We’ve all spent the last 18 months becoming familiar with surviving lockdown.
But we’re far from experts.
When we go back to “normal life” the world’s prisoners will not.
We asked Donnie to give us his best advice for surviving lockdown.
COVID-19 is not the first outbreak he has experienced – as you will read, they’re a part of life in prison.
Prison life is lockdown life, so we can think of no one better to help us all out.
The psychological impact of the COVID-19 lockdowns will take years to sort through.
The U.S. census bureau’s statistics show that 40% of younger people have suffered from anxiety or depression due to the lockdowns.
Next to financial uncertainty, the most serious cause of psychological stress is social isolation.
Where COVID-19 hit hardest: prisons in the USA.
But if you compare prison life with life outside of prison walls during the pandemic, the outside world looks like a paradise.
When the lockdowns began, prisons across the United States banned all outside visitors and restricted inmate movement within the prisons.
These measures were an exaggerated response. Staff infected prisoners.
Prisoners ended up with higher infection rates than the general public: over 70% of inmates had positive test results in Californian prisons.
The Sacramento Bee even discovered that “7 California prisons had so many COVID cases, they now have herd immunity.“
UN report: pandemic regulations in US prisons are torture.
Not only has actual COVlD-19 infection and exposure weighed heavily on prisoners, the lack of control has also been disheartening.
There has been no announcement to the end of the visitation ban.
The open-endedness of the COVID-19 regulations has left prisoners speculating that COVID-19 may never be completely eradicated and will forever be used as justification to cancel their rights and privileges.
During the lockdown, the number of inmates held in solitary confinement increased by 500%, violating CDC and other guidelines and keeping approximately 300.000 US citizens in torture-like situations without any justification.
The United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, criticized the “excessive use” of solitary confinement in US correctional facilities, saying: “this deliberate infliction of severe mental pain or suffering may well amount to psychological torture,”.
Prisons are densely populated places and there is no space for social distancing, despite prison administrators best (and worst) efforts.
While the general public was busy dealing with mask mandates, prisoners were being bombarded with orders they had no real way of complying with, even if they wanted to.
You might not automatically be sympathethic to prisoners’ treatment during these unprecedented times.
But perhaps you would if you knew the truth.
Want to know what a real lockdown feels like?
For the uninitiated, the question “what does it feel like to be in prison?” eventually comes up to me.
I usually answer the same way.
I tell them to “grab a small television, radio, or a few books, then lock yourself in your bathroom for 24 hours. Then tell me how you feel the next day”.
If you think this is an exaggerated response – it’s not.
There simply isn’t another way I could illustrate to someone what surviving lockdown in prison confinement looks and feels like.
Some prison cells are no wider than a person’s wingspan, meaning that you can touch both walls at once.
You could also touch the toilet while sitting on your bed.
So, in truth, your bathroom at home may well be a lot roomier than a prison cell.
It goes without saying that if you don’t like small spaces, you shouldn’t go to prison.
Especially if the pandemic lockdowns really affect you.
Prisons are always locked down and this will break you.
Prison is the definition of social isolation.
Prison isolates people from society and other prisoners by its very nature.
Studies have been done on the devastating psychological effects of isolation on prisoners.
But the results are often used as a way of breaking prisoners’ wills.
That or they’re deemed an acceptable collateral consequence of gaining control over society’s undesirables.
What has been overlooked though is the long term effects of such isolation upon the younger inmates’ minds.
Most prisoners experienced some type of confinement as children, before being sentenced to prison as adults.
As someone who has suffered some of the most extreme versions of confinement as both a juvenile and an adult in the United States, I am qualified enough to understand the psychological scars formed through such isolation.
It’s not just the isolation: bad company is a problem.
Isolation is not the only thing that causes these scars.
In fact, in prison, it often isn’t the isolation in itself, but rather the people who you find yourself isolated with which has the impact.
Prisoners might be confined in a small space with only one other prisoner – and the two may not get along at all.
There’s always the chance of personality conflicts or even gang rivalries.
Prison authorities don’t care much about compatibility when housing prisoners together, and these conflicts often lead to murders inside cells.
The men who avoid such violence have mastered the grand arts of patience and tolerance.
Dorm living is a little different: instead of a small space shared with one other person there’s a medium sized space with around 100 other people to bump up against.
