the debts we deserve (or owe you don't)

The very poor are different than you or me, though perhaps less in manner than in magnitude –the sheer overlap of their challenges, the lonely recourse to institutions, the width of chasm so often dwarfing the breadth of reach. It almost always begins early, long before the sun rises on anything resembling autonomy: with stressed or absent parents, with special or ordinary needs not met, with crummy simulacrums of home. Omens for the journey onwards, a journey that sometimes, in conditions come common in poverty, treads into the maze of my profession. Say what you will about my lens, my tinge, but these are the people I get: angry, bereft, confused and addicted, impressed by the meanness of life, most having done things they don’t want to think about, all having been done unto in ways they never deserved. We may try to draw our bright lines between victim and sinner, but I know the blurry truth of it – walk into a prison, ask who there’s been abused. One must rise from the muck of upbringing, of course, one must resist passing on the shit one’s been served. Know that the ones in our prisons are the ones most confronted by this ideal. We must ask, at least, how us others – in our systems – are allowing and reflecting such a hallowed, daunting process.

It seems elementary that us humans aren’t able to ascend the heights of our common moral calling – to respect ourselves and each other, acknowledge our harms, create space for forgiveness – without having first attended to the basics. Addictions and extreme poverty are big obstacles, both symptom and cause of the troubled times that cause criminal conduct. This is, by and large, clearly immoral stuff – beating on the weaker, knee-jerk or drug-addled stealing, selling hot goods or prescription drugs. To these base misbehaviours must be added the nearly-inevitable breaches of court orders that haunt the unstable – sure, it’s obvious to promise that you’ll keep a curfew or stay away from booze in the cold clink of morning, but maintaining such resolutions is far from simple when you’re released back into the same old story. The two-step leads, of course, to jail, like Thunder Bay’s stone submarine of a structure built a century ago to house about a third of its current occupants. My ‘in-house’ clients, still stuck on the lowest rungs of the ladder of needs and capacities, are for the most part unable to mend the tears in social fabric that most that most directly resulted in their incarceration. Much as I might like to help them to, or loud as the public may bray for accountability, the odds are long, the house and language unsuited to the subtle task. What I think we can be grateful to prison for, however, is its role in jolting (some) folks into a real willingness to get a handle on their addictions. A clear majority of my clients clamour for treatment – they’ve reached Step One, they know they need it. But what should be a relative opportunity for celebration and steely-eyed progress is commonly lost to the crunch of economics and condemnation. “We can’t afford state-run rehab” the subtext goes, “and besides, these wastrels don’t deserve it. Let them clean up the mess they’ve made first”. Thus, we come to make mixed-up demands upon the very poor and/or addicted who have been (indeed ‘justly’) brought into the criminal system. But most won’t fulfill our- or their own- moral obligations if they haven’t first begun to clamber up from the pits their battered upbringings have pushed them. And we’re not - or less and less – inclined to reach far enough down to really help.