"In the process of resocialization, old behaviors that were helpful in a previous role are removed because they are no longer of use. Resocialization is necessary when a person moves to a senior care center, goes to boarding school, or serves a sentence in the prison system. In the new environment, the old rules no longer apply. The process of resocialization is typically more stressful than normal socialization because people have to unlearn behaviors that have become customary to them. While resocialization has a specific meaning, many organizations consider their training or retraining processes to embody elements of resocialization. The most common way resocialization occurs is in a total institution where people are isolated from society and are forced to follow someone elses rules. A ship at sea is a total institution, as are religious convents, prisons, or some cult organizations. They are places cut off from a larger society. The 6.9 million Americans who lived in prisons and penitentiaries at the end of 2012 are also members of this type of institution (U.S.Department of Justice 2012) (OpenStax, 2012)."

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   Stating without sarcasm, anyone invested in Sociology should experience incarceration. Prison (especially the open dormitory style) is the ultimate social experiment, an inmate told me a half-decade ago. Since, I've resolved to write and see publication of a book of short stories and essays culled from institutionalization in Kentucky with an 89% sex offender occupancy, tentatively titled Trims. The greatest issue I face is the impossibility of documenting the smallest fraction of what occurs in this cultural Petrie dish; the events, casts, and even locales I inhabit are mercurial, complex, and steeped in historical minutiae.

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   Our civilian counterparts celebrate/debate diversity while we experience immersion. Myself, a gender-fluid 56 year-old White man with a violent charge from middle class Western KY, sharing a bunk-bed with a Black 20-something from an urban center, and beside me, the same as him. On the other side, another White Western Kentuckian possessing a drug case in his 40s with six children. I have used the anecdote before academically of the "White Pride" chest-tattoo recipient living astride the Black inmate he played chess with daily, the only strife resulting from the board. Here, without the constraints of political correctness, it is fine to be OK with one's own celebratory Caucasian acceptance. That does not equal White Supremacy for most, it is the ivory rejoinder to Black pride. With regularity, we make fun of each other, but with respect. This is fruit of not halting the conversation by calling words "violence", because convicts KNOW what that latter word means intimately. We achieve peace through dialogues "civilized" citizens cannot accomplish. Society could benefit from closer examination of a modern prison's approach to diversity.

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   Commonplace modern "progressivism" not only stunts the conversation, but inhibits what Sociological pioneer Herbert Spencer labeled Social Darwinism, the adaptation and growth of society brought on by its organic movements.

 

   Taken from A Nation of Victims by Vivek Ramaswarmy:

 "Daryl Davis is an accomplished Black musician who plays R and B and the blues. Hes played with icons like B.B. King and Chuck Berry, the father of rock and roll. He's even played with Bill Clinton. But he's famous for his unusual hobby: befriending Ku Klux Klan members.

 

   Davis became fascinated with the phenomenon of racism when he was ten years old and experienced it for the first time. He was the son of an American diplomat, so he spent his childhood traveling the world, attending racially diverse schools. After his family moved to Massachusetts, he joined an all-White Cub Scout pack. One day while he was marching in a parade with the other boys and carrying the American flag, members of the crowd started hurling bottles and rocks at him. He concluded they had an inexplicable hatred of Cub Scouts until he realized he was the only one being targeted." (Ramaswarmy, 2020)

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   The story continues with Davis learning the concept of American racism. He finds it ludicrous. Years pass, and while playing in an all-White bar in Maryland, he is complimented, then engaged by a patron into a musical discussion that leads him to find out this compatriot is a Klan member. Despite this, the chemistry of shared love of an art form inspired a phone number exchange. Eventually, his friend exited the KKK.

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   His pioneer experience led to several more, with attendance at Klan rallies, and leading some 200 members to apostasy. Predictably, many Blacks and Anti-racists were appalled by Daryl mixing with Klansmen and White Supremacists.

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   Hearing Radiolabs podcast episode "The Hate Debate" from earlier this year, the discourse concerned anonymity online and its impact on freedom of speech, which escalated into a tug-of-war regarding the First Amendment. Corrinne McSherry, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation deliberated against Ellie Nestall, legal editor of More Perfect, a Constitutional concerns organization that hosted this event. Nestall, an African-American lawyer demonstrated an obsession with Nazis, wanting persons that social media companies suspected of any such affiliations outed, and omitted from communication sites. An audience member that was raised in a heavily Christian dogmatic house cited Megan Roper, granddaughter of the Reverend Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, known the world over for their provocative signage and adamantly anti-gay demonstrations. She became apostate from the church after striking up relationships online working for the church, the attendee pointed out, adding "if we stop talking to one another, we stop growing". Nestall vitriolically responded, letting the man know that " Blacks, gays, and women are tired of being after-school specials for straight White men." I resented being spoken for, and was disappointed at applause his tirade garnered.

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   Herbert Spencer saw society as an organism, with systems mirroring our viscera and neural pathways, and general welfare as homeostasis, comprising the whole. This is the theory of Social Stability (Berger, 2021). Prison, on a microcosmic level, fares the same.

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   Reflectively, the culture prison resembles most is the urban landscape, due to the compact living spaces, shared resources, and close quarters. All outings involve waiting in lines. Social environments are immersed with bodies, and personal space is, generally speaking, limited.

