Strength. For most of history there has been a “might makes right” sense of strength. Based solely in the physical world, this perception has long left little space for any other strengths to be acknowledged, or even noticed.
During the last century, that has begun to change, though strength of mind and strength of spirit are still only seldom given their due. One place that this is most obvious is the prison environment in the United States, where strength of mind and spirit are far more important for survival than the ability to lift weights or engage in physical combat. It is often those who talk of “strength” while exhibiting the greatest weakness.
Here in Virginia, a Department of Corruption ranked among the worst in the nation, captives serve time entirely alone. There is little in the way of solidarity or community. Even among religious groups and gangs, a self-centered attitude is obvious: No one really sticks together. It is a twisted irony then that so often those affiliated with such groups speak of strength. Stranger still is a sort of deliberate aloofness to their situation.
For those who are not affiliated with a group, whatever the group, there is no illusion. You may play cards, or work out or play Dungeons & Dragons together, but you know that at the end of the day you stand alone. Nowhere is this more terribly obvious than among jailhouse lawyers and journalists, who not only tend to find themselves alone in the masses even while perpetually engaged in necessary socialization but also even further isolated by staff who target such individuals (often in blatant, hypocritical violation of laws and guaranteed rights). This is where real strength comes into play. The resilience and endurance to push through more tribulation, focused and selective, than any one person should suffer.
There are experiences that test the strength of a person’s mind and soul. Imagine suffering from chronic headaches, light and sound sensitivity, along with severe anxiety, depression and PTSD. Now as you navigate these documented struggles, as a form of targeted assault, you are forced into an environment with 80 people. That environment at a glance is clearly too small for 20 people to share. Then, to make it really fun, a too-large percentage of those people have exactly zero idea about how respect, consideration and personal space work; in fact, similar to strength, they have wildly askew understandings of these concepts. These same people surround you, screaming at their televisions, all day and into the night, for every single sporting event available. This disregard for others and lack of restraint is a clear sign of weakness, no matter the protestations about “strength,” idiot children and encouraged bad behaviors.
To further illustrate the lack of real strength, these same people are rarely rooting for a beloved team. Instead, they are yelling and screaming over the multiple bets, habitually made, on anything they might wager on. The Virginia Model of the Department of Corrections encourages such weakness, whether it is addiction to drugs, gambling, whatever, simply as a matter of policy and its archaic punitive system. The true show of strength is the anxiety-ridden individual who is in real time, almost daily, being traumatized by the environment and those in it who behave in such antisocial ways. The strength to hold on through screaming, yelling, banging and other random noise, not only from the lunatic gamblers but also others lacking any sort of social graces.
Prisons, especially dormitories, work diligently to eliminate social etiquette. This is a way to increase punishment in an extrajudicial way, divide and conquer by creating points of animosity, and inflict long-term traumas, compounding them regularly. The Virginia Model favors this approach as part of its business model, which is what the Virginia Department of Corrections (VADOC) operates under. This being “the easy way” to operate, as opposed to restorative-justice models adopted by more civilized societies, is another showing of misunderstanding strength. It takes less effort to allow such to be as it is. True strength lies in adopting less-punitive options. This would require enormous changes that the Virginia Model is in no way prepared to make. Four hundred years of habitual business on the backs of captives is a tough habit to break.
The same is easily said of the habits of those individual captives of the Virginia Model, especially when those poor habits are encouraged by the Virginia Model. Addicts are easily controlled, and creatures of habit are easy to watch and track. This is why so many of our modern means of addressing and overcoming addiction are ignored by the VDOC; that is its general weakness as an institution. True strength is not falling into the easy escapism of addiction so readily provided by the VDOC, which is another part of the Virginia Model business plan: devastating by miserable environments of harmful, abusive punishments and various escapist addictions, all by design.
Or maybe I’m entirely wrong and simply tired of persevering.