Conflicts are rife… just imagine you wanted time alone, but could never find it – for years.
Inmates understand your OCD.
While it’s true that prisons have higher rates of COVID-19, this has nothing to do with prisoners cleaning habits.
By nature, prisons are filthy places.
Many are old and dilapidated and need to be shut down. Desperate to do something – anything – most prisoners react to this by controlling their immediate environments.
They become neat freaks and germaphobes.
Actually, most prisoners likely suffer from one form of OCD or another.
This is because they spend their entire prison terms attempting to avoid everything from tuberculosis to HIV.
These tendencies show themselves through excessive tidiness, compulsive cleaning, and hand washing.
These actions are a last defence against the helplessness which sets in once prisoners witness entire prisons quarantined for exposure to disease.
Prisoners understand that their efforts are most likely futile, but doing something provides comfort, while doing nothing leads to increased despair.
I’ve been incarcerated in all kinds of prisons for over a quarter of a century.
I’ve become an expert in surviving lockdown.
I learned how to cope with social distancing, isolation and many other situations that can make you fall into deep states of depression and anxiety.
When I see the outside society form my caged perspective, I sometimes think that maybe the real problem is: people have grown too spoiled and complacent.
Unable to see and appreciate the small things they react to every slight restriction as if they were losing a limb.
If people’s grievances were limited to their ability to see close family members or the struggle to make a living, I’d empathize.
But that’s not the case. Some people been losing their minds over the inability to attend beauty salons, movie theaters, gyms, and bars.
While it is true that humans are social animals, it should also be true that any of us can be strong enough to find a place of contentment within ourselves.
What we are learning today through this pandemic is that the ability to cope with disruptions to one’s routine is a major indicator of true inner strength.
To help you find this inner strength, here are three major methods that I used for myself:
My 3 tips for surviving lockdown.
1. Creativity fights uncertainty
Creative activities (e.g. writing, artwork, or crafting) help people cope with stressful situations.
Perhaps this is why prisoners become so creative: drawing, painting, reading or other types of art, such as creating things out of items usually discarded as trash.
Somewhere in America there’s a jewellery box sitting on a dresser made from newspapers or cardboard some prisoner repurposed.
Being crafty or creative helps prisoners to free themselves from the stress of an uncertain existence.
Everything in prison is uncertain and forever beyond prisoner’s control.
Not only can prisoners not control who’s in the space around them, but they cannot control or predict their own physical whereabouts.
One day a prisoner is in one cell or bed and the next they’re on the opposite side of the prison.
More extremely, we know we can go to almost any other prison within the state on any given day.
Visitation can be suspended too, as it has for almost a year since the pandemic began.
We can also find ourselves moved beyond the range of our family’s ability to travel. California is over 160,000 square miles in area and nearly 800 miles in length.
In the most extreme cases, some prisoners are over 10 hours away from major population centers.
This causes much hardship to prisoners and their families.
This is nothing compared to what federal prisoners face.
They are often shipped off to prisons across America.
2. Patience and the wider scope.
In spite of all these things prisoners are still the ultimate optimists.
Prisoners often com from the worst beginnings, so we know struggle and loss.
When we lose, as in court, we simply stay the course and await a better day.
Waiting is a prisoner’s superpower.
It can save a prisoner’s mental health when faced with insurmountable odds and it is here that we have an advantage over the public when it comes to surviving lockdown.
Prisoners, unlike young people in the public, know that lockdowns come and go.
Nothing lasts forever and tomorrow will always come ushering in new circumstances.
3. Think towards the near future, but have high visions.
The main thing you can take away from prisoners’ methods for surviving lockdown is this:
Direct your thinking towards the near future.
Prisoners are never focused on tomorrow, but instead on the day after tomorrow.
We fill in the gaps by creating tasks which require long time commitments and we mark time as we approach our goals.
We have high visions and use them to not get lost in the daily darkness.
Youth benefit most
This might prove too simple and narrow minded for youth, but in reality, the young have the most to gain from taking time to refine themselves and their skills.
You might feel as if COVID-19 is stealing away all of your best days, but the reality is: your best days are ahead of you.
DONNIE HAS NO ACCESS TO THE INTERNET, THE ARTICLES COME TO US THROUGH THE POST.
We slightly modified the article to optimize its readability for the internet
The original articles are here:
