Prisoners

It's the surprises that teach us things -- surprises in dealing with others who are unfamiliar, who see the world differently.
 
The first time I walked into a prison, I lost two quarters from my pocket in the couch. This was in my graduate school days, when I was working in a penal reform project in a women's unit for nonviolent offenders, mostly drug charges.  The inmates were clearly suspicious of me and my colleagues; I could feel a vast gulf between their experience of the world and ours, and I had no idea what they were thinking. So I was pretty surprised, as i walked out, that one of the young women came running after me to hand me my 50 cents. I didn't know why - maybe fear, maybe currying favor, or maybe some human connection.

Some time later my colleague and I, as good psychology students, were leading a discussion group aiming to explore moral reasoning. We asked them to think back to their early childhood, to imagine themselves back in that time, and to recall a conflict they had experienced. There was a brief silence, and then several inmates burst into tears. I remember being baffled, embarrassed - and then mortified, as it emerged that the kinds of conflict they were remembering were not the kind of sibling rivalries or playground spats that came to my mind, but things altogether darker and more violent.

There was nothing romantic here. These women would cut each other for a cigarette, and would maintain a lie so brazenly in the face of the evidence as to make me doubt my own senses. I could never trust them. But as different as they were from me, there was a human connection. 

We can never really understand others (or even ourselves). But trying to understand makes a difference. I think I sometimes surprised them; they certainly surprised me, and stretched me beyond what I was.