From Dragonfly: Is it violent?

I was laying in bed last night, reading the beginning of a new Jodi Piccoult (well, a 2005 book well read, but new to me) when my roommate Longwinded asked me a question. I had to take my orange ear plugs out of my ears and sit up to hear her. My bunkie was already asleep. She said, "Do you fear for violence here?" "Do you think the inmates are violent?"

I wasn't sure where the questions came from in her, is she being threatened? Has something happened? So, I started to answer by asking those questions, not direct answers to her questions. Then she explained further. She was talking with a staff member and the staff member had asked her these questions. Since the question, "do you think the inmates are violent?" was inclusive of all inmates (it wasn't just "some" inmates), Longwinded answered, "no, because I am not violent and I am an inmate..." I told her that I do believe some of the inmates are violent, but not the majority of us. There's enough to keep us on our toes, though. There are enough to take threats seriously.

The staff member, I guess, thought she was in "lala land," as he put it. He informed her, and a couple other inmates, that last week an inmate bit the pinky off of another inmate. I hadn't heard about this. Longwinded hadn't either. However, one of the other people in their conversation had. I don't know if it is true, but it does not surprise me. Perhaps it happened on one of the mental health units. They would be deemed "criminally insane." Most of them are not given the freedom to roam outside their unit too often, so perhaps it happened within their unit. However, it could have happened anywhere. There are many people here with substantial mental health issues, who are mainstreamed into the prison population.

This conversation led my roommate to say that she has no idea the truth behind most anyone's crimes. Her bunky could be a murderer (I don't believe she is, but she is right, she "could" be). Her best friend on the compound could have violently attacked a child. She doesn't know and neither do I. That's the thing about this place. We are all together and we look just like each other. We are your tutors, your plumbers, your nurses, your neighbors. No one knows anything, except for gossip or what is shared. People lie. There's no way to know the full truth.

I told Longwinded that many people here scare me, but it is not based on what they look like or even how they hold themselves. I've been around lots of different kinds of people in my life and do my best to never judge a book by it's cover. What does scare me is the eyes. The eyes are the windows to the soul. The person who I believe would have hit me had that meanness in their eyes. I'd never feared her before that moment. Sometimes you can see it all the time in someone, sometimes it just comes out at the moments of their anger.

There is a young woman, from one of the mental health floors, who walks in circles, talking to herself, and punching air. I do not fear her. I am not going to say that she has not done violence, I have no idea of her name, much less her past or crimes. But, she has scared eyes. She acts "out" and doesn't hold back. It's makes it easy to know how to be around someone when they make it obvious as to their need for space. The people that scare me the most are those who hold it all inside, only to one day "break" and the violence erupts from them.

So, it is violent? Yes. However, it is also possible to keep oneself insulated from it. We need to avoid confrontation. We need to spend our time with people who are not threatening. We shouldn't be locked up with violent offenders, but we are. We just need to always keep aware of who is around. I still get scared sometimes. I fear Longwinded is now scared as well. I don't know why the staff member asked her about it, but her defenses are now up. Maybe, just maybe, it will save her from a bad situation down the road. One never knows why we receive the messages we do, only that we get the messages we need at the times we need them.