Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

fore and power games begin. The unwary, naïve, trusting and hurting
prisoner often comes to grief as unfulfilled yearnings implode his soul when
female officers snap back just at the most delicate moment of a prisoner’s
need for emotional comfort and understanding.
Escape from this hurt is found in reversion to infantile forms of behaviour –
or back to medication time, the time to get those liquid handcuffs on again
and be a good boy.
I assume that these reflections can only superficially touch on the
complexity that beset all the world’s correctional services. Some in the
general population seek justice and retribution, if not outright revenge as is
the want of Jews and Greeks, who maintain that only God has the right to
forgive. It is held that those citizens who have transgressed against one of
the many social norms that form the glue holding society together must be
punished appropriately.
That word appropriately is a problem, of course, because in China, for
example, drug dealers and users are shot; the family of the deceased has to
collect the body afterwards. For example, the argument is that heroin
addicts cannot be rehabilitated because they will leave a trail of destruction
for over 20 years before the addiction finally subsides. A society cannot
tolerate the luxury of nurturing individuals through this addiction period
and hence capital punishment is appropriate. Not so, comes the cry from
the liberal establishment holed up in western democracies, and so we see
rehabilitation in various forms all over the free and democratic world,
something that more intolerant nations around the world do not
understand or do not wish to understand.
Tolerance towards drug addicts springs from the fact that within the whole
argument of criminalizing drug use reeks of hypocrisy, namely, that the real
criminals, the drug pushers, are protected by the system. As one prisoner
jested to me, but the tone gave him away as being deadly serious: ‘I know
people in high places. I have connections in Corrections’. And that raises
the issue of injustice.
Meanwhile, prisons in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Great
Britain and the most northern European prisons are relaxed institutions. In
Italy prisoners receive wine because the argument is that prisoners
otherwise addicted, to heroin for example, receive free substitution
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