Forming Good Habits Requires Good Communities

Most people have heard the moral insight that bad company corrupts good morals, and the truthfulness of this insight is no more evident than in prison. While many prisoners were connected to the influence of negative communities before coming to prison, the unfortunate reality is that in being removed from these negative communities, prisoners are usually also cut out of whatever positive community influences they may have had. For example, my faith community was my primary community before I came to prison. When I came to prison though, I was not only removed from that community but also actively ostracized by them. This disconnection from my primary community was immediate and complete. In its place I was thrust into an unfamiliar and highly negative community which offered me no sense of belonging. At the time in my life when I needed the positive influences necessary for good habit formation, I was instead left without a positive community at all. The philosopher Aristotle said that good habits are difficult or even impossible to form in bad communities. Yet, that is exactly the herculean task given to prisoners who wish to change their lives and leave the negative influences of their past behind. Because positive communities are difficult to find in prison, to affect this change in themselves prisoners must often form their own sub-communities that lend the support and positive influence where positive change is found. Fortunately, I've been blessed to be a part of several positive communities in prison, and the Calvin Prison Initiative is only the latest of these. We prisoners may have been cut out like cancer from the communities where we belonged before prison, but some of us are now preparing to shape new communities in positive ways by developing or deepening good morals in positive communities like CPI.