I received your June/July 2024 publication. Thank you.
Vanguard is new to me, and I was excited about it until I saw that it’s just the same old rant on the system that thousands of other prisoner publications are all about.
There are abundant prisoner publications that critique the system’s evils—general corruption, bad living conditions, bad food and staff, bad lawyers and courts, and bad parole boards.
We like to moralize about others but not so much about ourselves.
I’d like to pick up a prisoner publication and read about how someone cleaned up their act and how they modulated from criminal thinking to the well-being of the commonwealth and society. Some stories are around, but not enough or in the right places.
We have embraced victimization big time when it’s about us, but what about the victims of our crimes and the ongoing ripple effects within and beyond the victims, even to this day, years, and decades after our crimes? Rather than messed up prison conditions, let’s consider and deal with what made us into the type of person that did what we did (for those who did it) without a conscience or with such a deficiency in conscience that we hurt people and fractured social trust without giving it a second thought, justifying it by pinpointing social ills, whatever it takes to avoid personal responsibility for our actions. Then consider how to deal with these personal shortcomings. There’s a long shadow behind us. We’re all damaged goods. We need to self-repair, self-heal, or we’re just the same old criminal who walked in the door on day one. There’s a way out.
I think that to be effective where it counts and where it’s needed most, the Vanguard Incarcerated Press should be more rehab-oriented. We already know how some prison staff can be bad actors (not the majority of them, I must add) and about bad prison conditions, which are never going to improve, just because that’s the nature of the beast. But we can improve. That’s the difference. Let that be the agenda.
Grieving prison conditions can be therapeutic to an extent, public abreaction. But as a lifer, I’m more interested in the rehab aspect of the prison experience. Anyone can complain about living conditions all the live long day, but can they reinvent themselves into a better person or a better character? Can they properly function within a social milieu without assaulting the public or otherwise breaking the law, and if so, how? That is what I am more interested in reading about from my fellow prisoners. We all already know what’s wrong with the system and what is needed to fix it, but how about what’s wrong with us, and how we can fix ourselves?
Also, I think that it is not wise for a publication that is meant to reflect the interests and encourage the unity of all prisoners around common issues to engage in partisan politics. Prisons are full of people of every kind of political persuasion. If the VIP is going to adopt a left-wing editorial position, advocating for and supporting left-wing causes domestically or internationally, then it’s just another political publication that is biased towards a particular political ideology, and is indoctrinating in that ideology, which will repel prisoners of a different political persuasion. Divide and conquer. Taking it a step farther, you must then publish right-wing opinions of right-wing prisoners, right? If not, then you have created acute divisions among prisoners.
I think it best that prisoner publications emphasize and focus on rehab programs and other self-help initiatives that focus on healing and changing ourselves for the better, so much so that we become an entirely new person. Because no matter how politically savvy we may become, in whatever political camp we fall, we still bear the unresolved deep scars and pain of what made us abreact in repetitive, violative ways which are bound to happen again, whatever the political and social milieu.
