12. The Law of Man
By the time I finished Elementary School, I had been victimized so often by rough violent boys for being a sissy that rumors about our Junior High being run very strictly were encouraging to me: the bullies couldn't get away with attacking me or tormenting me if the school ran a "tight ship" with a lot of law and order. I hated it when school was an animal house where undisciplined macho brats could do anything they wanted, and I knew I was a good boy who disciplined myself and didn't cause trouble, so if the teachers kept order, I'd be safe from either teacher or troublemaker. Or so I thought before I got there.
Some of that thinking was accurate. I didn't have many hassles with the other Junior High boys at that school, except occasionally off campus on my way home; the atmosphere was more serious, with the classrooms places of studious concentration; and those teachers who got to know me saw me as a good student and a civilized kid. They gave me the respect which my fragile dignity and intense self-control obviously cried out for.
The problem was, I was answerable (as we all were) to any teacher patrolling the hallway as we walked silently single-file to our next class or lined up in the lunchroom to eat, and eventually, inevitably, I was accused point-blank of breaking some minor rule like talking in the halls or drinking from a water fountain after the bell rang, and neither my outraged self-righteous denial of guilt nor my burning humiliation at being treated like one of those troublemakers, not even my excellent record as one of the good guys protected me from the relentless teeth of the school's justice system. In fact, all my defensive dignity got me was the additional allegation of talking back disrespectfully.
I began to reevaluate the idea of "law and order", of protecting the good guys from the bad guys and stopping the bad guys from running amok. Obviously the people in charge of maintaining the discipline could be just plain wrong or actually bad themselves, so who was going to discipline them and protect everyone from their running amok? If they in turn have someone over them, what if that person or persons are bad or wrong about something? And if there's something over their heads, who...
By the time our family had moved to Los Alamos, exposing me to a very different Junior High where the animal house mentality reigned, I was no longer so certain of wanting adult protection even when the boys threw my underwear in the toilet during gym class; I had begun to have some serious doubts about the sanity of the adult world about then. If I could see that the basic premise behind the "law and order" scheme of things was flawed, why was it still being used as if it were valid? Oh, I still believed in culpability and guilt and blame, I thought the bad should get caught and punished, but the first order of business was obviously to protect the good from danger, and if the good were endangered by the system designed to catch and punish the bad, then the system itself, by definition, became part of the badness which must be restrained and remonstrated.
By the time I entered High School I had rejected the notion of setting human beings over others with disciplinary authority, because of this tendency for throwing the proverbial baby out with (or sometimes instead of) the proverbial bath water, and I started to consider that the world was not necessarily even being run, however incompetently, by the good people at all, but perhaps by people who just happened to have successfully sought power.
But every time I thought about that for too long, I'd feel that dreamy terror like when you're having one of those nightmares where you're being chased and your legs won't move when you try to run away...
* * *
The laws of nature enforce themselves; they are universal truths which, if understood, can be used to foresee the outcome of actions or situations, and to fail to take such laws into account brings unintended and usually destructive results. In some instances, knowledge of such a law is so central to our survival that evolutionary process has built it into us: the law of gravity, for example, has registered in us as an inborn, instinctive fear of falling which keeps even tiny babies wary of sheel vertical dropoffs. In other cases, the applicable law of nature may require our scientific analysis to determine its clauses and enable us to use the new knowledge to our advantage.
The law of man originated in the primordial study of these truths and the attempt to conclude proper human behaviors based on their foreseeable outcome. Punishment was also originally rooted in practical reasoning: if you broke the law and fraternized with the lepers, you, too, would be declared unclean and unwelcome in the community.
Since early studies of natural cause-and-effect were mingled with superstition, rumor, and massive doses of unproven, untested hypotheses, many of the laws of man did not accurately reflect the natural laws. This probably led many folks to question their validity. But as patriarchal concepts of behavior modification spread, the justifying of human law became less a matter of explaining the reasoning behind it and more one of effectively punishing the offender. Society was soon composed mainly of people who had grown up deprived of explanation and consent, thinking that the reason for obeying a law was obedience itself. It was wrong to resist the will of the authorities because they were the authorities; you were bad if you broke their laws. Simultaneously, a minority of resentful rebels evolved as a permanent social fixture, these being the ones who not only questioned the wisdom of this body of unreasoning law, but finally came to dismiss the notion that obedience was in and of itself a virtue. Cynically dismissing morality entirely or idealistically redefining ethical behavior according to their own concepts of reality, these disbelievers restated the reasoning bluntly: one obeys irrational laws, if one does so, out of fear of being punished by the authorities.
