I needed to overcome a slowly growing reluctance about subject matter relating to human behavior that truly defies simplistic solutions. A bit of self-engineered license sprang to life when I added to and albered a bit of what I knew from days of yore about the wise old owl. Check it out:

There was an owl who lived in an oak,

The more it learned, the less ‘it spoke;

The less it spoke the more it learned;

Uncovered ignorance shocked and burned,

Until at last all it knew was lost to mute;

Giving only an occasional hoot,

Meaning it all is moot sayeth the hoot.

(the end)

So with that bit of thinking, I decided that what little I have learned shall not become moot by my becoming mute.

In the last few decades, many Corrections Departments across the country generated programming aimed at encouraging inmates to accept their place in the overall scheme of things in society because of their legal predicament. The prison authorities would let it be known to the inmate that it is valuable to know your place, even if that place is temporary, even though it is galling to be held in place against your will.

And in learning their place, they must first acquire the knowledge you can only gain through participating in what your defined place is about. There’s no way to learn it by standing off and looking and talking. You find that you must learn that all too often, prisons and police and legalities are the perfect illusions behind which a prosperous power structure can operate while observing quite accurately that it is above its own laws. You need to accept this beyond any need to understand this phenomenon.

New learnings such as these from the subjective standpoint can prove extremely frustrating to the individual who still has the capacity to discern rational concept of justice and fair play. It is especially difficult for the mature, thinking prisoner. Usually, the young prisoner are oblivious to the ramifications of the perpetual injustice beyond the simplistic appraisal that it is "fucked-up." They usually don’t know why or how it is "fucked-up," but they know somehow something is amiss in accord to the ideal posed in what "should be" and "could be" in the ways of law and order. But in this, when the young do eventually become enlightened, it has been shown that generally they are incapable of making hard decisions, unless those decisions are associated with immediate violence and the consequent sharp flow of adrenalin. This is the violence you see in the young. Although the old can cling to it on occasion, the young seem to wallow in it when provoked by undue stress.

By hard decisions, I refer to those decisions which govern the courses of action for remedial concerns against injustice, especially those of an appropriate nature such as working from within the system and through the parameters provided within Constitutional rights. There are avenues of redress provided at various levels of authority. Theoretically, it would appear to be a very workable system. The only problem generally encountered is that most all of these avenues are merely "rubber-stamp" processes that simply affirm the original findings regardless of any remedial concerns. This is for outside courts and inside "Rules Infraction Boards," in the prison setting.

In the middle-age group, there seems for the most part to be a sense of lethargy that takes over when concerns for injustice arise. There are always the "few" who act for the "many" in seeking justice or redress for injustice. However, usually these "few" are usually incompetent in relation to the law and the systems of enforcement. Now the issues have evolved into purely constitutional questions; nothing else seems to matter in relation to concerns of prisoners in America today.

The old-age group seem to have settled into a grumbling inaction stage where they seem to understand that no matter how much they complain, nothing will be done in their interest anyway. There is a sense of futility, but the "complaining mechanism" still functions and seems to serve as somewhat of a psychological catharsis. There is an element in each of the age group classifications that seem to function in a state bf resignation to the seeming inevitable. They have resigned themselves to their obvious fate and settle into their "place" almost gracefully.

Here again, what I focus is not all encompassing or complete in an accurate assessment. However, statistics will bear out this generalized overview, however simplistic it may appear to the uninitiated--being people who have not been imprisoned.