Read Online The Four Stages of Cruelty by Keith Hollihan - Free Book Online Page B

the stakes are high for an artist, it can be difficult to open up.”
    “What was the project?” I asked.
    He looked at me with amusement. “Are you interested in art?”
    The sudden condescension made me bristle, and I responded badly.
    “I just find it funny hearing the word ‘art’ thrown around when we’re talking about hard-core inmates.”
    He’d found me out, and he smiled now with a polite reserve. “You probably don’t think much of what we do here.”
    “What is it that you do here?” I was relieved, at some level, to be talking honestly.
    “Paint, draw, throw clay. Sometimes we expand into collage and poetry.”
    “I went to camp for that once. When I was in grade school.”
    “Exactly. You think it’s camp.”
    We were grinning at each other. I don’t know why I’d edged into mild hostility—perhaps an instinct to reestablish my bona fides as a CO. At some level I was bothered by the coddling that went on in this room, by the caring and nurturing of such unworthy beings. You had whole school systems out in the world where no one gave a shit.
    “I thought it was supposed to be therapy. Art therapy,” I said.
    “The art isn’t therapy,” he said, and got engaged again. “Not the way you think of therapy. I don’t believe art is therapeutic or even moral just because it’s art. I don’t believe it necessarily makes you a better person, whether you’re the viewer or the creator. Art is too elusive for that. Work that’s didactic or deliberately uplifting is usually crap.”
    “So why bother with it?” I didn’t mean the dismissal to be voiced so harshly, but Brother Mike was undeterred.
    “The art gives them confidence, a means of expressing themselves, sometimes for the first time. Most of the men here have low self-esteem, and what little they do have, the system grinds out of them through the daily humiliations and restrictions.” He raised a hand. “I’m not criticizing. It is what it is. But as we refine punishment, we whittle away the human psyche. In my experience, that does nothing to encourage rehabilitation, let alone actual penance, the soul-saving stuff I’m supposed to be engaged in. Artistic creativity is a bit of salvation from that institutional degradation. It gives a senseof purpose, a sense of accomplishment, a platform to discuss moral and spiritual issues, occasionally personal insights.” He laughed. “Maybe that’s just ego speaking, but I swear, at conferences, my presentations go over very well.”
    I nodded. “Sounds challenging.” Like I’d crashed some cocktail party and was agreeing with opinions I didn’t quite understand.
    “I build some trust, foster some self-expression, and channel the art making into the restorative justice work we do. Are you familiar with that concept?”
    Restorative justice. I knew the term, and it had always seemed ridiculous to me. “A little. You let perpetrators and victims talk things through.”
    “It’s my way of saving souls, Officer Williams. It takes years to prepare an inmate, and years for an inmate to successfully reach out to the people they’ve wronged. But when it happens, when those sides start to correspond or when they actually meet face-to-face, you’d be amazed at the emotions that surface and the humanity that gets revealed. And that’s when people make a connection and move forward, sometimes with great positive impact on each other’s lives.”
    “Why would any victim want to connect with a perp?”
    “They’re connected already. They’ll never not be connected. This is just a way to handle the awesome psychic reality of that. Otherwise”—he shrugged—”the hate and the anger is like cancer killing us a little more every day.”
    His eyes were locked on mine, and I knew then he was a true believer. I, on the other hand, had never believed in anything deeply in my entire life—except for the importance of contingencyplans, the likelihood of the most certain things fucking up,