Aggression, continued

I've been thinking more about aggression lately as you may have noticed from the previous blog. For the last several months, I've been facilitating Aggression Control therapeutic groups at the prisons. The curriculum I was given to work with was bare bones at best and while it all makes sense on paper, explaining these concepts to these guys is a real challenge. I add my own material and make it as alive and relevant as possible. Can you imagine walking into a room of about 8 to 10 violent offenders and telling them they have choices? My first group rule is ALWAYS that the therapist (me) stays safe. Then they have to promise not to hurt each other.

I would say that most people I know, in the Free World, are not aggressive types. Yes, they may become verbally aggressive at times but how many of you get in fist fights on a regular basis? But take the population with which I work. Some of these guys were born into aggressive households, been physically (and otherwise abused), been removed and placed into foster care and then continued to be abused or fight back until they were placed in TYC. That's when they really learned to fight just to stay alive.

There is one inmate who had a background similar to this and then killed a man while under the influence of narcotics. He has no recollection of the murder. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison. He was 17 at the time. When he entered TDCJ, at 17, someone tried to rape him. He knew that if he allowed himself to be raped by this one person, he would be the target of many more assaults. So he killed that person, too. And he got more years added on to his sentence. But he was not the victim of any further attempts at sexual assault. When I met this man, who is now in his early 30s about a year ago, he was handcuffed and shackled, being dragged into a solitary cell and about to be gassed for becoming violent with security guard. I've worked with him for about a year now, both individually and in group therapy. I've witnessed the bravado, the fears, and the vulnerability of a man who was never allowed to be a boy. He has come such a long way, he now uses humor instead of threats of aggression. He's learned that not everyone is a physical threat to him. But make no mistake, in prison, these guys never know when the next attack is coming. He "graduated" from group therapy a few weeks ago and credited me with the changes he's made. And when I reminded him that he is the one who did the work, I think he really believed it. But despite all the work he's done, despite the changes in behavior and attitude, this young man will probably still spend at least 15 more years in prison. Think of all he will have missed. High school, dating, the first job, marriage, children, a home of his own, friendships and relationships. He doesn't engage in self-pity and I, for the most part, don't pity him either. But I have to wonder, what are we doing here?

We allow children to be brought up in aggressive homes, they watch aggressive television and movies, play bloody video games, and then when they act aggressively we punish them by putting them into prisons where they must use aggression to stay alive or at least stay unmolested.

Well, I do my little part. I teach the principles of assertiveness rather than aggression. I teach long-term consequences and payoffs. We do role plays and analyze previous situations they've encountered. I tell them the only appropriate time to use aggression is when either they or someone they care about is being threatened. That part they get. I'm not teaching pacifism here.

Sometimes it irritates me when I hear people talking about the inmates as an us/them situation. As if only monsters would behave aggressively; surely civilized people would never do these things. Now don't get me wrong, I always teach choice. Sometimes our choices are rather limited but we do have them. And even being brought up in a terrible home and foster care and everything else does NOT give anyone an excuse to be violent toward another person. And there are plenty of inmates in prison who did have good homes and all advantages and still made terrible choices. I'm just saying, can't we look at these problems as affecting all of us? An aggressive society costs us so much in terms of money spent housing inmates, the legal processes, thefts, injuries to victims, and so on. And it continues to cost one young man who has been in prison for 17 years and has no chance of leaving anytime in the near future.

What are you doing to create a more peaceful world?