allotted to a prisoner is twice that for those in nuclear submarines.
His living space is comparable to one of a family living in a Moscow apartment under the USSR. And try to remember that people all over the USSR FOUGHT for the privilege of living in Moscow. When people came home after work in Moscow, they would get out on the exercise yard, the Moscow streets, and walk like New York immigrants in the 1890s when they lived 500 to 600 per acre.
Unlike the 1890s immigrant or the Moscow workers, the prisoner was guaranteed as much as he could eat when he came in from the yard. Prisons are kept relatively clean, even sterilely hygienic most of the time, since there is a lot of labor around to clean. In Alcatraz, Al Capone was referred to as "the wop with the mop." When you mop, you get out of your cage.
Prisons are a hell of a lot cleaner than and just as safe as Harlem or the Barrio, to which most prisoners return.
But it is not he OBJECTIVE conditions make for institutionalization. People come to prefer having their whole lives controlled down to the last detail.
I hate to be down on the Great Drama of Prison Life, but all that stuff they are doing in there is childish. Grown men don't run around twitching their fingers in Gang Signs or Proving Alpha like a bunch of chimpanzees, by confrontation and lifting weights.
Prison life never rises above the Kindergarten level. Which makes it a perfect refuge for the none-too-bright.
Yes, the announced average IQ for prisoners is often above 100. In a population made up mostly of blacks and Hispanics.
If you dispute the official figures, try to get prison authorities' permission to check it.
Sounds like the good old USSR, doesn't it?