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   "Urbanism or urban way of life became the dependent variable. Hypothesis derived from Louis Worth in 1948. The larger, the more densely populated, and the more heterogeneous a community, the more accentuated are the characteristics associated with urbanism. Spatial segregation of individuals according to color, ethnic heritage, economic and social status, tastes and preferences rise as the range in individual variation increases." (Taut and Kathawade, 2014)

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   In here, despite that cohesion, communities vibrate to their own frequencies, and this is family. The Mexican cluster are most noticeably ardent about this. When an Hispanic arrives at Northpoint, his crimes are not brought into question. His familia swiftly sees that he has coffee to drink, food to eat, and clothes to wear. To a slightly lesser degree, I have observed similar with the body politic of housed African Americans. They are accepting of their fellows with sex cases for the better part, and are situational regarding homosexuality with hyper-masculinity playing a huge part in that determinant. The "down-low" (clandestine) scenario is notoriously widespread, although less so since the prevalence of transgender inmate proliferation, a more acceptable optic for many. Whites, despite cultural equity, disappoint in this regard. Mainly this involves the gang community and upper echelon yard figures. Demographically, they are the only ones that extort, blackmail, and turn on their own to an infamous degree for prestige, drugs, or cash. A great amount of Caucasians engage in sexual behavior than will admit it openly, and those that do insist on a dominance/submission dynamic for the majority; submission is for "trims" (men who live as women in lock-down), for most even equality is unacceptable.

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   This posturing is contextual to Herd Mentality Solomon Ashe (born 1907) uncovered. He realized people will exhibit counterintuitive behaviors with the assumption that others know better, or fearing ridicule, persecution, or perception of legitimate rebellion. One of the deepest defects of imprisonment culture involves lesser individuals being ascribed an undeserved elevated social status through insidious politics. "The Emperor's New Clothes" allegory is rampant.

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   Continuing the dynamic of mixing demographics, the greatest successes for the "wings" of the dorms are when the alikes are placed in adjacency. High concentrations of White, Black, Hispanic, and even Trans populations seem to work best. These create families, and the families are the organ structures that comprise the body. Our ecosystem falls flat with over- integration; the organs should be segregated with encouragement of expression of individuality and the absence of tribalism. Exchange of ideas and freedom of speech fosters change, segregation brings community, culture, and security.

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   Further regarding the relationship between segregation and wellness of the body populous, one demographic was ascribed a thoroughly separate accommodation: sex offenders. In 2022, then-warden Kevin Mazza made the controversial decision to convert half of Northpoint into a specified unit for that style of criminal, offering protection from violence and extortion. Three years later, many view it a failure, myself prominently.

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   My main complaint stems from Social Stability. As a demographic, sex criminals should not be a community, as in a family. An encounter or therapy group, undoubtedly. With so many types traveling under the banner from hands-on pedophiles and rapists of adult women to photo criminals, incest participants, step siblings that did not acquaint until later teens, anonymous internet hookups gone south, and young men who themselves are victims of bitter parents of daughters who were equally culpable but turned 18 second, shoving them all into a building together with sex as a common denominator was a recipe for disaster - a sexual mental health crisis. Incessant inappropriate behavior, prostitution, false rape accusations, disturbing celebratory jokes/conversations/rituals, ridiculous levels of jealousy, and lionizations of a lifestyle that should not be enjoyed.

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   Ironically, having spent time all over, I find kinship on the Offender unit, with the White middle-class domination therein. That, and child history of sexual abuse, which an 80 percentile of sex cases have. The behaviors cause me anxiety, however, and I prefer the general population side. The segregation did no one favors. It robbed half the population of genuine diversity, subtracted the necessary punitive experience (not to mention the administration basically did the Corrections Officers jobs for them on grand scale), and introduced sickness to our body.

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   I go back to my last assignment, where I discussed the vision of 1940s - '50s Black Conservatives and their views on Separate But Equal, with Black money supporting Black people, while building Black America. With a more pragmatic approach to diversity, we would maybe see communities supporting their own utilizing the prison microcosm versus that of society at large: a great example being celebrities like George Clooney, Jennifer Lawrence, Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp, Dianne Sawyer, and Jack Harlow with Kentucky roots. Imagine the impact this group of entertainment industry titans could unleash if they decided to go after the pervasive poverty issue in rural/Appalachian Bluegrass. Clooney champions causes ad nauseum, but I cannot recall him rescuing any of our broader states poor. Darfur, an impoverished region of Sudan, he cried over, I remember. This, I believe, is resultant of culture shaming. Clooney cannot exhibit concern for the largely White, presumably Christian and conservative population he sprang from unlike a successful Country musician from a similar background. These counties are red, not voguish. Bringing tech hubs, or any type of genuine fortification to regions such as the one Northpoint is situated upon, coincidentally the same area as the actor in question originates, could relieve an exhausted cycle of various dependencies. Again, society could benefit from closer examination of modern prison's approach to diversity the one where I live, anyway. There is no Utopia, and if there were, it certainly would not be contained within razor wire.

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WRITER'S NOTE: Edits done to this essay beyond the original submission were grammatical in nature and one sentence in Paragraph 14.