What it's like being a woman working in a men's prison pt 2
Reflections on the First Day
After my first shift at the prison, I dashed off to my next commitment, which was bringing a 12-step meeting to the women's jail.
After the meeting, I sat in the parking lot with my sponsor, reflecting on the day.
She joked about how I went to prison in the morning, jail in the evening, and would sleep in my own bed that night. Isn't recovery amazing?
She laughed.
That night, I had much to ponder who I wanted to be, what kind of counselor I was becoming, and whether this would turn into a full-time job.
I realized I'm probably an unorthodox counselor. My vocabulary is rough, my attitude blunt. I've always been a tomboy at heart.
My main focus was teaching them what addiction truly is, how to navigate it, and find recovery.
The next morning, I learned I'd be shadowing other counselors for a few days.
I also had a lunch date with a woman who'd been a counselor at that very prison. She wanted to discuss how to manage working as a woman in a men's prison.
My first class that day revealed inattentive men, a different group from yesterday. The counselor wasn't using any workbook; he was telling stories similar to those you'd hear in a 12-step meeting.
The men seemed bored and disinterested.
In the next class with another female counselor, the same scenario unfolded. She read from the basic text of a 12-step group but offered no elaboration, just reading aloud.
It was tedious and uninspiring. This dry teaching style was definitely not how I wanted to teach.
Lunch with a Blunt Perspective
That afternoon I met with the woman who wanted to talk to me.
Right off the bat, she was very straightforward and blunt with her opinion of inmates.
She said things like, they're all scums of the earth, they're all out to take advantage of you, use you, lie to you, don't trust any of them for any reason whatsoever.
She told me what to watch for in their faces when they were touching themselves while I was teaching class.
She said they're called gunners or 38s.
They're disgusting and will take every opportunity to disrespect you.
I wondered to myself about this woman, was she being this brutal to scare me or was this really who she was?
How can you be a counselor and be an advocate for people when this is your opinion of them?
I thought about the fact I would be working with men whose crimes were the same as ones that had been perpetrated against me.
How was I going to feel about it and still do my job?
She said don't trust anyone, not even the people that you work with, and take notes, keep documentation on everything, and don't leave it laying around.
I walked away from this meeting, my head spinning, trying to discern whether this woman was just bitter or if this was really the way things are.
Disillusionment with Alabama Rehabilitation
For the rest of the week, I shadowed counselors, read manuals and handbooks, watched DVDs and videos that we had on file, and quickly became very disillusioned with rehabilitation in the state of Alabama.
I realized that the state had never really put any money into this program, and that it was mostly just recovering addicts without a whole lot of actual counseling experience working in these prisons.
As I was the same, a recovering addict, I had been to college, and what they had taught me and what I was seeing in the flesh were two different things.
Everything that I had read about rehabilitation from the 1970s forward seemed to be a very systematic approach, but here it was still very much 12-step oriented with no actual handbook of evidence-based scientific practice.
I went home that week with more questions than answers, but determined to get to the bottom of it and learn what would actually work in this environment.
I knew what I didn't want to be, a bunch of bitter people who don't care about the outcome of their efforts.
If I was truly the best counselor in the state, as my boss had claimed, I had to figure out how to make it a fact.