And, in order for the patriarchal authorities to inspire that fear, punishment had to be painful, and it had to really follow on the heels of the offense as if it were the natural outcome of the action.
The laws of man required the hand of man to enforce them, to catch the offender and administer the artificially undesirable outcome of his or her behavior.
Man had usurped nature; man was playing God. And the primitive understanding of the real outcome of human activities got blurrier and blurrier.
* * *
Ask any legislator, and you'll be told that it is much, much easier to introduce and pass a new law than it is to remove an old one from the books. Once a law has become part of the Law, it no longer receives the attention of the lawmakers, it is not often the subject of constant reevalution and debate. Instead, it becomes part of the body of what lawmakers consider the Solution to problems.
When a problem is brought to their attention, they look first, and almost exclusively, at what unregulated areas of human conduct might be causing the problem. If the behavior seems to be a human coping mechanism for dealing with already existing laws and their effects, the coping mechanisms are deemed inappropriate, not the laws they are designed to cope with. Carried to its logical extreme, this approach would arbitrarily regulate every aspect of human life, removing the aspect of uncertainty (choice), turning each of us into useless automatons whose programming would reflect no pattern or overall functional purpose at all. Fortunately for lovers of chaos, it is not necessary to legally regulate our every activity (and monitor and punish us accordingly) to achieve this end, since our economic system plays such a complementary role, but the system of laws touches us pervasively on a psychological level by being so blatant about removing the aspect of consent or choice in the matter.
It's noisy lessons are these: you have to obey the will of the authorities even if you don't understand their line of thought; and you can't understand it anyway, it makes no sense to you, so these must be affairs that are beyond your meager comprehension.
The laws of man can be summarized like natural laws, in terms of their predictable outcome: "Thou shalt be irresponsible."
* * *
The masculinized man in today's sexist society careens through life in a nearly constant state of having his strings pulled and his buttons pushed, powerless over his own life even as he is encouraged to prove his manly ability to assume power over others. Dehumanized as a child to the degree necessary to deal remorselessly (literally, guiltlessly) with others in true masculinized style, his crippled emotional interior self is incapable of soothing himself, loving himself, nurturing himself, or otherwise validating his own worthwhileness and certifying himself as okay by his own codes of values and standards of okayness. Instead, his ego must be fed by his achievement of clearly masculine goals of domination and possession, winning, overcoming an adversary.
If he were in a position to listen to the voices of his emotions and analyze them as sensory data about what life is all about, where lies happiness, and so forth, he could also choose a meaningful adversary upon which to turn all that towering rage; the fury that comes from the treatment to which he is exposed is not wicked, or distinctively male, either.
Fury's chronically masculine misapplication is due to his blindness and inability to pick a worthwhile target, and his dehumanized willingness to strike out uncertainly without worrying about accidentally hurting the wrong party. Compared with similarly infuriated women, he will behave with much more aggression, since she will wait in frustration until more certain of where to strike, and so his personality will be interpreted as more inherently hot- tempered; his anger will show. Hers (legitimately her own, however rarely visible) becomes labeled a masculine trait when it does make its appearance, which separates male and female behavior through sexist exaggeration and definition, while attributing anger to masculinity instead of legitimately infuriating conditions.
Tightly channeled into patriarchally desirable achievement according to the rules of competition in jobs and promotions, etc., these frustration-fueled tendencies are burnt out on the treadmill, fueling the system; discharged in patriarchally acceptable channels such as competitive sports, undisciplined hell-raising, wanton destructiveness not of some other man's property, or even the moderate and discreet use of brute force, these energies are burnt out in ways tolerable to the system; but if he cuts loose on a rampage against persons or their property, he runs the risk of arrest, conviction and punishment.
And, of course, the man least enchanted with his life is least likely to blow his anger in socially acceptable patterns, just as the man most dehumanized and least within reach of those patterns is likely to be the least enchanted with his life, and is most likely question those patterns when angriest and least able to change anything due to lack of power. And feel helpless and powerless (and feminized) as he begins to see the chaos as it truly is. And become angrier.
