This is not truly a new post, but it is a post about a visit I made to one of the state prisons in North Carolina for a visit to my son, Sean, who is incarcerated there for some pretty hideous crimes. Sean is a sociopath, completely without a conscience.
First, the drive wasn't nearly as long as Google maps and my TomTom said it would be, so we arrived over an hour early and sat in the prison parking lot, Don napping and me reading. That is the last "normal" feelings I would have for a while.
Going into the prison wasn't that strange. Just check in, get a wand search to make sure you aren't carrying anything illegal, then a guard walked us (group of about 10 visitors) to the visiting area. Sean was already there, waiting. He looks good. Healthy, more fit and very relaxed.
He was very low key, very calm, but some of the things that he said made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Sean is my second son. My odd son, but now, he is also my terrifying son.
He blames his brother, Daniel, for his being in prison, as Daniel told him to get his drugs and move out. It was a choice that Sean made to rob that store and try to kill those two people. Not Daniel's fault. I can understand why Daniel didn't want Sean staying there.
He made veiled threats to several people while we were talking, mentioning his "connections" and that no one had better mess with me or he would "reach out and touch them".
He hugged me when I came over to where he was waiting. He was genuinely glad to see me, but it was a brief, fleeting smile only, and it didn't feel like it had a lot of meaning behind it. We talked and visited for an hour and a half and I left feeling like I had been talking to a stranger in a Sean slip cover, that somewhere, somehow, that's not my son, that's somoene else entirely and just happens to look like my son. Very surreal experience, the entire visit.
I don't know how I feel about seeing him as it was like seeing a shadow, a glimpse into a mirror that holds hazy pictures of the past and the present but no images at all of the future. Alice's looking glass wasn't even as strange to behold.
Sean scares me on a very deep, very primal level. He has no remorse for what he did, or for anything that he's ever done. He is a seething pot, waiting for the right moment to boil over, and when boiling over, will endanger everyone near him.
I don't know when I'll go back for another visit, but I know that I will eventually go visit him again. As much of a stranger that he is, he is still my DNA, birthed from my womb. I don't know him anymore. I'm not sure that I ever did know him. He's an alien lifeform to me, and that's a very strange, unsettling feeling.
I wasn't upset to see him in prison. I never shed a tear while I visited him. But I saw beneath the veneer that he presents and I don't really like what I saw. The monster in there is barely beneath the surface, and is only holding up masks in an attempt to disguise itself as a human.
Sean has changed since he went to prison. It's not the change that he's trying to profess it is, a change for the better, realizing what he did was wrong and why. It's not that kind of change at all. It's a change from a human to something both less and more. He's attending church while he's in prison. He's using that to show that he's changing, and improving. In truth, he's doing it because it looks good on his record, and gives him the appearance of normality.
There is a movement here in North Carolina to remove consecutive sentencing from the law books completely. Sean has 4 consecutive sentences, totalling nearly 44 years. The movement here is to make it so that all prisoners with consecutive sentences will have them changed to concurrent sentences. This would make it so that Sean could be released back into society in about 7-10 years. That is not something I would want to see happen. I feel that my son is a danger to society and that my son will reoffend, this time taking at least one life, maybe more.
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Comments
And, as an afterthought, welcome to OS. It's great to have your voice here.
excellent
rated
I think it's a problem with the penal system in general that it doesn't distinguish between issues of simple mistake (a choice is made, it was a wrong one, and there need to be consequences and payment) and “other” matters that are not simple mistakes. These latter items may include anything from compulsions to sociopathy (which many model as compulsion, but actually I'd prefer to think of as hyper-rational but lacking in any form of social ethics—definitely “choice” but not the sort of choice that can easily be reformed). Let's call this latter set the unredeemable situations.
In my opinion, the problem here isn't the length of sentence, in my opinion, but the fact of a finite-length sentence at all in the case of those unredeemable. For example, if it is true that sociopaths really exist (and the testimony “against interest” of a mother is awfully damned compelling in favor of the notion that they do), then it's pointless to indulge the fiction that everyone in a house of “corrections” is redeemable and hence to assign a duration until the problem will be “corrected.”
Admittedly, this is a delicate aera, becuase there is a social complexity (and we see it in the Guantánamo issue, too) in saying that it's reasonable for the government to simply detain someone indefinitely because they are a danger to society. I think the public objects less to the notion of indefinite detention, though, than they do to lack of due process. Certainly locking someone up effectively forever requires some serious due diligence to support. We see it done in other countries and we often object, and we should expect to receive objections from abroad if we did it here. Any process to, in effect, lock someone up and throw away the key, no matter how humanely administered, would doubtless receive a lot of criticism from those who worry that it was just a place to throw the politically disfavored, the administratively complex members of rich families, and so on. And yet, as you note, the danger is real of not attempting this in a few cases.
It may be that leaning hard on the serial sentencing thing is the best one can do to assure continued lockup, and I would agree this makes a good case for that. But it's really going at the whole matter kind of weirdly. Even if sociopathy were not involved, the simpler case for not doing serial to parallel conversion is to ask why someone who commits (for example) 4 assaults/murders/whatever shouldn't get a worse sentence than someone who didn't. From the point of view of deterrant, you'd still want someone who has started a bad act and is considering expanding it to have reason not to say, “well, at this point, it's the same number of years anyway, so why not?”
Welcome to OS. I hope you find this to be a warm and affirming place. I have found that it largely is. There are some very good people here you can surround yourself with.
Monte
Coming to such a nontraditional decision about my son has not been easy. It required a lot of self honesty that I didn't necessarily want to come by. However, when looking at the big picture, and the other things that he has done that he hasn't bee prosecuted for, mostly because he hasn't been caught, there was no other decision that I could make.
I didn't put in a lot of background about why he is in prison, and I don't know if anyone is interested. I can promise you that it isn't a pretty story, definitely not one to tell the kids as a bed time story.
I'm so glad you posted this, and so sad you posted this. When you're ready, we're all willing to read your complete story.
And I agree -- beautifully written first post.