It has been a week since the TEDx event at Monroe Correctional Complex and I’m still glowing. I’m inspired by the many ways we have to support healing already and I’m hopeful that we can grow that support exponentially to embrace more of the prison system. One of the many highlights was a conversation between and inmate and officer in the green room as the three of us were waiting for our turn to speak. They were talking about inmate-staff relations. The officer talked about how he sees his job not just to contain, but to encourage. He talked about how he tried to get those in solitary to at least laugh once a day, because he wanted them to have that human connection that comes through humor. He told a story of how he was really hard on an inmate once, much more so than other inmates, and when that inmate was being released, he pulled him into an interview room and said he wanted to tell him why he had been so hard on him. The inmate’s crime was similar to the one that had killed one of the officer’s family members. The officer was encouraging the soon to be released inmate that he could do well one the outside, that he had a lot to give, that he could make it. The two of them ended up in tears and their relationship healed.
