Prisoner’s Dilemma

Prisoner’s Dilemma
I have a friend who is incarcerated in a federal penitentiary. As Cher said on stage the other night, jail is the short term one and prison is the long term one. Well, this is a prison and I will go this Saturday to visit him. He will be in prison for another month, having served one month of his two-month sentence. Let us stop and consider that for a moment, how hard is it to spend two months in prison? After you get past the shock and awe of your predicament, I imagine that two months passes quickly.
I have heard a few things from him via the Corrlinks federal prison email system. So far, he has said that he is passing his time on a “country club floor”, which I guess means that it isn’t the general population and it is somewhat less prison-like. He says they do not lock the doors and they are not terribly restricted in their activities. He is catching up on his sleep (the beds must be OK), he is catching up on his reading (eight books so far in a month), he is catching up on his TV (not sure what they can and cannot watch), he is getting lots of exercise (they must have a gym), and he is engaged in a regular poker game, honing his skills in a game that starts at 9pm and runs more or less to 9am (he says he only plays for two hours or so). That sounds like a busy day for him. He says it is all very unproductive and a waste of valuable resources. More on that later.
He told a story of watching the new Scorcese film The Irishman recently. I am not concerned repeating this and other comments he makes by email since the Corrlinks system certainly has oversight and those emails must all be read. Since that movie is still in the theaters, either they have Pay-per-View or Netflix in the slammer or someone got a hold of a SAG screener, which is itself a federal crime based on the preamble on those DVDs. He said he watched it with several real wiseguys and one dethroned union boss. While I’m sure that made for an interesting evening (the movie is 3.5 hours long), I’m not entirely sure that the judge would say that such activities were properly cleansing for the incarcerated population.
Doesn’t that all make you wonder about what Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen (and presumably soon Rick Gates, Michael Flynn and Roger Stone) are doing in their respective slammers day in and day out? Have they seen The Irishman yet? Do they get invited to a nightly poker game? Are they catching up on their sleep, reading and exercise?
We all hear that mildly corrupt people get more corrupted by virtue of the people with which they interact. On first blush, it seems my friend who had a problem with a $44,000 sublease deposit defalcation (since repaid) is the Alice’s Restaurant litterer in this picture. He is sitting on the Group W bench with the mother-rapers and father-rapers and they are yukking it up over his misdemeanor-like crime. I’m not sure that leads to much contrition on the part of my friend. As for the hardened criminals in the bunch, I also feel they are harmed by this interaction because they see that a reasonably straight-edge guy who just steps off the line by a few inches, lands in the same place that they do. Where is the benefit to trying to stay on the right side of the line under those circumstances?
The thought that prisoners who got into trouble partly due to their proclivity towards gambling (that is a vice with which my friend struggles) can spend the night gambling, seems more than a little distorting. Also, the poker table is the scene of many a crime in American history. My friend commenting that he is honing his poker skills hardly seems productive for society. As for his use of time, saying that it’s an unproductive process and waste of valuable resources, makes me ask a number of questions. First of all, does society consider his time doing what he has been doing while free, so very productive? That is somewhat hard to say since it has several times led him to the jailhouse. I don’t believe anyone has pressed my friend into any sort of employment in prison. I mean, he’s not making license plates or anything to my knowledge. Maybe he needs to find a different and thereby more productive path than the one he has been pursuing. It seems that what society should want from the cost and effort of incarcerating someone like by friend is that he spend the time in deep reflection of how he can correct his path. I recognize that thinking that a prisoner’s every thought be on rehabilitation is somewhat unrealistic, but the fear and disgrace of federal incarceration should be a deterrent that keeps people focused on not ending up in that situation. My friend’s description of his time spent in prison does not do much of that for non-offenders.
I had heard that my friend might be released early for good behavior. Now that may be hard to accommodate given the holiday period, but on the assumption that the people that read the Corrlinks emails might find my friend’s description of his incarceration less than contrite, I’m not sure the facility would consider him rehabilitated sufficiently to warrant early release. I am undoubtedly overreacting to this and they probably just don’t care enough on a person-by-person basis to be so subtle in their sense of the purpose of prison and the need to fix prisoner’s attitudes.
When I turned eight, my mother took me and a friend to be on the Captain Bob local afternoon TV show. It was an interesting experience for several reasons. First, in those days before the refinement of censorship protocols, some kid told the knock-knock joke that goes; “Who’s there?” “Centipede” “Centipede who?” “Centipede under the Christmas tree!” Oops. Then Captain Bob asked us all what we would do if we won $100. When the camera and microphone turned to me, I said I would keep five dollars to spend and give $95 to charity. It was a surreal answer in a surreal klieg light moment. The funny part came just after the show when my mother handed me a card from my Aunt Aggie and it had a ten dollar bill in it. She asked if I planned to give $5 to charity and I had only one real-world answer, “No way!”
In that vein, I wonder about what I might do if I were incarcerated for two months. I would like to say that I would spend a great deal of time pondering my contrition and what I could do to make amends and reform myself. I would not care if I were fully guilty as charged, but would take the punishment at its face value. I would then seek to volunteer my time in prison to some useful purpose as the detention center could allow. This all sounds great and honorable, but I suspect I would get funny looks from my jailers. They might even laugh at me. We all know the other prisoners would find this approach hilarious. Most importantly, like the eight-year-old with the extra $5, there’s no probability that I would actually do what I suggest I should. My point is very simple, the prisoner’s dilemma in this instance is that matters of the heart such as contrition are best left in the privacy of one’s heart. That in no way obviates the need for reflection and perhaps most importantly, suggests more discretion on the part of the prisoner.