Scenes of Prison
15. Kentuck
W hen we moved into the new prison, I moved to a special programming unit that Bob Houston managed, but this special unit had evolved from an earlier counseling program that operated at the Men’s Reformatory, the Chemical Dependency Counseling program. This was a group counseling program for general population inmates that provided group counseling for inmates with identified dependencies on drugs and alcohol. When the new unit opened, many of the general population inmates who attended these groups at the old Reformatory moved into D-Unit and lived there. They received more intensive programming. We called these “inpatient” inmates. But the need and demand for programming for general population inmates who did not live in D-Unit did not end when D-Unit opened. They wanted programming, too, so I volunteered to take over this responsibility for general population inmates in addition to my other duties as a caseworker. I had organized and led counseling groups as a middle school counselor, so this was familiar territory for me.
The program I created and led was called the Chemical Dependency Outpatient Program. I organized and led four counseling groups, each meeting twice a week in an area away from D-Unit. Group members were inmates from general population units at the prison with a documented history of dependence on alcohol or drugs and a desire to complete a self-help counseling program. The Parole Board was instrumental in filling out the ranks of my groups by requiring attendance for those who’d like to be considered for a parole, so inmates attending these groups weren’t exactly there by their own choice.
I took great interest in these groups, and I gave a lot of thought to how I might direct the counseling process. One day, I posed a hypothetical situation to one of my groups. I asked this question: “Suppose that you’ve finished your prison sentence, and you’re free, living in your own apartment on the streets. It’s the start of a new month, and your rent is due. Your rent is past due. The first of the month has come and gone, and you were a little short, so you didn’t pay it. The landlord comes, sits down on your sofa, and tells you that he’s come for the rent, and he’s not going to leave until he gets it. How would you handle this situation?”
This question was carefully planned, and I had high hopes for this discussion.
It’s a curious word, landlord. The lord of the land, the owner of the land and the controller of the homes these inmates would someday establish once they were released. The landlord commanded payment and thereby possessed a significant portion of their income, their labor, and their time. These resources actually belonged to their landlords! Would this relationship sometimes lead to conflicting demands on their resources? Do landlords sometimes fail to fulfill their obligations to maintain a property their tenants occupy? Do landlords sometimes object to things tenants do, like damage the property or misuse it? Do tenants sometimes invite others to live with them in a property they rent and then find the landlord perturbed when this is revealed?
All these questions and tensions led me to imagine that the topic of landlords would stimulate a spirited discussion and be helpful to the young men assembled in my counseling group. I even imagined that our discussion could lead further to other unequal relationships in their lives, especially with authority figures like bosses, neighbors, parents, and inlaws.
Critical incidents from the inmates’ past lives might also be revealed, and we could even stage reenactments of these incidents where inmates in the group recreated roles from these past events. We could manipulate the roles and try on different responses. We could even practice them and rehearse them in preparation for a future encounter an inmate could be expected to face with a landlord, a parent, a boss, a family member, or any other person who could be expected to emerge and be important in an inmate’s life. Here, in this group, an inmate could practice appropriate, well-thought-out responses, and he could leave at the end of the session with an insight, a plan, and a skill he hadn't had when he arrived.
It was a wonderful plan. I was so proud of it. I had high hopes and bright expectations as I finished my question to the group and waited for the spirited discussion to begin, and one inmate spoke up right away. This immediate answer came from an older inmate everyone looked up to and called “Kentuck”, but his answer was not what I expected. Indeed, it came as a complete surprise.
Kentuck was tall and lanky with bushy blond hair and an acne-scarred face. He talked in a slow southern drawl, and nothing seemed to excite him. He’d been in prison nearly all his adult life. He committed one crime after another whenever he finished a sentence and was released. He never stayed out of prison very long. I’d put him in his mid-fifties.
“How would you handle this situation?” I asked the group.
“Kentuck” spoke up right away. “Well, I’d kill him,” he said.
My imagined discussion exploring unequal relationships began to dim. I looked around the group. Some inmates were nodding in agreement while others were as surprised as I was. Others were watching me to see how I was going to react.
“You’d kill him?” I repeated slowly, hoping to stimulate some discussion.
“O course,” he replied. “I’d haveta. It’d be self defense. An open and shut case.”
Some group members were nodding. Others were sitting up in their chairs and listening closely. No one else spoke.
“It would be an open and shut case?” I repeated, with a tone of voice that suggested disbelief.
Kentuck went on . . .
“If he said he wan’t a’goin to leave without his money, and I din’t have it, then he was obviously a’gonna kill me. He wouldn’t a said that unless he was armed, so I’d have tah act real quick like before he had a chance to draw his gun.” Kentuck made a rapid motion near his right hip as if he was drawing a gun from a holster.
Goodness! Did he really think killing the landlord was necessary, or was he hijacking the group and the day’s discussion so, he’d have an entertaining story to tell other inmates sitting at his table in the Dining Hall at dinner that night?
Probably the latter.
Oh my, I thought. What now?
I did what I could to salvage the group session. I talked about making predictions about what others are going to do based on what you might do in a similar situation. “I’d kill him, so naturally, he was about to kill me.” It was a good example of dysfunctional thinking. Using yourself as a model from which to make predictions.
It was weak. I did my best. My wonderful plans for the discussion lay in a puddle on the floor like the remains of a snowman on an unseasonably warm March afternoon. I thought of the grand Hindenburg airship collapsing in a ball of fire in 1937. I thought of Snoopy flying through the clouds on his Sopwith Camel doghouse and being shot out of the sky by the Red Baron. My wonderful plan for the day remained just that, a wonderful plan that would not be executed, at least not this day.
I was disappointed, and in future counseling sessions I avoided getting my hopes up with elaborate plans for the meetings, especially when Kentuck was going to be present.
I suspect that Kentuck was the center of attention at his dinner table that night in the Dining Hall. He had a good story to tell about demolishing my excellent plan for the group that day. No doubt his audience enjoyed the entertainment and would likely remember the tale if they ever attended one of my groups.
I last heard of Kentuck after he had been transferred to the Nebraska State Penitentiary. One day, he had been asked to drive a tractor to a location on the west side of the prison grounds near railroad tracks that passed by the prison. He never arrived. I guess they eventually found the tractor, but they never found him, and that’s the last I ever heard of him. He was older than I was by a couple of decades, and I imagine that by now he has spent his last years in a skilled nursing setting somewhere telling other residents humorous stories about his life. I imagine that one of those stories included the day he shanghaied my counseling group and showed his fellow inmates who was really running the show.
Discussion
- Have you ever had a class member shanghai a well-planned meeting and pursue an entirely different idea? How did you respond?
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