A lot of times, when we hear about some horrific crime on the news, we have this thought: "how could something like this happen?" And a lot of times, we're asking that question sort of existentially — like how could we live in a world where something like this happens?
But the fact is, the world we live in is the reason something like this happens. People's lived experience is what lays the groundwork for that awful moment when they commit a crime. And most of the time, we don't stop to think about that when we ask that question — how could this have happened?
A new book called "Imprisoned Minds: Lost Boys, Trapped Men, and Solutions from Within the Prison" tries to ask that question a little differently. It's co-authored by Kevin Wright, a criminal justice professor at Arizona State University, and a man named Erik Maloney, who's currently serving a life sentence at a prison here in Arizona.
In the book, Maloney interviews six fellow incarcerated people about their life stories to try to understand who they were before they were arrested and convicted. The book is an argument for a correctional system that's informed by an understanding of the traumas that can lead people to commit crimes — not to excuse those crimes, of course. But to ask a different question: what do we mean, really, when we say "correctional system?"
Maloney and Wright joined The Show from the prison where Maloney is incarcerated. Maloney said that the seed of this idea was planted pretty much the day he got to prison.
Full conversation
ERIK MALONEY: I looked around at this concrete and steel cell, and I'm by myself, and the first thing that popped into my head was, “look what you've gotten yourself into.” And so I, I went on this journey and I started reading books. I started to really get into psychology and I found trauma.
And when I started to study trauma, the way that trauma researchers and writers describe what we now know as the imprisoned mind is very vague, you know, and, and it seemed to me that they had, hadn't experienced the trauma and so I was able to use my lived experience to understand what they were trying to describe.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah, that makes me think of a really moving sequence from the prologue where you talk about your daughter coming to visit you in prison and realizing that it reminds you of going to visit your own father in prison. Am I following correctly that it was connections like that that started to occur to you as, as you underwent this study?
MALONEY: Absolutely.
DINGMAN: There are so many lines in the prologue that really stuck with me, but one in particular was, you write, quote, “self-delusion epitomizes the imprisoned mind.” Tell us what you mean by that. What, what do you think leads to that self-delusion?
MALONEY: Well, when we experience trauma, naturally, our, our protective self emerges to do what it's supposed to do and that's to protect you. And so, we become reactive because of our protective self and our protective self, it's an irrational part of ourselves that externally looks around to try to find any potential dangers. And those potential dangers can be real or imagined.
DINGMAN: I have to say that's, that's one of the reasons it was so compelling to read your story, because as you explained to us in that essay, as a child, you were exposed on a repeated basis to dangers that there was no rational explanation for.
You talk about your house being broken into when you were like 20 months old, I think, and being pushed off a roof and various other incidents of violence that for me as a reader at least helped me understand why you might reach the conclusion that you need to defend yourself and how that thinking process could lead you to all of a sudden find yourself, as you write about, in a gang or selling drugs or or whatever the case may be, carrying a gun.
MALONEY: Yeah, absolutely. You know, my first 7 years of my life after that, after the, the, the being held hostage, I was a scared kid. And it makes me wonder when I see horrific incidences in the news, my first thought is, “what happened to this individual to cause them to feel that this was their only option?”
DINGMAN: So Kevin, let me bring you into the conversation. I know you've been studying these issues for a long time. How much does childhood trauma and psychological damage get talked about in the world of criminal justice and in particular when it comes to conversations about rehabilitation and recidivism?
KEVIN WRIGHT: Yeah, it's certainly not enough. And, you know, in, in full disclosure, I have Erik to thank to really push the idea on me more and more. I mean, I knew it was part of the, the challenge, but I didn't realize how pervasive it was for people on the inside, that they had these backgrounds, they had these experiences and, you know, certainly some researchers and people do it better than others.
They think about the entire life course, and they think about how childhood might be connected to later behaviors. But that's rare. You know, typically, a lot of people will care about kids going through traumatic experiences and, and worry about what their future might look like, and then when these kids become adults, that's gone.
DINGMAN: Erik, at a certain point, you started interviewing fellow incarcerated people about this concept. Those must have been really engaged, emotional conversations, but I can also imagine it, it wasn't easy always to get people to open up.
MALONEY: One thing you'll find about guys in prison is that they will tell you their whole life story if you just ask.
DINGMAN: So can you give me an example of a story that you heard from a fellow incarcerated person that really stuck with you.
MALONEY: So Kid's story was the, was actually the first person, he was actually the first person that I knew he had to be in the book because when you meet kid, you know, automatically know that he's an angry individual, but when you start talking to him, it, it, it quickly becomes apparent that he has a reason to be angry, right?
And it wasn't until I really asked him about his upbringing and learned about him finding his mother's body and having to be sent to a mental institution because the people who were in in charge of his guardianship didn't have the empathy to sit and say, “we need to get this kid some help because of what he's just been through.” It's very telling why, after learning about all this, why he's so angry.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Kevin, let me ask you again, you know, as somebody who has looked at these issues from a variety of different angles, when you started to hear these stories yourself, what did you make of it? I mean, did this seem like a new framework in your studies of this? What, what surprised you about these, the testimony that these folks gave?
WRIGHT: I mean, it's the complexity behind these, these stories and, you know, I, I say,, quite often in the book that there's not necessarily a, a new groundbreaking idea here, but there's a new groundbreaking perspective.
For so long, it's been about reducing recidivism, reducing the rate at which people come back to prison. And so inherently in that, what you're trying to do is take a so-called criminal and make them not criminal. And again, starts from a, a, a standpoint that people on the inside are different than people on the outside.
And so what would it look like instead if we just adopted a better than arrival corrections and we wanted people to be better than their arrival to the system. Why would we return people to our communities in a worse shape than when they left them? It doesn't really make any sense.
And if they're not leaving, if they've got longer sentences, we should still be investing in those people, too, because they're the ones that are surrounding everybody else on the inside. And Erik is a perfect testament to that of what happens when we invest in somebody and what he can offer for people on the inside and people on the outside.
