Which Would You Choose: Familiar Failure or Facing Fear with Courage?

The other day as I walked to chow and waited in line to get my tray of food, moving slowly up the line with the rest of the herd, I overheard the conversation of the two young men behind me. They were discussing their prowess and expertise as the "best" dope cooks in Detroit. They regaled each other with a ping-pong of one-upsmanship about whose recipe was better.

"I'm tellin' you," one claimed, "when you add [ingredient], your crack is so hard it'll ping off the wall like a baseball!"

"Yeah," the other retorted, "but mines is so hard you can't even cut it. You gotta break it with a hammer!"

I just dropped my head in disgust. These two young men were being trained by the Department of Corrections in a vocational trade so they could leave prison highly employable. But here they were, planning their next trip to prison. I even heard one tell the other that getting caught isn't so bad, since crack and powder have the same sentence now. Apparently one of his friends back home only got a year-long sentence in jail for a kilo of cocaine. 

As I listened, no longer able to just ignore the conversation, I wondered what would make these men believe that giving up even a year of their lives to jail or prison was worth returning to the dope game. I wondered what sort of hopelessness they must feel to risk more prison time, just to cook and sell drugs. Or is it hopelessness at all? Perhaps it's just fear. Fear can be a powerful motivator. Sure, these guys are being trained in a new vocation, but they've never worked in the real world--except for selling drugs. Drugs are all they know.

Fear of change paralyzes a lot of people, not just prisoners. In fact, fear is often the reason the public and the legislature refuses to support changes to criminal justice laws. After all, even though the current system is a miserable failure, it is familiar. Perhaps that's why these two prisoners, and so many others like them, return to their same criminal patterns of behavior. Those patterns are familiar. They're comfortable, even if they have proven to be a miserable failure. Yes, they have consequences too, but those consequences are also known. Trying something new, even something positive, is unknown. What if they fail? What happens then? And just as scary, what if they succeed? Will their friends still like them? Will their family respect them? Will they like the changes in themselves?

Making changes, big changes, from everything you've known to something new is not easy. We should not expect it to be easy for prisoners either. They have to want to change before they will. But in the process, we also can provide encouragement and, if necessary, counseling on having courage to change. Change requires courage, especially when it turns your world upside down (or right side up!). Courage is not the absence of fear, but knowing what to fear and then acting with proper judgment. 

I don't know if these two young men have anyone in their lives teaching them what to fear or helping them to learn proper judgment. I would guess not. This doesn't mean that we should stop training them. It simply means that we need to understand the problem of recidivism as more than simply an education problem. Many other factors, not the least of which is a moral foundation, are critical to true and lasting change.