My Conversations with Killers: The Underprivileged and Incarcerated

I spent most of 2007 and 2008 working as a psychologist-intern at Chicago-area maximum security prisons. I was also pregnant.

The smells of sweat, urine and feces only made me throw up once the whole time, but the prison cornbread made up for that episode, (pure pregnancy craving gold!).

I waddled the musty wings of Stateville Correctional Center up until the night I gave birth. And that was only the beginning of the unsettling juxtapositions I encountered that year.

Have you ever had a man who murdered a dozen people refer to you as ma’am and offer to let you sit in his more-comfortable chair? Have you ever had a nightmare about gun shots blasting through your back while you are asleep in post-epidural relaxation? I have done both these things.

A lot of my job as a psych intern was checking boxes; asking routine suicide assessment questions with detoxing and post-traumatic offenders. However, real conversations happened too; individual therapy sessions where men made nonchalant comments about being shot at while watching TV in their own homes, or about being held under water by an uncle or set on fire by an enemy. Those happened. Group therapy sessions where long timers acknowledged life was better for them inside the walls of prison because they stopped having to look over their shoulder or feel they had something to prove? Those happened, too.

Over the course of a year, this white girl from Wisconsin shamelessly picked the brains of the men at Stateville. I administered complex psychological evaluations on twice the number of offenders required of me, and asked the men invasive questions until they looked at me sideways and feigned exhaustion. I scoured Ebsco, and quoted research in my write-ups. My supervisor looked at me strangely and slowly remarking, “I’ve never… seen anyone… do that before… Hmmm?”

I simply wanted answers. I felt we needed to know why people make their choices before we can even begin to help change them.

I wanted to know about the role of experiences, and family support, and innate personality, about gang affiliations, and relationships/parenting and drug use choices. I wanted to know about how larger culture, racism, and the micorchosm of the southside affected their senses of restriction, hope, adequacy, or powerlessness. And did this lead them to where they are today?? Did this guy have psychopathic traits because he was hardened by neglect and abuse, and then formed an adaptive survival mechanism? Or was he born looking at people as objects? Did that guy strangle his girlfriend because he had an organic difficulty with impulse control and sociopathy, or were there also some post-traumatic emotional dynamics? Did drug use play a role in the behavior, or did the behavior lead to the drug use? Or both? And were the drugs because of traumas or genes? Or both?

So. Many. Variables.

When I asked these mostly southside Chicagoans, with wide eyes and genuine curiosity, “Why didn’t you chose not to join a gang? Then I’d sarcastically think to myself: I mean, my DARE instructor told me that you should just not join in the first place. That easy. Duh. I mean go to college instead.

They’d explain what I would later hear again in an episode of This American Life: Just existing and breathing air on a certain side of the street means you are in a gang and there is no hiding under the radar or getting the target off your back. You better get your hands on a gun and not walk alone if you know what’s good for you.

Oh. I scratched my head. So you’re telling me, the problem is bigger than telling kids to go to college and offering assistance to single mothers? How did the “street” culture get that way in the first place?

You mean to tell me all of my simplistic, easy-answer world views have been wrong?? THE D.A.R.E. PROGRAM LIED TO ME!!

And then comes the larger conversation that no one wants to have… it is the one about how when we take a bunch of people and remove understanding and respect, and then add a bunch of oppression and hopelessness, we end up with “cultural” defense mechanisms.

If an individual is told he is a piece of shit his whole life – but by some miracle he gets a scholarship to Yale – the likely outcome is that he will FAIL out of Yale due to the larger psychological expectations of inadequacy. And then he might find a different way to momentarily feel powerful and adequate, even if it is at the risk of his own life. (Says research. And another This American Life episode.) Now. Apply that to a whole culture or geography.

I went back to Stateville, part-time, a month after I gave birth. Every three hours, I sat in a storage closet with two suction cups attached to my nipples trying to absorb myself in the regurgitated Buddhism of Eckhart Tolle in paperback. More unsettling juxtopositions. On the one hand, there were the childhoods of the men in Stateville. And on the other, the life that my kid was going to have. My kid’s mom was pumping breast milk and pondering detachment-from-ego; MY kid was cradled in his gandmother’s arms on a safe and quiet park bench; birds chirped in the background of my reverie.

I thought about how my fat, healthy, white-skinned boy was born with two healthy parents in this crazy north Chicago suburb where the moms walked around obsessing about BPA and Baby Einstein. The pediatrician, a Notre Dame alum, gently nudged Ronnies massive thigh during his eight week checkup, “This kid is going to be fighting Irish someday.” My kid was already pegged for college by near-strangers.

Back in the the prison closet, I thought about the offender who I just met, curled up in a ball on the infirmary floor. He was not detoxing. He was stone-sober. But there he was, terrified for his life. The nurse had come toward him with a needle and he had flashed-back to the time he was stabbed nearly to death with a pocket knife… when he was seven… by his ten year old neighbor… while his mom was at work… his dad was already dead. I bet no one tickled his leg and teased about what college he was going to attend.

Even Medela knew it was wrong, and let me know it through a steady rhythm of disapproving noises: Nua Nooo, Nua noo, Nua nooo.

I have pondered my experience being pregnant in a prison because I have concluded, through dozens of evaluations and conversations with murderers, the following:

I am not that different from them. Are any of us?

If he were born to the exact same circumstances in the exact same place in the exact same time in history… would my kid have someday ended up on the other side of the bars? [Note: The answer is a resounding hell yes. My child is a person with needs for adequacy and belonging and power and respect and hope, just the same as anyone else.]

My uncomfortably simple question now is this: If we sat down with the same curiosity toward the school shooters and the terrorists and the drug-lords and all the others who are destroying our world, would we come to the same conclusion? Are the cultures of oppression and abuse and powerlessness and belittling and disconnection and blind eyes and deaf ears, breeding sociopathy? In a different place and time – where we haven’t removed respect and understanding in favor of hopelessness and oppression – would many of the exact same people be acting very differently?

Just something to think about.

Angelica Shiels is a licensed clinical psychologist and blogger at On the Yellow Couch. She lives in Maryland with her husband and three boys. Join real conversations about parenting, relationships, and psychology on "Facebook:http://facebook.com/ontheyellowcouch and Twitter.