Prison Psychosis

My contribution to my brother's discussion group. It's from Idries Shah's Caravan of Dreams. Just don't use the m-word.

Prison

Visualize a man who has to rescue people from a certain prison. It has been decided that there is only one promising way of carrying this out.

The rescuer has to get into the prison area without attracting attention. He must remain there relatively free to operate, for a certain period of time. The solution arrived at is that he shall enter it as a convict.

He accordingly arranges for himself to be apprehended and sentenced. Like others who have fallen foul of this particular machine in this manner, he is consigned to the prison which is his goal.

When he arrives he knows that he has been divested of any possible device which could help in an escape. All he has is his plan, his wits, his skills and his knowledge. For the rest, he has to make do with improvised equipment, acquired in the prison itself.

The major problem is that the inmates are suffering from a prison psychosis. This makes them think that their prison is the whole world. It is also characterized by selective amnesia of their past. Consequently they have hardly any memory of the existence, outline and detail of the world outside.

The history of our man’s fellow-prisoners is prison history, their lives are prison lives. They think and act accordingly.

Instead of hoarding bread, for instance, as escape provisions, they mould it into dominoes with which they play games. Some of these games they know to be diversions, others they consider to be real. Rats, which they could train as a means of communication with the outside, they treat instead as pets. The alcohol in the cleaning-fluid available to them they drink to produce hallucinations, which delight them. They would think it sadly wasted, a crime even, if anyone were to use it to drug the guards insensible, making escape possible.

The problem is aggravated because our malefactors have forgotten the various meanings of some of the ordinary words which we have been using. If you ask tem for definitions of such words as “provisions,” “journey,” “escape,” even “pets,” this is the kind of list which you would elicit from them:
Provisions: prison food.
Journey: walking from one cell-block to another.
Escape: avoiding punishment by warders
Pets: rats.

“The outside world” would sound to their ears like a bizarre contradiction in terms;
“As this is the world, this place where we live,” they would say, “how can there be another one outside?”

The man who is working on the rescue plan can operate at first only by analogy.

There are few prisoners who will even accept his analogies, for they seem like mad babblings.

The babblings, when he says, “We need provisions for our journey of escape to the outside world,” of course sound to them like the following admitted nonsense:

“We need provisions – food for use in prison – for our journey – for walking from one cell-block to another – of escape – to avoid punishment by warders – to the outside world – to the prison outside...”

Some of the more serious-minded prisoners may say that they want to understand what he means. But they do not understand outside-world language any more...

When this man dies, some of them make of his words and acts a prison-cult. They use it to comfort themselves, and to find arguments against the next liberator who manages to come among them.

A minority, however, do from time to time escape.

I've always been fascinated by psychology, and this story reminded me of a few things. One was the excellent memoir No Picnic on Mount Kenya, written by an Italian who was imprisoned in British East Africa during WWII. He found the prison psychosis affecting his fellow prisoners so unbearable he decided to escape and climb Mount Kenya with equipment made from articles found in the POW camp! Just as unbelievable is the fact that the map they used (at left) was the label from their prison rations.

I was also reminded of the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which 12 college students volunteered to be imprisoned in the basement of the university's psychology building to study the psychology of imprisonment. The simulation became so real for the volunteer prisoners and guards that the experiment was abruptly terminated. Many prisoners had completely assumed their prison identities, had forgotten they were students and that they had volunteered for the experiment, that they had the option of ending their involvement at any time.

I suggested we leave, but he refused. Through his tears, he said he could not leave because the others had labeled him a bad prisoner. Even though he was feeling sick, he wanted to go back and prove he was not a bad prisoner.

At that point I said, "Listen, you are not #819. You are [his name], and my name is Dr. Zimbardo. I am a psychologist, not a prison superintendent, and this is not a real prison. This is just an experiment, and those are students, not prisoners, just like you. Let's go."

He stopped crying suddenly, looked up at me like a small child awakened from a nightmare, and replied, "Okay, let's go."

This transformation on the part of the prisoners, guards, and Dr. Zimbardo, the "superintendent," had taken only 6 days. Could we "non-prisoners" possibly be suffering from a similar psychosis or hemianopia?