And when in masculine form he strikes out uncertainly, he will most likely fall prey to the enforcement system of the law of man.
* * *
If we had a magic spell which would make halos appear over the peaceful and loving people of the world and cause the vicious and hateful to sprout horns, law enforcement officers would not only be a lot easier to pick, eliminating the problem of vicious and hateful people in uniform, but would also themselves have a much easier time of doing their own job.
Even restricting ourselves to the least officious and "power-tripping" of police officers and their ilk, and studying the job itself as properly performed with respect for citizens, we can't eliminate the dynamic of paternalistic suspicion. Big Brother is watching you, at least now and then as he casts his official eye on you, to see if you are breaking any laws. If this were not the case, he would not be doing his job. The laws of man do not enforce themselves, so it is necessary for the enforcers to identify infraction and fracturer and tie them to the process of punishment. Otherwise, you might be getting away with something. The presence of them there in uniform and watching you is a reminder, in case you might be forgetting: "there are things you will not be permitted to do, and we suspect some of you will try; be scared of us, what we represent, obey the law or you will be punished; we don't know you to be good; we do not trust you."
When an occasion causes the police officer to approach you with more personalized suspicion that you, in particular, might be doing something wrong, the aura of suspicion and the potential for being judged by another person become unmistakable. At this moment, regardless of how conscientious the police officer may be, or how obviously safe from any prolonged suspicion you may be, the bald fact of the matter is that if, in the opinion of this official, you ought to be arrested and cuffed and hauled away, or roughly handled to discourage your potential for dangerous behavior, or even shot for representing an immediate threat to his or her life, that is what is probably going to happen. At no time, no matter how terrified you are, or how hostile and vicious the behavior of the police officer, are you really socially empowered to restrain, wrestle with, escape from, or kill a police officer to defend yourself against such behavior. In theory, of course, the same laws apply to regulate the behavior of officers of the law, with a few exceptions here and there, but in practice you run an extremely high risk of immediate physical and later legal damage to react to a belligerent police officer as if to another citizen behaving the same way.
The officer is not a judge, by which I do not mean to state that you are safe from punishment at the hands of a police officer, but rather that the arresting officer is officially not concerned with the reasons for your illegal bevavior except as evidence to be brought into the courtroom. The maxim that you are innocent until proven guilty does not apply here, for even if the officer is kindly and fully sympathetic and is willing to grant legitimate motives for your illegal behavior, that opinion is not legally official until the judge or jury make it so, and you are still going to be arrested and perhaps handcuffed, and put in jail without any official interest in your side of the story.
* * *
Once I changed clothes before going out and forgot to transfer my wallet, and drove off without it. I was trying to find an obscurely marked driveway on a busy street, and shot by it twice. On the third pass, I spotted it directly in front of me and jammed on the brakes. The driver behind me did likewise, but the person behind him, caught off guard, collided with him. I pulled over and apologized for precipitating the incident, and was still talking with the two drivers when the police showed up. Since my car was not even involved in the accident, I didn't figure on being in any trouble...until I came up empty-handed when asked for a driver's license. Or some form of I.D. Oops...
I was arrested and patted down, and placed in the back of the patrol car. There is a steel cage in them which prevents prisoners from endangering the officers in the front seat. At the jail, a large electrically-operated gate slid open for a moment and the car was driven in. We entered the first door, and once that was relocked, I was again patted down. The arresting officers relayed information to the desk clerks, who typed it up. A second door was unlocked, and I was brought in to a room where a police officer took each hand in turn, rolled it across an ink pad, then rolled the print off each finger onto the fingerprint card. Then I was placed in front of a camera with a numbered chalk board under my chin and photographed head on and from the side.
They kept asking me to recite name, date of birth, and home address, and the make and model of my car (which I did, and kept volunteering my social security number, driver's license number, telephone number, and cheerful promises that I wasn't on the most wanted list or anything).
Eventually, their computer was going to burp and verify that a current driver's license really had been issued in my name, and that I wasn't wanted for anything, but the process took awhile; and meanwhile, they apparently couldn't just take my word for it and translate it all into a ticket and send me home. I was asked if I could raise bail to get out, but, unfortunately, I had neither money nor collateral at that time. So...
