Enforcing Freedom by Kerwin Kaye

Author:Kerwin Kaye
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC004000, Social Science/Criminology, SOC031000, Social Science/Discrimination & Race Relations
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2019-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

While the attacks on person after person (seven in total) were generally quite sharp in tone, one of the men was shown a good deal of sympathy in his punishment. A twenty-year-old man who had been wearing his gang colors was told sharply that he was not allowed to do that within the facility, but the intervention was done with much more sympathy. “One of my own children is in a gang,” said one of the floor staff, “and gangs aren’t all bad; there’s some good stuff about them, and not everyone in a gang does bad, but you just can’t wear that in here.” While being very clear that the rule against wearing gang colors was a requirement—“You’re going to take that off or you’re going to go. It’s just that simple”—staff members suggested that he could instead “fly his flag on the inside,” offering him a potentially face-saving compromise that might enable him to bridge loyalties to both the gang and the institutional requirements he now faced. “If you’re real, you got it in your heart. You don’t have to wear it on the outside.” “You can yell about it, you can be pissed about it,” suggested another staff member, “but you just can’t do it. You can walk out the door and do all the gang stuff you want, and I can respect that, but you can’t do it here. No matter what. So are you willing to make some adjustments?” After some grumbling, the ultimatums and perhaps the gentler tone and face-saving gestures offered by the staff eventually convinced the man to remove his brightly colored necklace. In fact, during the prior meeting when the staff had decided on what punishments to dole out to each resident, they had decided that this particular resident, who otherwise obeyed the rules and who was deemed one of the “strong ones,” needed to show more “leadership” within the house. Rather than being given a learning experience, he was therefore assigned to a supervisory position within the house.

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