Good Nazi's

I know, it's a laughable concept. You can probably guess (correctly) that I am comparing prison staff to Nazis, but I may surprise both of us by trying to see the good in them.

Guys like Milgram and Asch did their experiments to try to understand how seemingly normal people could wake up, have breakfast with their families, kiss the baby goodbye, and go to work at a concentration camp: starving, beating and murdering, all "following orders". They were all "just the messenger".

They couldn't all have been monsters, was the point of these conformity experiments. I could concede this point to some of the prison staff: those who didn't laugh in my face when I told them I was hungry or the ones who smile when they tell us we'll be locked down for a long time. Even these rotten ones... maybe they have loving families that are completely unaware of their penchant for inflicting and rejoicing in the suffering of their fellow human beings. Maybe they even go out and feed the homeless or work in the local parish on their off days, I wouldn't know.

But the prison's harsh strictures and teachings of "us VS them" dynamics limits any ability for them to act like a human being capable of compassion. Indeed, even an attempt to, say, give extra food to a starving inmate or let someone out after a month of lockdown to call a dying mother to say their last goodbyes is actually breaking a rule: rules they are paid to enforce. These little cracks do let in some light occasionally, but they are rare and furtively done with an embarrassed blush, their eyes turned away. These rare attempts at humanity will be met with SEVERE censure from their fellow workers and superiors along with social ostracism for being the one who wants to help us, who "hugged an inmate" as they joke at anyone who isn't an outright sociopath. Importantly, this makes the officer who doesn't want to torture us or remain indifferent to human suffering... the enemy of all his colleagues. See how the system has assured our torment?

So even those who are "good people" either have to hide it or flaunt it, suffering complete ostracization. In 14 years, I've met 2 that made me feel I was talking to someone who saw me as a human being. The rest.... they have to pretend they don't like us, like all the rest of the staff. They have to hide their compassion. Pretend... And I think Vonnegut said " we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be".

Thankfully, the place doesn't twist too many of them: the ones who are unapologetically good, those who have the courage of their convictions.. They quit. Usually before a year is out. I've seen... more than I can count of these ones. Any compassion or humanity is like curves of a round peg, shaved and smashed to fit into a square hole.

So there may well be some good prison staff, but this environment restricts and even punishes any attempt of theirs to act on it. An important effect of this is shown in writings of people like Victoria Law and Dr. Theodore Dorpat who show that the staff find it harder and harder to "leave it at the gate". They end up with mental health disorders, more domestic violence, PTSD and higher suicide rates. With each shift they work here, they are shaped more and more into what the prison is MEANT to do. This behavior of theirs is not an aberration, this is how the system is set up. They treat us like animals and we, in turn, learn to act LIKE ANIMALS. Our subjugation shows them what they are capable of doing to people, to creatures. They learn to hate themselves, maybe for what they are willing to do "just following orders", for a paycheck. It's a bad barrel, and no good apples come out of it, though many go in. Like Nazi's, they are 'just' following orders".

Oscar Wilde said in his poem "The Ballad of Reading Gaol":

The vilest deeds like poison weeds

Bloom well in prison-air:

It is only what is good in Man

That wastes and withers there.

He understood