I was taken to a shower stall, told to strip, and was squirted with this harsh-smelling jelly stuff (for lice, he told me) and stood under the (cold) water and rinsed off. I was handed a towel and a set of green jail clothes which looked sort of like what nurses and orderlies wear in the operating room of a hospital, those loose-fitting pullover drawstring things. From there I was led to a cell to spend the night.
The cell was a small ugly room with metal trays welded to the walls, on which lay mats about one inch thick. That was bed. My cell had four of them, two on a side. There was also a toilet. That was it, except for the bars and the door. Everything was metal except the bed mat, the concrete floor, and the blanket they furnished me. No pillow.
Fortunately, the paperwork finally cleared, and they wrote me out a ticket for driving without a license, and let me call someone to come pick me up and take me home.
* * *
"With its high, slate gray, sand blasted walls, lush, well cared for lawns, and modern architecture, the building in question could have been any number of distinguished, dignified, ordinary places of business. Nothing could have been further from the truth...
The first detention cell, immediately in front of the sally port was packed tight with new arrivals: bums, burglars, winos, pimps, armed robbers, traffic violators, murderers, drug addicts, homosexuals, shop lifters, child molesters, dope dealers, rapists, purse snatchers, forgers, muggers, gamblers, speed freaks, pick pockets, mental patients, and frightened kids who shouldn't have been there in the first place, stuffed tightly together from all walks of life.
There was hardly room to move. All day, five days a week prisoners were gathered from the various substations throughout the Los Angeles area and shuttled to the County Jail by bus, like cattle, and during their three to five day stay at the substations not one had been given the opportunity to wash his body or brush his teeth...[the] substations...teemed with roaches, lice, and most smelled like a toilet would that hadn't been flushed for months...
One partial, sometimes whole blanket was given out per prisoner which was sometimes stained with vomit, dried blood, urine, and even on some occasions sperm. Now the latest load of prisoners stood uncomfortably squeezed in a cell designed for twenty but accomodating three and occasionally four and five times that number -- it all depended on how the cop felt about it --, shoes and socks removed, belts around their necks, all belongings and personal property on the floor, waiting for the ritual [of post-arraignment, pre-trial procedure] to begin."
-- Carl Shaw, from The Inside - The Outside -and
Some in Between (used by permission)
* * *
All this may be true, you may be thinking, but sooner or later, you get the chance to clear your name, to appear in court and confront the charges and your accusers; and even if it is quite possible to get snagged by the impersonal machinery of the system, the legal procedure of the courtroom is a meticulously logical and methodical approach, and represents the pinnacle of civilized society...right?
"The Myth Masters are able to penetrate their victims' minds/imaginations only by seeing to it that their deceptive myths are acted out over and over again in performances that draw the participants into emotional complicity. Such re-enactment trains both victims and victimizers to perform uncritically their preordained roles. Thus the psyches of the performers are conditioned so that they become carriers and perpetrators of patriarchal myth. In giving the myth reality by acting it out, the participants become re-producers and 'living proof' of the deceptive myths...
In the Sado-Ritual we find, first, an obsession with purity...Second, there is a total erasure of responsibility for the atrocities performed through such rituals. Those doing the destruction commonly have recourse to the idea that they are acting 'under orders', or following tradition (serving a Higher Order). This allows the self as role-carrier to commit acts which the personal/private self would find frightening or evil...[and also] we find compulsive orderliness, obsessive repetitiveness, and fixation upon minute details, which divert attention from the horror...legitimation...is an extension of the primordial gynocidal acts."
-- Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology 1
"Concrete examples of evidence dilemmas crop up in regard to many phenomena of fringe science. For instance, ESP often seems to manifest itself outside of the laboratory, but when brought into the laboratory, it vanishes mysteriously. The standard scientific explanation...is that ESP is a nonreal phenomenon...The believers in ESP insinuate that what is wrong is not their ideas, but the belief system of science. This is a pretty grandiose claim, and unless there is overwhelming evidence for it, one should be skeptical of it. But then here we are again, talking about 'overwhelming evidence' as if everyone agreed on what that means!
...My feeling is that the process by which we decide what is valid or what is true is an art; and that it relies as deeply on a sense of beauty and simplicity as it does on rock-solid principles of logic or reasoning or anything else which can be objectively formalized. I am not saying...truth is a chimera...I am saying...truth is too elusive for any human or any collection of humans ever to attain fully."
-- Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach
2
Vulnerability is unacceptable to the masculinized mind. The initial process of dehumanization was designed to bypass the vulnerability men felt in dealing with women as people, that is, not to deal with it, but to avoid dealing with it. The portion of the self from which the masculinized are alienated is that which accepts and forgives error, imperfection, weakness, fallibility, and thus enables the self to love unconditionally rather than only in response to total achievement of standards of reliability and okayness.
Therefore, it would not do for men to be uncertain, to doubt and question as if fallible, so in every aspect of life where accurate knowledge of truth is necessary, man must be able to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt before taking action. Otherwise, there might be error; there might be guilt; and for that there is no excuse or forgiveness.
In the opinion of the patriarchal state, some men do make such mistakes, at which point they must be divested of their manhood, since men must be perfect; furthermore, those mistakes must result in painfully undesirable punishment or they would be getting away with something. Part of being perfect is the relentless enforcement of law; on the heels of offense must come retaliation, both because the offense was a bad act and because punishment is required to make of it a bad act.
But the first order of business is to determine the truth in the matter, to prove beyond the shadow of a ("reasonable") doubt that the men who administer this justice are not themselves in error. After all, once the door is opened to the possibility of one (alleged) man failing to be perfect, it is not so easy to guarantee on the basis of manhood that the rest are immune. And there is no rational way out of the spiral of accountability and fallibility I discussed at the beginning of this chapter. If the accused man can be in error, so can the accusing authorities, and the monitors of the accusers of men, and so on. Proof of anything beyond the shadow of a doubt (or proof of the "reasonableness" if the standard is "beyond a reasonable doubt") does not exist among fallible human beings.
Unless one believes in the magic of ritual and ceremony. Perhaps if we chant a spell or two and follow the recipe of procedure, faithfully trusting that the results will be accurate without requiring our understanding, we can determine the truth. Check the sky for circumstantial comets, call an expert to interpret the tea leaves, see if the witch will float. Approach the bench. Raise your right hand. Place your left hand on the Bible. Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God? Say "I do."
The one behind the big desk wearing the black robe is the judge, who will be in charge. Sometimes the judge will decide if you should be punished; sometimes a group of people called the jury over there in those velvet chairs will decide by arguing until they all agree and vote the same way about it. Nervous? Don't worry, they aren't going to talk to you very much, or listen to you very much, either, for that matter. In fact, you may not even have to talk at all, if the lawyers don't call you to the stand.
Lawyers? Well, that one over there is going to try to convince everyone you did something bad and should be punished. He isn't mad at you or anything, nor does he necessarily think you did what you are accused of doing, for that matter. It is his job to interpret things around so as to make it sound as bad as possible for you. The one sitting next to you is your own (equally uninvolved) counsel. He or she is going to try to make it sound like the first lawyer doesn't know what he's talking about.
Your lawyer may try to reinterpret and justify what you did so that it is no longer illegal, she may try to argue that you didn't do what you are accused of doing, or she may try to show that the first lawyer filed brief B-227 Form A incorrectly and get your case thrown out of court, which means that (regardless of truth or guilt or legality) your side won and you don't have to get punished. It's called the adversary system, which is very patriarchal, and what it means is that no one really cares about understanding what happened, and why, so much as they are letting the lawyers fight over you. If the prosecutor beats the defense, you get punished, but if the defense beats the prosecutor, you get to go free.
Technically, you can still fight the prosecutor yourself for your freedom, if you don't particularly like the feminized state of having so little to do with your own legal fate, at least in some cases you can, but they don't like it when you do that. The rules of the game are very complicated and arbitrary (in fact, look at what the word "arbitration" refers to!), and most prosecutors fear that you could get off the hook by appealing on the grounds that the laws governing courtroom procedure are over your head. Maybe so: do you know how to subpoena a witness? Or recite the correct magic phrases to properly introduce a line of thought, or a piece of evidence?
One could heretically declare that the laws must be comprehensible to the average person to whom they apply, but in the power structure you are not likely to find much sympathy anywhere that counts. The politician legislators who make laws are quite often lawyers, the judges who preside over courtrooms are usually lawyers, and the superior judges who hear appeals and even interpret laws (like the Constitution and the various amendments that theoretically protect your freedoms) are almost universally lawyers. And law is an "old boys' network" dominated by patriarchal men.
