Cooperation
It’s not likely that many people would connect the word “cooperative” with their image of the men who live inside a maximum-security prison. More likely, they’d assume that most people living in a prison lean towards being uncooperative. But what I have found to be a surprising irony is that most all the inmates I’ve met in the prison are extremely polite and cooperative. The prison has turned out to be one of the most civil working environments I have ever experienced.
It is true that to maintain order and civility in the prison, there are well-defined rules and regulations that all inmates are expected to follow. When individuals do not conform to these expectations, it results in a range of punitive sanctions. But what really keeps the peace in the prison community is not the threat of punishment nor the power of the supervising officers; rather, it is the fact that even in a prison community, most citizens comply with the rules and choose to cooperate with each other in order to maintain a livable social order for all. If this were not so, anarchy and violence would surely reign, and most prison inmates would not want that for long.
From what I see, there appears to be relative peace and casual cooperation in most parts of prison life. Inmates stand in long lines to get their meals in the chow hall, to do their shopping at the canteen, to pick up their medications from the infirmary, or to get clean socks and underwear after a shower. It is rare that anyone cuts in line or even shows impatience when progress is slow. Men just join the queue and wait their turn. A cooperative civil environment is maintained.
On the job, inmate workers perform admirably. Dishwashers scrub pots and pans without complaint. Laundry workers size and separate thousands of inmate shirts, jeans, jackets, and “tighty whities,” and inmate janitors maintain old tiled floors by repeatedly stripping, waxing, and polishing them to a mirrorlike shine year in and year out. The whole walled ship stays afloat and in tiptop shape because of inmate effort and inmate cooperation. It’s that simple.
Because of all this civility, I’ve discovered that I genuinely prefer working with inmates over other students. They are helpful and willing to try most everything I throw at them, whether it is singing “Head Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” in the ESL class to learn the words for the body parts or working in mixed cooperative groups to solve math problems or create oral presentations in the Adult Basic Education (ABE) II class.
I’ve been accused by some of the security staff of sweet-talking all the inmate bruisers in my classes into docile cooperation, but it just isn’t true. I make requests rather than commands and expect as well as give honest effort on everything we do. Cooperation starts with respect in a prison, which is something I pass out to each of the students at the beginning of every term in the same way that I pass out sharpened pencils, a few sheaths of college-ruled paper, and a blue pocket folder. Respect, too, is a necessary staple for learning.