They like taking care of you and others who need their protection, all you helpless people who cannot take care of yourselves, who cannot know where your own best interests lie. They like being needed. They like it enough to make sure. You will need them to guide you through the labyrinth they designed.
Come forward, then. Since error is unforgivable, you must be punished if you are guilty (and you will be declared to be guilty, if not remorseful, if you are "proven" to have violated the law of man), but first you will be allowed your chance to respond to charges.
It is time to hear your side of the story.
* * *
If you were totally free, you could do anything you wanted, but you would also be totally responsible for your actions, as the result of those actions affects you. Actually, that is the way things are anyway, once you scrape through the layers of social illusion, but those illusions are well-maintained. At any rate, when you act so as to bring forth undesirable results, the natural emotional response is guilt, which, like all emotions, serves an information-bearing, functional purpose.
Guilt tells you that in order to correctly hold a high opinion of yourself, you have to modify your conduct, or reassess your code of ethics, or reevaluate your sense of priorities...an interior change is indicated in order to avoid bringing forth those undesirable results again. It is unnatural to enjoy engaging in behavior that brings unpleasant outcomes, this is a law of nature that exists for a hopefully obvious reason: what if this were not so? And the laws of nature enforce themselves.
Any given law of man either does or does not accurately reflect this law of nature depending at times upon the circumstances surrounding the act that violates it, so the actual natural morality is not a static relationship of the legality.
And, in conjunction with the offender's comprehension of what happened, this causes the offender to either feel guilty or not, to believe the illegal act to have been wrong or okay, and, if wrong, blameable or blamelessly accidental due to circumstances.
If guilty, ashamed, remorseful, the offender is being taught a lesson from within, behavior receives a prod towards modification at the hands of nature, and this painful state of humiliation goes away only after the modification and reassessment has occurred, after which the self forgives, accepts, and loves once again; the high opinion of self returns and rehabilitation is complete.
Or, at least, it would work that way except that the system intervenes and externalizes punishment, which alleviates the guilt without requiring any such internal assessments. Instead, the offender feels that society has gotten even and that the debts have been properly cancelled. As if two wrongs make a right, or righteousness and iniquity were like unto debits and credits in a bank book, the reassuring knowledge that no one got away with anything apparently un-commits the crime enough to soothe the conscience.
Meanwhile, if not guilty, apologetic, or otherwise in the position of regretting the action taken, the offender can not be made to feel guilty by being declared so, although the possibility exists for modifying the behavior by instilling fear of the consequences; this can even cause the offender to hold a regretful opinion of these behavioral patterns in light of the trouble it has caused: "Look what I've gotten myself into now". But the possibility of infuriating the guiltless victim and encouraging more antisocial behavior also exists. Here the offender may feel the need to even the score, to get even, just as society feels the need to get even with its criminals. Why not? Those are the values that we are taught, after all, by the very existence of the punishment system: vengeance is mine, sayeth patriarchal man.
If the offender did not, in fact, even commit the crime, that is the most predictable emotional reaction for the victim (what other term can be accurately used?), who can hardly be expected to forgive the mistake of the merciless system. The only question is who or what the victim will identify as the culprit (the judge? the government? the foundations of patriarchy? the despicable human race?) and what form the vengeance will take.
Returning to those who might cynically learn to refrain from behavior they see nothing wrong with out of fear of the systematized consequences, we can see that if the punishment took the proper form, it might contribute to lowering the crime rate.
But the proper form is most definitely not to send the cynical to a ghetto of the like-minded, to learn how not to get caught, to be exposed to the thinking of other people that rejected the wrongness of other crimes, to be isolated from the non-criminals' peer pressure to obey laws, to be psychologically and socially defined as a person who breaks laws, and to be removed from any opportunity to demonstrate modified behavior or a willingness to conform in return for safety from further punishment.
One might as wisely place all of one's combustible material in one dry room in order to prevent fires.
* * *
Men may not err. Prisons, therefore, are set up to divest prisioners of their manhood. Most criminals, victims of the punishment side of the reward-and-punishment equation, are male: because of our gender's experiences, dating back to childhood, men learn to seek notice and approval by actively doing, not passively being, and to fear active disapproval less. Being male makes disapproval so hard to avoid, that, as boys, we men became more insensitized to it than women generally are.
Therefore the prisons must make the punishment severe enough to register upon males accustomed to intermittent punishment as one of the facts of life, and at the same time invalidate their claims to being men. By blending the two, prisons manage to shred gender identity and then savage the feminized dehumanized results with grafted misogyny that insists they nevertheless try to prove their masculinity anyway. It is no accident that the rate of buggery (forcible homosexual sodomy-rape) is so prevalent in prisons despite its relative preventability, and that it is so well publicized. The prison says to the (former) man, "You are a pussy, a cunt, you have no power to fight back, and now we're gonna fuck you." To the patriarchal masculinized man, nothing is likely to be more dehumanizing. His gender identity is his primary identity, and evolves from being on the other side of the subject- object "haterosexuality".
With the possible exceptions of military experience or psychiatric hospitalization, I can't think of any experiences as antithetical to the ideal of an objective right and wrong in dealing with human beings than that of being an imprisoned criminal in a penetentiary. If, despite your crime, you arrive in prison with the strange notion that a human being should be exposed to at least some minimum consideration, and no more than a certain maximum of cruelty, by other human, you are in for a bit of culture shock.
The prison teaches you that if you are in a position too powerful to be held accountable by those you do it to, you may steal, rape, torture, mutilate, totally ignore, or do anything else possible to imagination and physical reality and do so right there under the concentrated scrutiny of the system that punishes wrongdoers. What is wrong, apparently, is stealing from, killing, raping, torturing, mutilating, or ignoring the wrong people; morality is subjective, then; it's not the deed, it's who you do it to. The only true crime is being punishably weak.
The internally justified high opinion of self, the self-image, will be torn down, if possible, in the prison's intentional lesson in humiliation, so that everything you might once have considered a birthright now becomes redefined as a privilege granted by the powerful; freedom is replaced by license, and responsibility by vulnerability, so that those with the ability to act are defined as having the final word on how to exercise that ability.
Theoretically, this process is supposed to instill gratitude in the ungrateful for the privileges society once granted them, and may once again if they're lucky. In patriarchal opinion, criminals must be people who think much too highly of themselves and do not know their place. The prison is therefore designed to bring their lofty self- images down into the mud of humiliation so that they will feel bad about themselves and be good from then on...???
In only very recent times have our studies of self-concept and antisocial behavior caused us to severely question these concepts, and so far the result has been a wishy-washy liberalism which leaves the prisons and their operational patterns intact, but hesitates to find accused people guilty, paroles prisoners much sooner, and so forth, which keeps more of the criminals our patriarchy has so effectively produced out in the world where they can apply the lessons they have been taught (even more recently, there is a conservative swing back to "law and order", i.e., a call for sentencing more people to prisons and for longer periods of time).
What we have learned, though, is that individuals with low self-images tend to project their awful opinions of themselves into their images of what it means to be a human being. Apparently, whatsoever we do unto our prisoners to teach them what they deserve, they learn to accept as perfectly legitimate ways of relating to all human beings.
Prisons are good colleges if you want to train psychopaths.
* * *
Since any genuinely wrong action brings undesirable results that have an effect (however indirectly) on its perpetrator, and naturally brings personal guilt as well, an ongoing tendency to behave in this manner and fail to modify this conduct when forgiven and left to one's own devices indicates a significant degree of dehumanization, of which the patriarchal masculinization process is the prototype. A paradigm for dealing with this condition would have to address the person's feelings, concepts of his or her best interests, image of self and self-worth, and so on. The ideas we associate with therapy -- in other words, helping rather than punishing the person -- are the ones that must replace the dehumanizing horrors in our existing prison facilities, and they must do so in a noncoercive manner. Society may assert that if a person, in the opinion of the rest of the community, is engaging in wrong actions that distress them, that person may be required to communicate with them about it, or, in the absence of willingness to do so, to be physically confined; however, internal change cannot and should not be forced upon anyone who perceives no need to change. Even the "therapy" model of how to deal with persons who disrupt communities can lead to the most dehumanizing chambers of horror imaginable when this is forgotten or set aside, as evidenced by the realities of involuntary psychiatry imposed on "mental patients" in the psychiatric hospital (see Chapter 15).
In simplest possible terms, hatefulness is cured not by hate, but love. That is a reality-grounded statement of natural law. Punishment simply does not work. Let the law of man stand as the collected body of human wisdom, but leave law enforcement to natural law.
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